Kerblam! by Christopher

Thursday, July 24
Cactus & The Shears of Consumer Opinion

I. Hate. Copy protection.

I went into a music shop yesterday, SPECIFICALLY to buy The Darkness' new album, only to see a nice big "Copy Protected" logo on the front. As it turns out, the CD is protected using Cactus, which I can just rip with a copy of CD-DA Audio Extractor (or CDex, I daresay), but the whole point is: THIS CD IS CORRUPT! (due to the way that the "protection" deliberately corrupts segments of the audio.

Boy, am I mightily pissed off.

But there's light at the end of the tunnel yet; Robin Ward has very kindly written up his experiences of the latest Radiohead album & his findings with ripping on his blog. So it turns out I might as well buy the album, rip it at 350 Ogg, and take it back saying "it won't play on my hifi"... cause I'm certainly not buying an album whose very manufacture harms my consumer rights. Why the hell can I not make a copy of an album I've bloody well shelled out for myself?

Yes, I know a "digital copy" of the album's included - which you have to play with EMI's own player, which sucks up CPU like small rodents in a vacuum cleaner, and the quality is nothing like CD quality. I don't call that a fair deal.

This has really got me wound up.

For the record, more stuff about this whole issue on the following sites (mainly concerning the Radiohead album, but both The Darkness and Radiohead's albums - at least the first pressing of the Radiohead album, for sure - are "protected" in the same way) can be found on Minchin's blog.

(...Protected... from consumer purchasing? hah. Own goal time EMI.)

And, on a related note, a nice web site concerning EMI Music Anti-Copy Control Information and a nice site with all the OFFICIAL, Red Book-compliant CD types - and logos. Bet you won't see any of those on a Cactus album.

Oh, and yet more feedback from an angry copy-protected-cd purchaser. Right here.

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 7/24/2003 11:58:00 PM. Roughly.
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