Today's "new music Tuesday" was a particularly fruitful one. I went to Target on the way to work this morning, and picked up new CDs from Fall Out Boy, Nine Inch Nails, and Acceptance. I listened to the first two discs at work, but paused before I unwrapped the Acceptance disc. On the front spine, it has a funny logo and says "Content Protected". This triggered my "uh-oh" reaction, and I flipped to the back. Apparently, on Windows machines, this CD has crazy content restrictions (you can only get low quality WMA versions of the songs, which can only be transfered to certain portable players). But apparently, on the Macintosh, it behaves like a normal audio CD.
I don't know how to feel about this. A large part of me wants to return this CD to target and wash my hands of the whole thing. I don't want to send the message that by consuming this CD, that copy protection is okay. On the other hand, on the Mac it doesn't appear to be protected at all. And I buy copy-protected DVDs all of the time, and while it bugs me, I'm not out protesting in the streets.
I wrote to Sony/BMG and complained, but what I really want to do is complain to the band. I think that if bands knew that their fans were pissed off about how hard it is to transfer the songs from their legally-purchased CDs to their iPod, then something could be done about it. So, I went the to the official Acceptance website, but I didn't see an e-mail address on there anywhere. Humph!
I still haven't opened this CD, so I still have a chance to return it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
-Andy.
Return it and get the MP3s from Napster, ITunes, Rhapsody, or wherever. You should be able to use those as you like. expand them to WAV files and burn a CD for the car, load them into the IPod. It should be cheaper too. Go the the band's website and they should have an email you can bitch to. They might be as helpless if Sony made the DRM contractual.
Or you can just keep the CD and have your way with the music files that way. Have you searched yet for ways around this protection scheme? There might be a registry hack to unlock the DRM. It can't be like a DVD's protection where each file is encrypted or it wouldn't work on a standard CD player. DVD protection isn't terribly hard to get around by the way. The cipher is well known, the keys are on disk and there are a million programs out there which can beat it.
But wait, I thought you were mister "don't steal from hollywood"...
I ran into this ethical dilemma a few months ago when I bought the most recent Citizen Cope CD. The best idea I could come up with was to copy / rip the music and then donate the CD to the library. Of course, in the end, laziness won out and I did nothing.
If the copy protection on your disc is the same as mine, then it's that whole rigamarole that came out a year or two ago where you can bypass it by holding down the "shift" key (on Windows, anyway). It is utterly stupid, and I hate to endorse it in any way, but I think shooting off a nasty email to the band is a good way to go. Of course, with the way most labels behave, they probably didn't have much of a choice.
The new Mike Doughty CD came out today, by the way. It's good - you should check it out.
For all the copy protected CDs I have, my computer nicely asks me if I would like to install extra software to "enhance the CD's performance". I click no, and that's that. I can rip them, do whatever I want, its all cool.
Basically just turn off CD autoruns and you're done. Note: I haven't even done this, I just have iTunes as my default player and that's that.
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018