This really doesn’t effect me too much since I don’t buy any CD’s anymore now that a) I don’t have anything to play CD’s with other than my computer and b) I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited, but I still find this to be completely asinine. Basically, Sony is now copy protecting many (if not most) of their CD’s such that even though you OWN the music and have PAID for it, you’re still limited as to what you can do with it. Want to play it on your PC? Fine, but you have to use their proprietary player to play it instead of your favorite player such as winamp, itunes, windows media player, etc. Yes, there are work-arounds but they’re not exactly something the average honest user is going to know how to do. This is where the problem comes in. This guy was searching his system for rootkits (much like a trojan but hides itself and intercepts system-level functions in most cases) and happened to find one on his computer that it turns out was placed by Sony. He’d bought a CD by VanZant and had run it on his PC and when the player software ran, it installed the copy protection scheme on his PC which looked and acted much like a rootkit in that it completely hid itself from plain view. Long story short, when he tried to remove it he no longer had access to his CD ROM drive because it had installed a filter driver in between the OS and the drive such that when it was removed there was no longer a link between the OS and the drive… basically he ended up hacking the registry to restore order to his PC. All this shit just because Sony wanted to dictate what you could and could not do with the CD you paid for. Sad thing is, this only penalizes the honest people that never had any intention to do anything illegal with it anyway. Those that really do want to rip it and re-distribute it via P2P networks are going to find some way to do it anyway. Of course the record labels don’t understand this. Absolute insanity if you ask me. For those of you that might be wondering what’s so bad about this…. The software the CD installs hides ANYTHING that starts with the characters $sys$. Hides it such that you can’t see it in windows explorer, can’t search for it, nothing. Doesn’t show up when you “show hidden files and folders”… Completely invisible. To prove the point, the guy actually made a copy of notepad.exe and renamed it $sys$notepad.exe and it disappeared. Nice security hole, Sony. I could install any form of evil software on your PC and make sure it starts with $sys$ and nothing on your PC would ever find it… Virus scanners included! It’s not been exploited yet, but it most certainly could and man would it EVER be ugly. Simple solution? Give Sony the middle finger!
As if that’s not enough, there’s another strange tale of Sony’s wonderful Digital Rights Management (DRM, Copy Protection sofwtware, whatever) that I found here. Basically a guy was told to check out a given band by a friend but ended up not buying the CD because the copy protection software makes it incompatible with itunes and the ipod. He finds out the label (Sony is the distributor, not the label) and the band both are against the copy protection scheme and neither of them gave Sony the OK to encrypt the CD in such a way. Weirder still, the copy protection scheme is at least somewhat easily defeated (it involves ripping it and burning it back to a CD then ripping it again via itunes so you can get it onto the ipod) and really isn’t even about copy protection. It’s about making it nearly impossible for ipod users to get the CD onto their ipods and thus complain to apple to open the ipod up to other music stores (namely Sony’s). Basically it’s some wacked out strongarm technique Sony is using to push Apple to open up the ipod. While I’m all for that idea, I think Sony’s way of going about it is just completely ridiculous. As such, I say FUCK SONY.