Copy controlled audio CD's - When the record industry bit the few hands that still fed...

If you bought more than a couple of major label CD albums in the early half of the 00's, chances are you own a few discs with a label like this on the back cover:



This was a futile attempt of the record industry to halt piracy and sharing of music on the Internet via p2p networks etc. However, the only ones that suffered from this invention was the record buyers themselves. Not only were we unable to transfer our music to the computer, portable mp3 players and so on, but also were there problems playing the discs altogether, on certain equipment.

Copy Control could be actually considered as a defect of the CD, due to the fact that it is basically code written onto a second session of the CD, intended to confuse players that are able to read that session and that sort of data - computers, for instance.

Furthermore, some CD's also installed suspicious software and drivers onto the computer -automatically- through the AutoRun feature on Windows computers, that led to other problems for the consumer, involving playing other CD's on the same PC.

Hopefully this abomination of copy control is forever history.

Next up we'll look at a way of transferring / ripping a copy controlled CD to your computer...

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