I hate, let me repeat, hate copy protected music CDs! I bought the damn thing now let me use it the way I want too! Arrgghh!

Let me say for the record that I'm not against Digital Rights Management (DRM), just it's current implementation. In fact, I strongly believe in protecting intellectual property (IP), which has close ties to the whole foundation of DRM. I also believe that once you purchase said IP, like a music CD, you should be able to consume it in any way possible (CD player, MP3 player, computer, Smartphone, etc.) without any hassle. As I said above, I bought the damn thing now let me use it.

So what's my story? Well, I like music. I have at least a few hundred CDs which isn't an abnormally large collection, but I think is still above average. I like to burn all of my CDs to MP3 format (21+ GB total and growing) and store them on an external hard drive that I use as a music jukebox at work. I also have an MP3 player that I use at the gym. I have been doing this for years and feel that it's a "must have" for me as a consumer. I don't share my music online. I don't burn copies of the CDs for everyone and their brother/sister. Basically, I don't do anything wrong or illegal with the music...I just want to listen to it in several different scenarios and the beautiful thing about technology is that I am able to do that!

I recently purchased a few new CDs, Velvet Revolver - Contraband and Foo Fighters - In Your Honor. They are copy protected. Oh, and to make things even better, they're copy protected by Sony's now infamous DRM software that also installs a rootkit. Uh, hello people. By trying to protect your individual piece of IP you just opened up my whole PC to a security vulnerability. Gee, thanks...ya freakin retards. You can read the details about the Sony rootkit over at Mark Russinovich's blog. A quick aside... Mark is the creator of Sysinternals that has awesome freeware such as FileMon, RegMon, Process Explorer and much more. I've had the opportunity to hear him speak on multiple occasions and not only is he smart as a whip, but he's a really nice guy.

With the copy protection software on the CD I wasn't able to rip the CDs to MP3 format. If I wanted to listen to the music on my PC then I needed to install their DRM software (which as stated above is also a rootkit in disguise). Their software would allow me to convert the CD to WMA format (MP3 versus WMA is a whole different topic). Oh wait a minute, they actually installed it for me as soon as I put the CD into my PC...without prompting me. How nice of them...not.

The internet is a beautiful thing. Velvet Revolver topped the charts when it was released in 2004 so a lot of people encountered the very problem I was just now experiencing. And fortunately for me some smart people figured out a workaround. Now I'm not going to tell you how to disable the DRM software once it's installed, but the information is out there if you really want to find it. It's not hard. Really, it's not.

One thing I will recommend is to disable AutoPlay on your CD/DVD drives. For the current generation of DRM software, this should prevent it from automatically installing as soon as the CD is inserted. Here are the instructions for disabling CD autoplay in XP Pro and XP Home.

The bottom line... I support DRM technology. I just don't support it's current implementation. It needs to be user-friendly and should assume the user's innocence instead of their guilt (as it does today).

~tod

tags: DRM copy+protected