CD Copy Protection of the Stars

Related link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AA305M/

Cheapskate that I am, I run the Eudora e-mail client in Sponsored mode, which means it plops a small ad onto the corner of my screen, changing it every hour or so. Once in a while, the image is interesting enough to click. Today I ended up on the Amazon page for the new David Gray album Life in Slow Motion.

The customer reviews were striking. Although most customers gave the CD five stars, a significant number gave it just one star, solely due to the intrusive copy-protection on the CD. What these customers discovered was that the CD was loaded with software that prevented them from copying the tracks to their computers and transferring them to their MP3 players. The only indication of that restriction is a tiny black dot near the bottom right of the CD cover:

If you happen to click on the CD cover image, a larger version pops up, revealing a bit more detail:

As near as I can tell, it says, “Content Protected. See Reverse For Features.” (Features!?) But the back of the box isn’t shown on the Amazon page.

Another recent album, Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor, does have the identification tag “[CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD]” right next to the title on its Amazon page. (Indeed, I found that page because it’s the #1 Google hit for “content protected CD.”) Clicking a link in the Product Details section pops up the following vague explanation:

This product limits your ability to make multiple digital copies of its content, and you will not be able to play this disc or make copies onto devices not listed as compatible. [I failed to find a list, by the way.] Content/copy protected CDs should allow limited burning, as well as ripping into secure Windows Media Audio formats for playback with most compatible media players and portable devices. In rare cases, these CDs may not be compatible with computer CD-ROM players, DVD players, game consoles, or car CD stereos, and often are not transferable to other formats like MP3.

The spotlight customer review below that had a better explanation:

You cannot rip tracks from the CD. When Windows starts to auto-run the CD, it quickly installs a hidden driver on your machine that is used to garble the sound of CDs protected by this technology. So now my computer is “infected” with this driver. More research pointed me to a hidden driver on my machine called SbcpHid. Go into the Windows device manager, find it, stop it. Now you can rip.

While there was a sticker on the front of the CD, I found this to be very sneaky. The driver is not marked with any company name or details. The timestamp was manually adjusted so you couldn’t tell that this was installed today. This sounds like most of the spyware that we are all trying to rid our computers of.

More than 300 other potential customers found that (1-star) review helpful—and it didn’t even talk about the music. A subsequent reviewer lauds the music but states, “I will NEVER buy another [CD] with this ‘copy protection’ on it....NEVER. I don’t care if Led Zeppelin is reincarnated and puts out a new CD, if it had this ‘crap’ on it, I would not buy it.”

How sad that the very people who could be an album’s best ambassadors are turning their energy to complaining about the product, devising workarounds, and driving down the album’s ratings. You may have heard about a member of the band Switchfoot recently posting—on his record company’s site—a list of hacks to bypass the copy-protection on the band’s latest CD. The entire thread has been removed, but you can read the cached Google version here, itself a pointed comment on the battle to control information.

To date, I think I’ve bought only one copy-protected music file, and that was mostly to try the service. (And as I describe here, I immediately converted the file to a non-protected format so I could use it the way I wanted.) So I dunno. Perhaps songs should come with intriguing little ads instead of copy protection?

How would the ideal copy protection work?