Velvet Revolver and Copy Protected CDs

I dig the new Velvet Revolver cd. The music rocks, the singing is great, and it’s just a good return to grungy rock ‘n’ roll. I recommend this highly.

Many who read this site know that I have an iPod and I like to listen to my music wherever I go. However, the Velvet Revolver CD is protected by a digital rights management program that prevents me, a legitimate owner of the disc, from ripping a copy to take with me on my iPod.

However, this in-depth analysis of the copy protection scheme currently being employed by BMG explains exactly how easy it is to defeat this protection, and it is as simple as disabling AutoRun on your Windows PC, which I disable anyway.

This protection scheme actually installs a device driver on my computer to prevent me from ripping CDs. My system doesn’t need any more poorly written software, thank you. Record industry: Wake up! You got my $14, which is really hard to do these days with the crap you put out. Now let me listen to my CD the way I want to. People are going to anyway. You just paid a licensing fee for protection software that doesn’t really protect anything. Someone is going to do what I did and make the mp3s available anyway, so why bother? Save the money and make music cheaper.

The Velvet Revolver mp3s were available on the net weeks ago.