News from the Daily Idiot.

[baratron]

In 2005, Sony BMG released a 3-CD set entitled Electric 80s. The cover art for this compilation featured a reproduction of a UPC bar code, with the title "ELECTRIC 80s" placed in the space at the bottom of the bar code where the human-readable numbers corresponding to that code would usually appear. ... Unfortunately for some retailers, the machine-readable version of the bar code used for the CD compilation's cover art was scannable by their systems.

Note, the only reason I'm passing this on as true is because snopes.com says it is, and I trust that being an urban myth debunking site, they actually check that news items really happened. 'Cos I haven't seen this in any .uk-ish newspapers.

Comments

[hattifattener]

Meanwhile, news accounts noted that stores were pulling the Electric 80s set while a new version with more conventional cover art was being rushed to market.

Seems like it would be just as easy to put something on the cover which looks like a barcode but isn't a valid set of symbols in the UPC barcode. (I mean, not a barcode referring to a nonexistent product, but a bunch of vertical lines which aren't a well-formed example of the barcode pattern— bad parity or something.)

Let's see. Amazon has an image of the CD. Deciphering the UPC/EAN symbol gets us [6 02498 09662 8], which is in fact a barcode for a music CD assigned to Universal Music Group. That's where the story diverges, though — it seems to be the UPC/EAN for The Very Best of George Gershwin (Decca, 2003; Decca is one of Universal's labels).

In Between Dreams has the barcode 602498802526.