Straight after their triumph in preventing you from plugging your DVD player
into your aging TV through your VCR, our friends at Macrovision have created
a CD copy protection system that allegedly prevents evil users from illegally
ripping the new CD they just bought to evil, unprotected MP3 files.
The scheme has been surreptitiously used on a number of unlabelled CDs, but
now, a bunch of European hackers have released
a workaround, in the form of a low-level Windows
driver. Which will probably be illegal under the DMCA in the US, and equivalent
legislation in Australia, and due to be enacted in Europe over the next year or so. Though it raises the question: if the "security feature" relies on
Windows' handling of "damaged" discs, will it stop Linux software such as
cdparanoia?