If you’ve legally purchased a copy of a CD, only to find that it’s unplayable on your computer, car stereo or portable CD player, chances are you’ve fallen victim to the RIAA’s latest ‘anti-piracy’ measures. These are CDs that are especially designed to screw up if you try to play them on a computer, preventing you from copying a CD for personal use – say, in your car – or ripping it to MP3 format for use on your computer or in a portable MP3 player. As well as computers, this also causes playback problems on gaming consoles, some car stereos, certain kinds of high-end stereo equipment, and several other devices.
Needless to say, this can cramp your style somewhat. Over at MacMerc, this how-to article details the behaviour of these discs:
After popping it in, iTunes hit the CDDB and got the track names. At this point I was feeling suckered that I paid for an awful CD that will play just fine in my Mac. I selected a track and the CD player spun and spun until iTunes started to not respond. So, this miracle of the RIAA actually freezes up iTunes. Nice. ::pats the RIAA on the back::
The article then goes on to describe a way to copy the audio from your protected CD, making it ready to use in your computer, MP3 player or other device. It’s hardly news to those of us who have spent time copying tape or vinyl recordings to MP3, and it’s a fairly clumsy way to do it, but this article is a very handy reference nonetheless.
The Mac Observer Spin:
This could be construed as advocating piracy, right? Wrong. Well, kind of. We all know that where there’s a will there’s a way, and music pirates have undoubtedly been using this method for some time already. However, as a reference for those of us who refuse to put up with defective merchandise, this is a good way to get what we paid for.
All that said, we think it is a MUCH more viable and important form of protest against these copy protected CDs for you to buy them and then return them (opened) the next day as defective. Buying the darned things and bypassing the copy protection only plays into the hands of the RIAA and enriches its members’ pockets in the process. Returning the CDs puts a hit on the labels and the store owners that carry them, though stores that properly label copy protected CDs shouldn’t be treated in this manner. It’s only by affecting the labels’ pocket books that this abomination will be stopped. Store owners that see an impact will start to raise a fuss with the labels, and many are more likely to properly label the CDs as copy protected themselves.
If all this sounds like too much work, at least don’t buy CDs that are copy protected in the first place. Your actions do matter.