Fairly Symmetrical

Epic Records Group has taken the drastic step of sealing CD players shut and gluing headphones onto them to stop digital copies being made from promotional albums. The albums involved are Riot Act by Pearl Jam and Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos.

From an article in the New Scientist.

This is getting ridiculous. First of all, I would think most reviewers have their own sound systems, which they probably have set up to reproduce music the way they like it. Those sound systems are probably more capable than portable CD players cheap enough that Epic was willing to throw them away on reviewers.

Second of all, this doesn't even really make pirating the CD much harder. Sure, you can't remove the CD from the player, pop it into your computer, and rip it. Sure, you can't pull out the headphone cord and replace it with a direct cable to the audio in on your soundcard. What you can do is cut the headphone cord, strip the cut ends, go buy a $2 audio cord from Radio Shack, cut one end off, strip those ends, and twist the headphone cord with the audio cord. Then plug the audio cord into your audio in and you're good to go.

The only real effect this has is making the recording companies look more desperate -- and more incompetent. Their last two tries at "copy protection" have been defeated by a Sharpie and a pair of scissors. Why don't they just give up?

Saw it first at Ars.