Public Service Announcement
For any of you Windows users out there that care about the freedom of being able to make legitimate and legal copies of your music (i.e. converting your CDs to put them on your iPod) please follow one simple advice:DISABLE AUTORUN ON YOUR COMPUTER
The major music labels keep coming up with new ways to prevent you from copying music, with heavy (and deserved) criticism going out to Sony for having it's CDs automatically install software that can
a) make it impossible to make mp3s out of the music you PURCHASED
and
b) render your CD drive inoperable if you attempt to uninstall their software
In fact, Sony installs such software on CDs against certain artists' wishes and not entirely for the purpose of protecting the artists from piracy - oh no, us consumers get caught in a pissing match between Sony and iTunes
Some further linkage:
Why Sony Sucks
How to Disable Autorun
Tell Sony How You Feel
posted by Mr. Bartender @ 12:48 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Sony's idea is much like clokspl.exe (often pronounced glockspiel, or clockspiel after the little characters on cuckoo clocks) that was added to games 5-10 years ago to prevent copies of the data. This rendered the CDs unplayable for a lot of people. So the idea died and went away.
If you use your computer with any account other than one with admin rights, it can't subversively install anything.
Personally I hate Autorun anyway, because it always assumes I want to do the wrong thing.
Oh I just bought a CD (Patty Loveless' latest) with the thing, and not only does it force you to install it, it doesn't play on any other media playing device. I see danger ahead. I wonder how it does in a regular CD player? Even with autorun off, it won't let you play the CD unless you install this thing. I deleted the registry edit it made, just to see if that will mess with it.
I don't know how it would make a physical piece of hardware inoperable via software. The viruses that can do that contain lowlevel commands to signal the calipers on hard drives to hit the platters or get them out of sync. No such issue w/ a cd drive.
Of course, I'll spend all weekend finding a way around this...
My workaround has been to find a torrent file of whatever CD I wanna rip.
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