The woes of Sony Digital Rights Management
This is more general music related, than specific NA Flute related. But there has been a huge backlash against Sony Music in recent months about the Digital Rights Management solution which they have implemented on many of their recent CD releases.
For those who are not familiar with Digital Rights Management, it's all about controlling the capability of a computer user to "rip" a song from a CD to an MP3 or other digital format. Now regardless of how you feel about copyrights and ownership of music by the musician, it's one thing to put the legal muscle behind it, and it's another thing to implement a draconian (in my opinion) method for restricting a users rights.
To make a long story short (there's plenty of info available on the web), Sony has put a piece of software on some of their recent CD releases which installs itself on your computer when you insert the CD into your CD drive on your computer (normal stereo CD player are not effected...). Basically, this piece of software 'hides' itself deep in your computer and watches for you to play or attempt to copy the CD in question. What most folks are complaining about is that there's no way (for non-geeks) to remove this software from your computer once it's installed itself. Futhermore, it violates some of the basic consumer protections about installing such things as spyware, etc. As a result, it was just announced that Sony is being sued in the State of California over this issue.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a list of Sony CD in question.
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