I feel it's my duty as a CD-buying citizen to let people know about things that will make their lives easier. For example : how to circumvent copy-protected audio CDs, so you can use them commensurate with the contract of purchase. ie. you bought the right to play the music. You did not buy into a contract to only play the music on certain devices.

Take your copy-protected disc, and blacken the very outer edge of the play side with a $1.00 felt tip marker. Other internet postings and blogs claim that tape or even a sticky note can also be used to cover the security track. (typically located on the outer rim of the disc). There are suggestions that copy protection schemes used by other music labels can also be circumvented in a similar way.

Sony's proprietary technology, deployed on many recent releases, works by adding a track to the copy-protected disc that contains bogus data. Your computer is programmed to read data files first, it will continuously try to play the bogus track first. It never gets to play the music tracks located elsewhere on the compact disc.

The effect is that the copy-protected disc will play on standard CD players but not on computer CD-Rom drives, some portable devices and even some car stereo systems.

By blacking out the copy-protection track, your PC will skip right over it and into the music. Sweet sweet unprotected music.

If you're an Apple fan, some Mac users have reported that playing the disc in their CD drive causes the Mac to crash. The cover of the copy-protected discs now contains a warning that the album will not play on Macintoshes or other personal computers.
Apple has also posted a warning on its website.

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