Sad day for Christian Rock

Through all the wars over copy protection in the past decade, one bright spot has until today always been Christian CDs. Sony and other music publishers may have been attacking my PC with rootkits or other tricks to prevent copying when I bought rock albums, but until today I'd never encountered copy-protection in a CD of Christian music.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I brought home the latest "Third Day" CD today, and discovered it too now appears to have been altered to make it difficult to rip into iTunes. Tracks 3-13 are normal, but Track 1 is a copy of all tracks in sequence, and Track 2, in addition to appearing to last 15 days, locked up iTunes when I simply tried to play that track from the original CD. I then checked, and sure enough, their publisher is Sony.

I guess that's fairly mild, as copy-protection tricks go, and fortunately I had another program available to isolate the missing tracks 1 and 2 from the rest of the all-in-one current track 1.But I remain offended that Sony once again apparently feels free to tamper with music I've purchased at full retail price without even feeling the need to put any warning whatsoever on the CD of their intentions to deny me the ability to listen to my purchase on an iPod. Fixing that cost an hour of my time, which I consider more valuable than a CD.

Sadly, from now on, I can no longer trust buying physical CDs of even Christian artists (at least no more from Third Day or anyone else published by Sony.) Instead, I'll likely have to limit my purchases to known-DRM-free MP3s from the iTunes Store and Amazon's MP3 Store. Gresham's Law strikes again, or more colloquially, "one rotten apple spoils the barrel."