DRM in audio Industry

Just yesterday I bought the latest album X&Y by Coldplay. Although I didn't notice it then, the CD is DRM copy-protected. DRM is the latest nuisance on the street for the average consumer.

These measures are not going to even bother the mass production piracy operations leave alone stopping them. The only result is to irritate legitimate users like me.

This particular record is by EMI. They went to the extent of updating windows media player components and disallowing accessing the audio CD from other players like Winamp.

Finally I was able to rip the whole CD from Isobuster tool. Bye bye DRM ;-)

Recent developments in DRM in the audio industry have not been healthy. There was an article in CNET about how sony has recently come up with some copy protected CDs that install rootkit on the PC. So using the particular CD in question opens your PC to attacks. This backdoor is already being exploited by a Trojan. Sony has instructions about uninstalling this rootkit at this website. CNET has an article on this sony issue at its website.

And finally the icing on the cake is the fucking immunity clause in fine print. It clearly shirks responsibility in case of any damage to the PC because of the DRM software. Shocking !!!

So will sanity ever be restored ? For now it seems like downloading mp3 is a lot better option as compared to DRM protected Audio CDs.

Atleast this has discouraged me from buying any DRM protected CDs. So what you gonna do ?