Network Security Blog

Sunday night my wife and I went out to a local community center and saw an artist I’ve liked for quite a while, Sophie B. Hawkins. After the show Ms. Hawkins had a meet and greet and was signing copies of her newest CD, Wilderness. It was a great concert at a small venue and overall it was a really good experience.

Forward to last night: I finally got the chance to put the CD I had purchase into my laptop and play it. Or rather try and play it. The laptop in question is off the network for various reasons and I generally just use it to play CD’s through a stereo (old laptop, really old stereo). When I placed the CD in the laptop, it immediately started trying to access the Internet. I thought that was odd and opened up Windows Explorer to look at the disk. Normally there would be a number of .cda files that are the actuall songs, but instead there were a host of installation files and subdirectories. I took the CD to my main computer where I could access the Internet. When I tried to play the CD this time, it opened Winamp, which is apparently incompatible with whatever technology is used to protect this CD.

I haven’t played Wilderness on a regular CD player yet, and quite frankly I’m more than a little annoyed that I should have to. This is the second CD I’ve purchase this year that has some sort of DRM that cripples it’s usage on a computer, and I returned the first one. I’d return this one too if I hadn’t purchased it directly from the artist and had her sign it. I’m not trying to pirate a CD, I’m just trying to use it as intended. Heck, I wasn’t even trying to rip the CD to MP3 format, though I’m definitely going to do that now.

If you believe that Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are aimed at protecting the artists against having their music shared on the Internet, you haven’t been paying attention for the last several years. More and more, it becomes obvious that DRM is only about limiting when and where the end user can use the product, not for the user’s good, or even the artists good, but for the record companies profit. And I’m not willing to contribute to their bottom line.

I don’t know the exact technology used to protect this CD yet, but I will figure it out. I’m not sure if the DRM protection was put in place with the approval of Sophie B. Hawkins, but quite frankly I probably won’t be buying any more of her music. Which is too bad, since I really liked her up to now. What was advertised as a way of protecting her music has now cost her at least on listener.