posted to me this evening not sure of the source



WATCHING the music and film industries get into a muddle over new technology can be a lot more fun than the entertainment they are selling.

Sony recently released a CD of "music from and inspired by" sister company Columbia's Spider-Man movie. The CD carries the now familiar warning that it "will not play on PC/Mac" because it is copy-protected using Sony's Key2audio system.

But as a promotion for the film, the CD also promises that "with your copy of the Spider-Man CD and a connection to the Internet you will have access to exclusive behind-the-scenes video footage, music videos and more". The instructions are: "1. Place the Spider-Man CD in your computer's CD-ROM drive. 2. Log on to www.columbiarecords.com/spider-man 3. Click on Get Connected."

Intrigued by the idea of a CD that is intended to work on a computer while simultaneously being designed not to work on a computer, we ran some tests. We found that the CD's music not only played perfectly well on a Windows PC, it also copied perfectly to a blank CD and happily ripped to a computer hard disc.

We then tried to follow Sony's instructions for getting connected. After a while, up came the hopeful invitation to "Insert" the CD and press "Start". But all this brought was the error message "we were unable to find Spider-Man".

So Spider-Man's copy-protection does not stop people copying but it does prevent them from accessing Sony's promotion for the movie. Cool.