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Beastie Boys' New Album Silently Installs DRM Code


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drminside.JPGFrom the but-the-beastie-boys-are-so-countercultural dept.

nfsilkey writes "After more than five years, the Beastie Boys have released a new album. It seems that the retail disc is bundled with a copy protection autoinstaller which silently silently puts itself onto the listener's computer. Many listeners are up in arms and some are venting their frustrations on the band's website."

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/06/20/00342...&tid=201&tid=99

Edited by method77
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http://www.integrityp2p.com/portal/forums/...13291#post13291

Ya I heard about this a few weeks ago. At first I thought oh just DRM no big deal. I wasn't happy about the boyz doing it but hey they gotta make money.

However as the days passed rumours of destructive DRM spread through the net and rumours of the CD infecting your machine somehow with malicious code.

This is due mostly to people who do not understand what DRM is.

Also Capitol Records would have to be OUT OF THIER MINDS TO PLANT CODE SUCH AS THIS. They would get fined SO HEAVILY. That would be considered malware and illegal. DRM license protection is not malware however and harmless.

DRM is rights management. If you have the rights to listen to the music you can otherwise the music wont play. Thats it.

My copy is fine.

Check these links. The bugtraq link is old and it was only a comment but recieved great attention because it was on bugtraq.

I love this first one. Just the name of the page :2thumbs:

Oh if you dont read it. All it is is region protection DRM for outside the US and UK. And its easily defeated anyway.

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/com...software_issue/

I'm a little dissapointed in the register for using the term virus, but whatever gets you page hits I guess.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/23/be...e_boy_cd_virus/

And finally what I would call the truth ( dont beleive the hype man :tut: )

TT5B Copy Control Issues

Jun 22, 2004 - 1:40 pmBy BeastieBoys.com

1. There is NO copy controlled software on US or UK releases of Beastie Boys' "To the 5 Boroughs."

2. The disk *IS* copy controlled in Europe - which is standard policy for all

Capitol/EMI titles (and a policy used by ALL major labels in Europe).

3. The copy protection system used for all EMI/Capitol releases including "To the 5 Boroughs" is Macrovision's CDS-200, which sets up an audio player into the users RAM (not hard drive) to playback the RED book audio on the disk. It does absolutely NOT install any kind of spyware, shareware, silverware, or ladies wear onto the users system.

You can find more information on the technology used here:

http://www.macrovision.com/products/cds/cds200/index.shtml

This is what EMI has to say about it:

Reports that "spyware" is being included on the Beastie Boy's CD, 'To The Five Boroughs' are absolutely untrue.

While the Beastie Boys CD does use copy control in some territories, there is no copy control on the Beasties Boys discs in the US or the UK. Where copy protection is used, it is Macrovision's CDS-200 technology; the same technology being used for the past several months around the world for all of EMI's releases in those territories. This Macrovision technology does NOT install spyware or vaporware of any kind on a users PC. In fact, CDS-200 does not install software applications of ANY KIND on a user's PC. All the copy protection in CDS-200 is hardware based, meaning that it is dependent on the physical properties and the format of the CD. None of the copy protection in CDS-200 requires software applications to be loaded onto a computer.

The technology does activate a proprietary Macrovision player in order to play the CD on a PC, and that player converts WMA compressed files to audio on the fly. It also temporarily installs a graphic "skin" for the player. Nothing is permanently installed on a hard drive. These details can be verified in the 'install.log' file in the computer's root directory.

http://www.beastieboys.com/news.php

Edited by Pablo
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