For those of us that still buy CDs, it appears that CDs are becoming less and less a means for distributing and audio and more a means for distributing applications. In Europe, almost every CD has the words "Copy Controlled" on it and tends to skip or not play in conventional CD players. This is just catching on in the US (Ben Harper's "Diamonds on the Inside" was one of the first Copy Controlled CDs).

Copy Controlled CDs are created by putting errors into the audio data. Basically the errors cause your home CD player to play the CD even with the errors. Your PC, on the other hand, has some intelligence. The PC hits the errors, tries to fix them, and then gets into an endless loop. Since there are errors on the CD, the CD cannot be labeled with the "CDDA" logo from Philips, so look out for that. More info about Copy Controlled CDs is here.

But I don't want to talk about Copy Controlled CDs. Rather, what bothers me is that a group of incompetent programmers are now automatically installing bad, malicious software every time I insert an audio CD into my computer. Don't believe me? Check out Mark Russinovich's article on Sony/BMG CDs. They use digital rights management software from First 4, and man are those people evil (so evil that I will not even include a link to their site here).