My copy of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief finally arrived the other day. It’s the very funky limited edition fold-out roadmap version, and although I was impressed by the packaging (I’m a sucker for a marketing gimmick, no matter how impractical it might be – and this one is not going to sit well in my CD rack), I was rather disappointed to read the message on the back: “This disc contains Copy Control technology”.
Now, I have a lot of CDs, and it is not always possible to be in the same place as my collection. To rectify this situation, a year or so ago, I bought myself an MP3 player with room for just under 5,000 songs. This meant I could copy the bulk of my collection onto the MP3 player and take it with me wherever I go. I routinely copy new CDs onto it as I buy them. Incidentally, this isn’t actually a breach of copyright, as the rules of “fair use” entitle you to make copies of music you have purchased for your own personal use, in the same way that you can legitemately copy CDs onto cassette to listen to in the car.
But I digress.
This is the second CD I have bought recently that has claimed to be copy protected. The sleeve to Blur’s Think Tank also claimed that the CD contained copy protection, but there was no evidence of it on the disc I had, and I have happily been listening to it on my MP3 player ever since. The Radiohead CD looked a bit more serious, however, as there is a big “Copy Controlled” logo on the back and on the CD itself, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway and see what happens…
I don’t agree with this kind of stuff, partly because the record company are trying to dictate to their customers what they should do with the products they have purchased, and partly because, in this case it rather seems like they are Closing the Door After The Horse Has Bolted (hmm, sounds rather like the title of a Radiohead track…), given that this album was widely bootlegged before it even reached the shelves.
Mainly, however, my problem with Copy Control or whatever is that it usually doesn’t work, or makes the CDs unplayable on certain CD players and PCs. The early attempts that the record companies made could be defeated with a careful stroke of felt-tip pen, or a bit of tape, and here, for your benefit, is my personal guide to defeating the copy protection on Hail To The Thief:
1) Insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive.
2) A window pops up that says: “Some files need to be installed before you can listen to this CD. Do you want to install the files?”.
3) This is the tricky bit: Instead of clicking “OK”, click “Cancel”.
3) You can now listen to, and/or copy the CD as normal.