Copy Protect This!
Take THAT DMCA!
If you buy yourself the new Velvet Revolver CD and decide to play it on your Windows-based computer, do yourself a favor, and hold down Mr. Shift Key so it doesn’t autorun. Just before you see the “License Agreement” that tells you that they won’t let you listen to the CD in it’s unadulterated glory on your PC it installs a little driver on your system, without warning you, that makes the CD skip when you try to play it with any application that pulls the CD-DA data off the disc directly (pretty much everything once you get into XP-land).
Guess what, boys? That qualifies as a Trojan Horse! You broke federal law by installing this driver on my system without my explicit knowledge or permission. Very bad.
Anyhow, if you are unlucky enough to have been “infected” by this malware, it’s easy to kill off, and you don’t even need a reboot to do it on XP.
Open up a command prompt window and do these things:
NET STOP SBCPHID
C:
CD \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS
DEL SBCPHID.SYS
All gone!
For good measure, you can delete the reference to it from your registry as well by deleting the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Sbcphid.
If you’ve rebooted since playing this CD, then you’ll also have to get it out of CurrentControlSet as well (since it gets copied from 001 to Current at reboot).
I’m sending a bill to BMG for an hour of my time spent cleaning this virus off of my computer. Had the CD actually had a warning on it, I probably would not have bought it, which would have been a shame, since it pretty much rocks. It does mention on the fine print on the back of the case (which you can’t read in the store because of the security “clamshells” around the disc) that it is an “Enhanced” CD that requires the installtion of specific software included on the CD.
At least they didn’t do like that other screwy system that made discs crash Macs and make the disc non-standard, so it should work in everything I have.
Assholes.