Thursday, November 03, 2005

Buy A CD, Destroy Your PC!

I never ceased to be amazed at the ways the music Industry™ finds to further destroy themselves with regard to how they treat their customers. Nevermind that the music these days blows goats to the point that I don't even care what's out there - and I'm a musician! - but when labels place digital rights management software on CDs that prevents people from ripping them into their iPods and now Sony Music CDs surreptitiously install DRM Trojan horses on PCs, you've got to wonder what blend of crack, meth and stupidity these idiots are smoking.

In an effort to crack down on P2P piracy - an overstated bogeyman if there ever was one - the labels are agressively punishing THEIR PAYING CUSTOMERS by rewarding their purchase with a f*cked-up computer! The labels tried to use the fear of downloaded viruses to scare people into being legit and then turn around and secretly install viruses onto the computers of the people foolish enough to listen to their propaganda.

It's sad to say, but at the moment, stealing is safer than buying and until the public and the artists fight back, it's not going to get better. Perhaps a class-action lawsuit and some Federal hacking charges will focus their attention? Doubt it.

If you're super-geeky, the particulars of how this works can be found here.

UPDATE: Yeesh. Five seconds after I post this, I see that Sony has released a patch to remove this Trojan junk. Of course, people have to know about the existance of the spyware in the first place and just how f*cked-up is it that now we have to be aware of updates to our CDs?!?!?

1 comment:

Z said...

Randomly I find myself on your blog and your catchy title sucks me in. To my surprise, I have to say, this is something that has bother me for some time as well.

The ciruitous route one has to take to simply back up music that was bought legally is rather absurd. I also don't like how typical cds these days only contain 10 songs. I remember the days of 17 song-cds. Ten songs doesn't cut it for me.

Also, the first company that comes out w/ an online music store where I can actually burn songs in a format that can be played on an actual CD will get all of my money and praises. I realize the potential for p2p pirating thereafter, but let's be honest, if I wanted to pirate the music, I would have done it in the first place instead of buying it.

The music industry needs to sort out some of their issues to say the least.