Beastie Boys 5 Boroughs DRM flak
p2pnet.net News:- The unwelcome press the Beastie Boys are getting over the DRM on their new Five Boroughs album may be undeserved, suggests a post on boingboing here.
“If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don’t want to be their customer,” says Cory Doctrow, going on, “Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn’t stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you’re better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa – if you buy it in a shop, you’re going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.”
Kazaa? Wash your mouth out, Cory ; )
Anyway, in a boingboing update, Ian says he, “spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK – US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn’t receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren’t allowed to differ from EMI policy.”
End of story?
Not according to rocr who posts on Waffle here:
“I’m pretty sure that c) is bunk. The copy protection has been the norm for EMI since the second half of 2003, but I recently bought the European edition of the remastered version of Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut with a copyright date of 2004, and it’s unprotected. Apparently, the guys from Pink Floyd, even now that Roger Waters is no longer talking to the others, still have enough clout to prevent Copy Control technology that, in addition to the concerns Cory raises, also harms playability and degrade the sound. Over at Virgin records, Peter Gabriel also succesfully resisted the use of Copy Control on his remaster series, so it can be done.
“Beastie Boys fans on the European continent are well advised to get the UK edition from a mail order supplier (so that if it turns out to be a ShinyDisk after all, they can return it as defective).”
