CD players glued shut to stop piracy 18:27 16 September 02 NewScientist.com news service A US record company has issued reviewers with portable CD players that are glued shut to prevent two new albums from being pirated online before their official releases. 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. A spokeswoman for Epic told New Scientist: "Obviously we have a problem with piracy and this is one of the ways we're trying to address it. We're trying lots of things." New albums have appeared early on file sharing networks such as KaZaA, Morpheus and Grokster with a frequency which is alarming record companies. Eminem's The Eminem Show suffered this fate prior to release in May 2002.
Hee hee. That's easy to defeat. Line in jack, duh. They must think music reviewers are terrifically lazy. Oh wait..that's true.
They should be worried. Screw Iraq, terrorism and our unstable economy...I heard half the country is on edge waiting for the next Tori Amos album!! What are we gonna do?!?! :bigtimerolleyes:
Yes, you can always snip the headphones off and attach a stereo jack, with help from your friendly radio shack. Not too hard. Or just attack the connect point with solvent and a quick tug. Nail polish remover is clean. I see your point, though.
hmm even though Eminem's cd was littered all over the net...it still was the number one album for few weeks.. i wonder how many cds it sold.
I don't think the point of that was to physically prevent people from obtaining the CD and copying it. However, if someone is to break the glue or seal, the record company would have grounds for a lawsuit.
I'm not sure how much that really will help anyways. Yeah, they stop it (or slow it) from getting onto KaZaa early, but they are still going to lose all that money when it does get on KaZaa after the CD gets out. Oh well, what do I know?
