11.03.05
How far is too far?
How far will music companies go to ‘’protect their digital rights'’?
This article describes a mechanism that SONY uses as a DRM protection scheme on its CD’s, which mechanism is particularly intrusive, and in fact is not being mentioned as such in the EULA. In effect, when you play one of the SONY CD’s protected this way, a bunch of files are installed in your computer, and then go ahead and ‘’cloak'’ themselves, in such a way that any file in the computer with name starting with $sys$ is hidden forever. So there is no way for any casual user of knowing the files are there. Why is that bad? Because among other things this program uses 1-2% of your processor time at all times, checking the work of other processes. What’s worse, it is poorly designed, in that if you somehow manage to find the files and delete them, then your CD will stop working, until you manage to dig a lot deeper and remove some more stuff. The program also installs itself as one of the programs to load when booting in safe mode, which makes it even harder to deal with.
But most importantly, this program messes up with internal, low-level processes in the computer, intercepting most other processes, and the EULA definitely does not indicate anything like that. What it says is: ‘’a small proprietary software program (the “SOFTWARE”) onto YOUR COMPUTER. The SOFTWARE is intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD'’.
SONY has gone a bit too far this time, IMHO. I wonder if this CD even plays on a mac…
And by the way, you cannot play this CD with a media player of your choice. You have to use an ‘’approved'’ player provided with the CD.
Later
