Sony goes way too far with DRM

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

I found this article and decided to drop in quickly to post it. Is Sony trying to get sued or something?

Summary:
On some new Sony audio cds, they have an autorun that installs a program that acts as a device driver above your cd rom drive and acts as some sort of DRM protection scheme. This driver also hides itself and any files whose names start with "$sys$". It installs completely silently and is almost unnoticeable once completely installed, and does not provide an uninstall utility. Deleting the fake driver files that prevent copying audio cds (the ones mentioned above) causes your drive to stop working until you do some advanced registry hacking. They even have it set up so the DRM loads in safe mode.

 

Mac OS doesn't install any such thing

 

Doesn't work in 64bit versions of windows either. This sort of thing isn't new. Diffrent companies have been installing things behind the scenes with games and music for awhile to stop people from copying/pirating. Usually people only notice when there stupid apps break the computer.

I've always felt that it should be illegal to sneak software onto your computer without your knowledge but apparently there arn't any laws against it in most countries. So I just disable autorun all the time. I rarely if ever use them for anything. They tend to not be very useful anyways. Usually all I want is to run the setup and it's not to hard to just double click the file labeled setup. As far as music is concerned, I never want it to autorun at all anyways.

 

Yup, thats nuts alright. And it doesn't really stop pirating, because you can copy the CD just the same using an ordinary CD player....