Sony is going to try to copy protect their CDs again. After several botched attempts in the past, the latest round looks to be yet another miserable failure. A guest commenter notes that the First4Internet copy protection is just more of the same. Worse yet, it's implementation could harm your computer.

I've demoed First4Internet copy protected before. It uses all the usual tricks like an illegal table of contents, but the most annoying was a driver it installs when you autorun the CD. If you turn autorun off, you are safe. With no autorun, you can copy the disk with blindwrite, clonecd or many other programs. WITH the driver installed, a new service appeared that would crash intermittently. With it disabled, I couldn't burn ANYTHING, the CD-R drive appeared as a CD-ROM in Windows XP so burning software ignored it. The crash of the software was a memory leak. Sony should think twice about automatically installing software that looks like poorly engineered spyware.

The inherent problem with copy protection is that no matter how much you encrypt the content, it still must be decrypted in order for consumers to enjoy it. Even in relatively new digital media formats, like DVDs, the decryption algorithm can be easily unprotected if people are so inclined. In fact many quality movie copies come from people within the industry (like those Oscar screeners that end up being duplicated).

With music, you have a small content industry trying to bully a huge electronics industry into being the copyright police. But even if they could control both the content and the player, copyright infringement would still be rampant. Video game consoles like Xbox and Playstation can be easily modified to play copied discs. Where there is a will, there will always be a way.

Meanwhile, the general public will continue to pay the price for the lawless minority.