posted by RICK : 7:15 PM
Is it a coincidence that DAYS after I loaded Stellastarr's
Harmony's For the Haunted record on my computer, things slowly began to fall apart until I was forced to ERASE my entire hard drive (and entire music colletion) or stare at a screen claiming that it couldn't mount my hard drive? After all, it was recently noted that Sony has been playing "
Spy Vs. Spy" with our listening habits.
In short, for those of you not keeping tabs, this is how it works: Sony-music, for about 6 months, has been selling a majority of their new releases as "Copy Protected." What happens is once the disc is ripped onto your computer, it installs a file on the hard drive that essentially monitors your activity, and also, the activity of the record that you just BOUGHT.
While this sounds seedy, it also sounds like something that was inevitiably going to happen, until you find out that said file burries itself on your computer and can be used as a gateway for all sorts of malicious computing by
them as well as
anyone with the skills.
Sony has recently issued a
patch, but not so much of anything along the lines of an apology.
Had this unfortunate news for Sony
NOT surfaced, they were planning on having anyone who purchased a future Copy-Protected disc to go onto their website and register said CD before it would play. I don't know if this is still planned.
So here's the bottom line: QUIT BUYING RECORDS FROM SONY MUSIC GROUP! Steal them.
Or, if your concious is eating away at you (mine does), buy the record at the iTunes store, burn it, and the re-rip it as mp3s.
But the bottom line is that I really wanted the new
Neil Diamond record, but now I'm having second thoughts.