History of DRM
Ars Technica wrote up a fantastic article about the history of "Digital Rights Management". DRM is basically a form of encryption that media companies use to try to prevent people from making copies of movies or music. It sounds great in principle, until you realize it prevents you from burning that song you bought on iTunes to CD and playing it in your car, or making a backup copy of a movie you bought in a store to bring with you to watch in Japan. Some DRM only allows you to play the media on certain brands of music player, for no real reason. Add to that the fact that it doesn't-- and can't-- prevent a group of professionals in Russia from breaking the code in a matter of minutes and distributing the media illegally. In short, DRM does nothing to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted materials, and does a lot to hinder your legitimate use of purchased material.
Here's the article, which gives a short but detailed history of some of the more widespread forms of DRM, and how they were broken.
July 25th, 2006 at 3:20 am
I have a CD with something like this and I HATE it! It allows you to burn 2 copies, but you have to use the burner provided on the CD, not your own (which means downloading even more crap onto your computer that you will never use again) And, in addition, you have to apply for permission to play it on your computer via a connection online, which, in the case of my new CD, doesn't even work. So, I can't play it on my computer or burn it to my mp3 player :( Grrrr!
Fortunately, however, it will play on my regular CD player and in my car...whatever that's worth in this digital age...
July 25th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Assuming it hasn't already installed something to block you from making copies, the simple solution is to hold SHIFT while inserting the CD, wait until the drive spins down, and then release it. This prevents whatever crap is on the CD from autorunning. If it's already infiltrated your system, this probably won't help.
The REAL solution is to take it back to the store, and get a refund. Tell them the reason you're returning the disc is because you can't use the CD YOU BOUGHT to play music on your portable device. They HAVE to give you a refund. If everyone did this, there wouldn't be any more DRM.