Charley Pride's Copy-protected CD hacked

May 16, 2001 6:34 AM

Charley Pride's Copy-protected CD hacked -- or is it? Apparently, the people involved in trying to keep the CD off Napster failed to realize they are dealing with the World Wide Web.
posted by Hankins (5 comments total)

1) Someone wanted to copy a NEW Charlie Pride album onto the Internet.

2) Someone wanted to listen to NEW Charlie Pride on the Internet.

3) 63 year old Charlie Pride is mad that there's somebody who cares enough about his career at this point to do either.

weird.
posted by Perigee at 8:33 AM on May 16, 2001

It's good to hear he's still alive, I grew up listening to his music because my parents love him. I even went to one of his concerts when I was a kid, and he put on a good show as I recall.

It's interesting that each time the recording industry trots out some new scheme to keep people from copying media, they shoot themselves in the foot. First with encrypted DVDs (oops - someone forgot to encrypt their key), then SDMI (C'mon, we dare you to crack it. oops - someone cracked it) and now copy-protected CDs (oops - not backward compatible. oops - the Australian guys didn't protect theirs). Even if they do manage to smooth the bugs out of CD copy protection, it'll only work for the few hours it takes for J. Random Hacker to write the patch to get around it.

If the member corporations of the RIAA and the MPAA weren't still earning record profits, I might be able to sympathize with their plight.
posted by RylandDotNet at 9:01 AM on May 16, 2001

Thank you, Hankins! That article was possibly the funniest one I've read about encrypted music.
posted by lia at 9:30 AM on May 16, 2001

Heh. My great-grandfather was a doctor in rural, delta Mississippi (Quitman County, town of Sledge) for 60 years. This is where Charlie Pride was from. He said he probably delivered Mr. Pride. He also said there were a bunch of Prides running around that part of the state. Apparently they didn't have too much problem with `copy-protection'. :)
posted by tayknight at 9:34 AM on May 16, 2001

Copy-protection with music is going to be a bit of a farce anyway. There is always a way around it.

French techno group 'Daft Punk' recently released their latest album with a special 'membership' system on it. You log on, tap in your private number, and you download a player and can listen to a whole bunch of exclusive songs. This was done to stop the tracks appearing on Napster.

Well.. it's easy. You just play their songs in their player, set your soundcard to record from 'Wave', record it in your favourite WAV editor, then encode to MP3! You can do this with almost -everything-.

I did it because I don't want to use their crappy music player, and I want all my music in MP3 (I'm converting my whole album collection) for ease of use. But, even with a copyrighted CD, you can play it, and record straight to MP3 from a digital source. Easy peasy.
posted by wackybrit at 11:15 AM on May 16, 2001