Sony BMG Recalls 52 Copy-Protected Titles (has the list)

chartattack ^ | Thursday November 17, 2005 @ 03:00 PM | ChartAttack.com Staff

[dickmc]

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has recalled its XCP-encoded CDs and is offering exchanges to disgruntled consumers whose PCs using Windows operating systems could potentially be hacked as a result of playing the albums in them.

The company has drawn widespread criticism for the hidden copy-protection software it embedded in 52 CDs to limit the number of times they could be copied.

As a result, Sony BMG is recalling the 4.7 million XCP-encoded CDs that it shipped to stores. Of those, 2.1 million have already been purchased............

You may want to check out the list below. It is not all modern garbage. There are some pretty good old stuff on it!

[dickmc]

Sony BMG has also released the full list of XCP-encrypted titles for the first time. Here are the affected albums:

# A Static Lullaby - Faso Latido

# Acceptance - Phantoms

# Amerie - Touch

# Art Blakey - Drum Suit

# The Bad Plus -Suspicious Activity?

# Bette Midler - Sings The Peggy Lee Songbook

# Billy Holiday - The Great American Songbook

# Bob Brookmeyer - Bob Brookmeyer & Friends

# Buddy Jewell - Times Like These

# Burt Bacharach - At This Time

# Celine Dion - On Ne Change Pas

# Chayanne - Cautivo

# Chris Botti - To Love Again

# The Coral - The Invisible Invasion

# Cyndi Lauper - The Body Acoustic

# The Dead 60s - The Dead 60s

# Deniece Williams - This Is Niecy

# Dextor Gordon - Manhattan Symphonie

# Dion - The Essential Dion

# Earl Scruggs - I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends

# Elkland - Golden

# Emma Roberts - Unfabulous And More: Emma Roberts

# Flatt & Scruggs - Foggy Mountain Jamboree

# Frank Sinatra - The Great American Songbook

# G3 - Live In Tokyo

# George Jones - My Very Special Guests

# Gerry Mulligan - Jeru

# Horace Silver - Silver's Blue

# Jane Monheit - The Season

# Jon Randall - Walking Among The Living

# Life Of Agony - Broken Valley

# Louis Armstrong - The Great American Songbook

# Mary Mary - Mary Mary

# Montgomery Gentry - Something To Be Proud Of: The Best of 1999-2005

# Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten

# Neil Diamond - 12 Songs

# Nivea - Complicated

# Our Lady Peace - Healthy In Paranoid Times

# Patty Loveless - Dreamin' My Dreams

# Pete Seeger - The Essential Pete Seeger

# Ray Charles - Friendship

# Rosanne Cash - Interiors

# Rosanne Cash - King's Record Shop

# Rosanne Cash - Seven Year Ache

# Shel Silverstein - The Best Of Shel Silverstein

# Shelly Fairchild - Ride

# Susie Suh - Susie Suh

# Switchfoot - Nothing Is Sound

# Teena Marie - Robbery

# Trey Anastasio - Shine

# Van Zant - Get Right With The Man

# Vivian Green - Vivian

[weegee]

Shouldn't Sinatra and Louis Armstrong songs be public domain by now? Oh that's right, the industry changed the laws inspite of the constitutional intent.

Well at least those artists are doing well for themselves. Oh wait, they've been dead for years. Well that's okay, the songwriters are the real ones who get the money. Publishing is where it is at. Oh wait, they are dead too.

Funny how life is like that.

[elli1]

I'm presuming that the living 'artists' have been standing on their ears demanding that SONY protect their 'art' so's I'm thinking consumers ought to be pissed at them, too and suing them for damages along with SONY.

[weegee]

Look for Elvis Costello's recent album. If I recall, the back of the album contains an FBI warning logo and he has added a comment to the back cover that says he does not stand by that.

[Squantos]

Hmmmm with few exceptions they seem to be targeting the DU sorts per the titles.....:o)

Usual suspects....

[swmobuffalo]

Does this mean if we dont have any of these CDs then we don't have to worry about this rootkit problem?

[elli1]

Elvis Costello's new album "The Delivery Man" carries the FBI warning, along with a note from Costello: "This artist does not endorse the following warning. The FBI doesn't have his home phone number, and he hopes that they don't have yours."

[ShadowAce]

Sony's CD rootkit infringes DVD Jon's copyright

From the Register:

Sony's rootkit-style DRM software, XCP, designed to prevent copyright infringement, looks like it's breaching the terms of a copyright agreement itself.

In fact it contains code written by the Motion Picture Ass. of America's villain of the week for several years running, 'DVD Jon' Johansen, who was dragged through the Norwegian courts by the MPAA using a very dubious extension of US law, for circumventing the DRM on DVDs. Johansen eventually prevailed in having the spurious charges against him thrown out.

The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying "Thanks!" - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come.

The British company that developed the DRM software for Sony, First4Internet Ltd, has included free software code covered by the Free Software Foundation's LGPL, a cousin of the GPL, amateur sleuths have discovered.

The LGPL, or Lesser General Public License, was designed to protect author's rights for chunks of code rather than finished programs.

It's a complicated area, with subtle distinctions between rights over code that is compiled into, and distributed as part of the final binary program, or code that is only called at as the program is executed. But it is pretty clear cut that First4Internet has used code without observing the terms under which it's distributed - terms backed up by the power of copyright (one of our greatest inventions).

And we all know what happens to people who don't respect copyright.

Sebastian Porst discovered code from the LAME project, mpglib and VideoLAN in the XCP copy restriction, which has caused Sony so much grief. Jon Johansen is a contributor to the VideoLAN project.

"I just want to mention that the function that can be found at virtual offset 0x10089E00 in ECDPlayerControl.ocx is the function DoShuffle from a GPL-ed file called drms.c written by Jon Lech Johansen and Sam Hocevar (Google for it)," notes Sebastian.

A parallel, and even more exhaustive forensic examination of the XCP code was undertaken by 'Muzzy' - who published his findings here.

So why is First4Internet in such trouble? If you use LGPL code, the licence requires that you acknowledge the provenance of the code you're using - with a clear notification and an assurance that you can provide your own source code on request. It's designed to deter lazy programmers such as... well... the kind employed by First4Internet Ltd.

FSF attorney Eben Moglen told us this evening he couldn't offer a statement on what the organization planned to do next. ®

[zeugma]

Here's where you go to exchange any disk. (also has full list).

http://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

[zeugma]

Ping to post #9

[Only1choice____Freedom]

# Our Lady Peace - Healthy In Paranoid Times

Ironic isn't it?