Can you tell us what the driver actually did? How did it "prevent" piracy, and what are your feelings about the allegedly bad software quality?
I never thought it would prevent piracy. They said it was a success even if only a small percentage are stopped by it. I didn't believe in the software but I do believe in copyright so I took the job. The software was put together by 4 guys on a shoestring budget. It's amazing it worked at all. People read into this and think big Sony/BMG money but in reality it's tiny contractors. Some of us were doxxed back then and was a pretty horrible experience all around.
There's a general trend for people to treat the happenstance actions of individual workers as fully-intentioned top-down decisions of a unified, hivemind multi-billion dollar entity. A previous employer of mine has been in the news for things where a shortcut by a single lazy engineer was interpreted as a political attack on free software.
> When a CD was inserted, it checked for a watermark and if there, returned pseudo random sectors of data.
So, if the driver was not running in the machine, the disc would be a standard Data+AudioCD? Nothing else to stop reading it as a generic music disc?
Basically, if you inserted the disc, Windows would see the data partition, and "helpfully" run the installer for you. Then you'd have the driver installed, and it would block access to read the disc as a generic music disc.
In 1995 the idea of commercial products being adversarial is low. For the very few cases of the driver they install being unwanted, there's countlessly more cases of it being wanted.
This wasn't "secure by design," it was "usable by design." And for 99.9% of the people, it was likely both.