The Beastie Boys and the lack of copy protection

I’m a bit confused here people.
Last Tuesday I bought a copy of the new Beastie Boys album, To the Five Boroughs. I had heard there was talk of it being protected with DRM software. Posts on Boing Boing and Slashdot fed the meme into the blogosphere.
When I got back to the office, I tried ripping it to my desktop. The album riped fine using Windows Media Player on a stock Compaq desktop machine. No problems at all.
When I got home I ripped it to our media server. Again, no problems. I used Musicmatch Jukebox to do the ripping. I’m hardly using r33t haxx0r tools to get around any copy protection.
So I don’t see anything that even remotely looks like copy protection on the CD.
I took a look at the disc and it does have the Macromedia director based ‘Enhanced CD’ software on it that autoplays when load the disc. All that does is allow you to watch a Quicktime video. I don’t see any DRM software being installed.
I scoured the net to find any details of the ‘silent install’ and what the ‘secret DRM’ does. Besides many a slashdot-style screed against DRM and the Beasties, I didn’t find one technical explanation of exactly what the ‘secret DRM’ is or where it is located on a hard drive.
I did find many, many people saying that they were able to successfully rip it. I didn’t see anyone saying they had trouble ripping the CD.
Now, I’m probably wrong, but it seems to me that there is no ‘secret DRM’ on the new Beasties’ album and the that techno-blogosphere has whipped itself into a lather over the non-issue.
Someone please prove me wrong and point the details on the secret ‘silent install’, but until then, I consider the ‘Beasties DRM = evil’ meme a false and unproven one.
Did anyone out there that bought the album have any problems ripping the CD?

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12 thoughts on “The Beastie Boys and the lack of copy protection”

  1. Yes, I read the Boing Boing update before I worte this, but the complaining is still going on in the English speaking/blogging world of the US/UK.
    I’m questioning the what appears the be the circulation of mis-information. I anxiously await someone proving me wrong.

  2. Not familiar with the Beastie Boys CD but there IS auto-run copy protection software n the new Velvet Revolver CD which I bought last week. My friend and my cousin both had problems ripping them.
    However, I’ve taken some precautions to circumvent. You can go into your Windows registry and disable Auto-run. If you don’t like that solution you can also just hold down the SHIFT key when you insert the CD into your drive. The SHIFT key signals Windows to disable the Autorun feature.
    Enjoy! 🙂

  3. Microsoft’s next update to Windows XP (Service Pack 2) will no longer autoplay music CDs with CD-ROM content by default – instead, it brings up a dialog asking what the user would like to do and gives them the option of playing it with music players.
    There are CDs out there that silently install a new CD-ROM driver which prevents the user from ripping CDs in future. I’m unsure which titles are affected.

  4. I just bought the cd and it’s not ripping at a reasonable speed using EAC but it’s playing ok in my computer using real player (and what ripped seemed ok). I haven’t had a chance to check out to see if anything got installed, but the prospect of something being installed really pisses me off. I’ve converted most of my cds to MP3 and THAT is how I listen to the music I buy.

  5. I’m in Australia and I couldn’t even listen to it using real player or windows media player I had to use the software that’s on the CD just to listen to it on my computer.

  6. I bought my copy from Amazon.co.uk and I could not rip it under Linux using cdparanoia but iTunes under Windows had no problem. I did disable CD autorun first though and on inspection it would have ran something had I not.

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