VELVET REVOLVER: 'Contraband' Copy Protection Feature Shattered

June 28, 2004

Engadget, a web magazine with "obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics," has published an article offering instructions on how to bypass the "copy protection" feature included on the VELVET REVOLVER CD, "Contraband".

Phillip Torrone of Engadget writes: "The disc has 'Copy Protection' from SunnComn called MediaMax, which on some Windows systems will force the user to install software on their system in order to listen to the music and restrict what they do with the music, for example you cannot make MP3s. If SunnComn sounds familiar, they should, these are the folks who were going to sue a Princeton student for 10 million dollars for writing a paper that showed by pressing the shift key while inserting the CD (and of course, pressing the shift key still works on this CD too according to all reports).

"Sadly, the way RCA and SunnComn want you to listen to music is pretty complicated, you'd need to insert the CD on your PC, wait up to one minute, click an end user agreement, then only 'listen' to the music, oh- wait there is more- it installs software which blocks making MP3s and it requires a web connection to exchange 'data' and keys. On the disc there are music files, WMA, but they don't seem to play on any device we have which plays WMAs, the site says only 'approved' devices, yikes!

"Well, for us, it wasn't an issue, why? Well, we have always disabled 'Auto-Run' on our Windows based system, since like Windows 95, we've always disabled that 'feature'. By default Windows will automatically look for a file called Autorun.inf on any CD you pop in to your system, we've always known this is a big security issue as there are a lot of spyware and viruses distributed on CDs, you read about this every week. In fact, Microsoft is even disabling this in their next security focused service pack." Read more.

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