installing the Sony program on a machine running Windows Vista -- the beta version of Windows' next iteration -- "breaks the operating system spectacularly".
Perhaps this will be a wakeup call to those who have purchased CDs containing DRM that they may not work in their computers in future.
The only DRM CD that I ever purchased, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, states that it is designed to be compatible with "PCs with OS Windows 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, 64MB RAM of higher". Whilst later Windows versions are often designed to be compatible with old software, there are no guarantees. Certainly, the recently released 64bit versions of WIndows are by hardware necessity less backwardly compatible than previous version. With each new version of Windows, the chances of DRM CDs continuing to work lessens. In some cases, such as with Sony's XCP system in Windows Vista, the result will be a "spectacular crash".
In the small print at the bottom of the Hail to the Thief CD case is the note: "For futher information http://copycontrol.emi.com.au". This address redirects to the main EMI Australia web site, which contains no copy control information as far as I could see. After all, the CD is two years old - how long should they be expected to maintain customer support for it? Will they continue to update the software required to decipher their DRM for future software versions?
My study contains a whole bookshelf of DOS-era PC games. Although they are all on obsolete 5 1/4" floppy disks, only those with DRM (or copy-protection, as it was then called) are unplayable today. That is because I was able to copy those without DRM from their original floppies to CD, and later to DVD. To play those games trapped on their original disks I would have to hope that I could find hacked versions on the internet.
DRM is intimately tied in with the technology of its time. It's raison d'être is directly opposed to its continuing existence, and thus it is inherently unsuitable for media that people expect to last a lifetime. In its current form, it is barely as useful as the ill-fated DIVX psuedo-DVD.