Friday, 4 November 2005
DRM and Rootkits
For example, myelf and my family are fans of Lost, but, being in the UK, we can't follow series 2. I bought a copy of the series 1 DVD in the US when I was there in September, and we watched the DVDs inside a week a so. My kids wanted to watch Series 2, so I thought I'd be go get the episodes on-line. I go to the Apple music store and try and download the episodes, turns out I need a US billing address to get the episodes, as I'm in the UK they're not available to me.
I have lots of friends in the US and I ask one of them to download the first episode for me, which they do, so I grab the episode and of course it's DRM'd and I can't unlock it on my PC. This is an episode that I've paid for and only my family will watch. At the moment nothing is available to remove this DRM so I have to either wait until Lost Series 2 becomes available in the UK, or I have to get an illegal copy of Lost using BitTorrent or something similar!
Which brings me to the real point of the post. Sony have released a DRM'd CD which installs a root kit on your PC when you install the software on the CD. This was brought to the world's attention by Mark Russinovich here, and has been discussed in many places. I just wanted to point at this excellent Inquirer article which starts
SONY SCREWED UP WITH its rights removal to protect its profit margins philosophy and there is no way the use of rootkits can be justified.Caught with its pants down, what did it do? Make things right? Heck no, it blamed the user, and doesn't do anything more than window dressing to deflect what are valid criticisms.
Being an optimist by nature I hope that the furore surrounding this will bring companies like Sony to their senses, but realistically I doubt it!
Posted by at 7:45 AM in General
I'm with ya, completely. I'm old school, I like to listen to my CD's on my computer but my new CD decides it will only render through some custom little player at 32kps quality, sounded like it was playing through a drainpipe. I got so mad I went and found a CD ripper that bypassed the mechanic, converted to MP3. The irony is as you say - without the DRM I wouldn't have copied to MP3. Oh well.