Thursday, May. 27, 2010
Sony CD Copy Protection
In the days before iTunes, record labels tried all sorts of wacky protections to stop people from pirating music. The dumbest innovation belonged to Sony, which hard-coded software into CDs in 2002 to prevent listeners from copying tracks to a computer. The only problem? The software could be easily defeated by using a permanent marker to draw a border along the edge of a disk, rendering the expensive barrier useless. Good luck banning markers, Sony.