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Beastie Boys' New Album Silently Installs DRM Code
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."
I bought "To The 5 Boroughs" (cause I'm representin' Manhattan), and ripped all the tracks to my iPod with no problems. Just what does the DRM code do?
I'm on a Mac, is this another case where I'm missing out on the DRM fun because of platform neglect? (There IS a Mac partition on the disc, but all it seems to have on it is a Macromedia presentation with a QuickTime movie.)
When one goes in-depth into the "end user license agreement" that we all say "I agree" to, it becomes apparent that you actually do warrant them to install such an application. I'd imagine it would be part of the liner notes, interactive software related agreement, or perhaps even just a simple "look on this site to see the license agreement" blurb.
To quote from_ disc_ha.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/06/11/new_beasties
This is one of the reasons to disable autorunning of CDs. It's nice yes, but really, it's not a big deal to take the extra step to go to the CD and run setp. Since this sort of game of actually installing software without asking seems to be getting popular, it's a good rpeventitive step.
c es\Cdrom and set the Autorun value to 0. You cal also download TweakUI from Microsoft (go to Microsoft.com and search for TweakUI) which will change the key for you, as well as altering other behaviour.
To shut it off, open your registry editor and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servi
When you do this, Windows will no longer popup and do anything when you put a disk in. Instead, it will wait for you to do something. For normal data disks, this means you'll have to go run setup yourself. For evil audio disks such as this, they'll simply never install their BS and you can play as normal.
Illegal in the US, you mean?
One of the comments in the cited links says that the copy protection is only for discs sold outside the US and UK.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Two words...
Spy-Ware
That said, if it's a stardard EXE I don't see how it would run on linux. :D And since Linux doesn't have an autorun annoyance... I mean feature, we'd have to consciously install it.
Once again, the solution is... Don't use M$ Windows. (Sorry Mac people, I have had no recent experience with a Mac to make a comment on it.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
And even if you do get round the protection, the burner software may check for "Proper Licensing" anyway. I know MusicMatch does.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Download TweakUI from the MS Power Toys section, it will let you change a slew of settings. Including disabling autorun.
I'm also pretty sure that holding shift when you put the cd in will do the same thing.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
These days, the recording companies seem to have a special system in place to trade sample rights. The liner notes often say something like "sample licensed through so-and-so recording company special products division". I'm sure that if DRM was somehow preventing their sampling (although they would probably work around this by holding down the shift key like anyone else), they could arrange to get an official sample straight from the source.
The ironic thing is that the Beastie Boys' early days, before court rulings that forced people to pay up, they did massive sampling without attributing the sources. I have their "Paul's Boutique" album from 1989 (A pretty good CD, IMO). I've seen a blurb somewhere that said that an album like this couldn't be made today, given that each track contains at least 2 or 3 recognizable samples. In fact, I'd say that the samples are so prominent, they are the main "musical instrument" on the record. Many of these weren't obscure samples either; I recognized some of the main "hooks" out of several top-40 hits. There are zero credits in the liner notes mentioning any of these samples.
Compare this to The Verve, who tried to get away with only a slightly worse sample ripoff a decade later, and got their asses handed to them on a platter by the Rolling Stones' lawyers.
New Audio CD DRM Defeated by Use of ''SHIFT'' Key
Google search that found above link, good read.
http://www.fsckin.com/
It's probably Ian Rogers, the webmaster for the Beastie Boys' web site for a very long time - starting in 1994. I worked with Ian a bit when I was running the original Foo Fighters site, he's actually a really nice guy (Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys used to share the same management, Gold Mountain Entertainment, now GAS or something like that).
With how the industry works, I'm sure he had absolutely nothing to do with this, but instead it was label decision as has already been pointed out. It's another perfect example of how disconnected the music industry is from its fans (at least those in non-english speaking countries - the software doesn't exist on the US or UK releases).
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
There is no autorun similar to the Windows variant that automatically starts an exe up. There is only 'autorun' for Audio CD's, DVD's and camera's, etc, media that cannot do any damage to the machine.
A 'Blue Moon' is the second full moon in the same callendar month, IIRC every 12 to 13 months.
Just some odd trivia I thought I'd throw out. Was going to try for funny, but can't think of a way to make it funny. Oh well.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
TCPA is actually now TCG, Trusted Computing Group, and doesn't have anything to do with DRM. It's essentially a standards body that specifies compliance for hardware security modules, or TPMs (Trusted Platform Modules), which also don't have to have anything to do with DRM. For example, IBM makes desktop and laptop computers with TCG compliant TPMs on the systemboard which exist for the sole purpose of providing security for your data, not ensuring that you install only "trusted" software or don't violate this copyright or whatever, and cannot, in fact, be used for that function.
A refusal to buy anything TCPA (which is actually TCG) is pointless. You're boycotting the wrong thing.
Buy the President
I've bought two albums with EMI's copy protection... I couldn't tell the difference from a normal CD. I played normally, and was able to rip all the tracks into iTunes.
If it did install something, it was done in some extremely sneaky fashion. I didn't notice it installing anything, and it would have somehow got around the fact that I was an unprivileged user.
So that's why most MacOS X users will not have their machines infected--they aren't running Classic at the time they insert the CD.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
There is no autorun feature under Mac OS X 10.3 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in 10.2 either. There is an autorun in Mac OS 9 and I believe there was one in versions of Mac OS X previous to 10.2
The only thing in Mac OS X which is similar to autorun is that you can set certain actions to happen when you put a CD or DVD in the drive. The default is for a blank CD or DVD to ask you what to do, for a music CD to open iTunes, a photo CD to open iPhoto and a video DVD to open DVD Player. All other CDs or DVDs will be just be mounted in the Finder if they contain a filesystem readable by Mac OS X.
None of these default actions will cause anything else to be run or anything to be installed on your computer. If you want you can change the default actions to run another application, to run a script, or to be ignored.
Sapere aude!
"Not that its exactly hard to disable the 'autorun annoyance'"
It used to be easy to do this in Windows, but the control to do this seems to be missing. It is true you can hold the shift key down, but if there is a way to disable autorun altogether anymore it is pretty well hidden. Fuck Windows, anyhow.
Well in answer to my own question, to disable the autorun in Win2k ya gotta edit the registry, which is pretty much what I thought you'd have to do. So Joe Sixpack probably won't be doing it so easily. I would say that yes, it is hard. It woudl especially be hard if you did not know how to look for information on disabling the feature, which would require that you knew it was called "autorun," know to search the microsoft knowlege base, and know how to use the registry editor without killing your machine.
here is a link to the forum thread explaining that the copy protection is on all emi cds, except us and uk versions, and that the beastie boys would have liked it not to be protected but couldn't help.