Anti-DRM tide rises inside Sony; Scotch tape defeats rootkit

Just a few quick hits on the still evolving Sony rootkit story.  Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow claims to have received an e-mail from a highly placed source within Sony BMG indicating that record label heads may be rethinking DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) as a part of their business.  According to Doctorow's blog entry, several artists are furious because of how Sony's faux pas may hurt their relationship with fans who are doing the right thing buy purchasing music.  DRM was applied to certain CDs without the approval of the artists.  Doctorow also has a two part round up (part I, part II) of the Sony rootkit timeline. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Net,  Gartner has issued a research note that talks about how all that's needed to defeat Sony's rootkit DRM, as well as DRM that has been applied to other CDs, is to use nothing more than an opaque piece of tape on the outer edge of so-called protected CDs.   The "outer edge" technique for uncorking protected CDs is nothing new, having first surfaced back in 2002 when similar copy protection technologies from Cactus Data Shield (CDS) and Key2Audio were defeated in pretty much the same way.  I took a walk down ZDNet memory lane to look at the CD copy protection headlines of that time and here's what I found:

• Rivals join forces for copy-proof CDs –  November 6, 2002
• Labels put brakes on CD copy blocks –  September 3, 2002
• CD's now protected against felt-tips –  August 28, 2002
• Warner Japan to copylock music CD –  April 1, 2002
• AOL wants to lock up its CDs –  March 12, 2002
• New CD protection won't play on PCs –  March 6, 2002
• Shelves hold 10 million copy-locked CDs –  February 12, 2002
• Universal copy-protected CD shuns players –  December 18, 2001
• Customers put kibosh on anti-copy CD –  November 19, 2001
• 1 million copy-protected CDs released –  August 8, 2001