Having written much about Sony’s futile efforts to copy protect its audio CDs comes an Information Week article yesterday that the newest protection can be defeated by applying a small piece of Scotch tape to the outer edge of the CD.
For those of you keeping score at home, you can add this to the list of other simplistic methods used to defeat various varieties of Sony’s protection:
- Shift key
- Sharpie marker
- Macintosh
- software written by some kid probably living in his Mom’s basement
- protection-defeating instructions from Sony itself
The Information Week article also has a fabulous conclusion on Digital Rights Management made by analysts at the Gartner research firm:
After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs. It will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players.
Sony seems to finally understand this, and according to the article, is ending at least its most recent copy protection tactics, recalling unsold protected CDs and exchanging already purchased ones for unprotected versions.