From beastieboys.com:

Here's the deal with copy protection on To the 5 Boroughs. Read it.

• There is no copy controlled software on US or UK releases of
  Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs.
• The disk is copy controlled in outside of the USA and UK - which is
  standard policy for all Capitol/EMI titles (and a policy used by all major labels in Europe).
• The copy protection system used for all EMI/Capitol releases including
  
  To the 5 Boroughs is Macrovision's CDS-200, which sets up an audio player
  into the users RAM (not hard drive) to playback the RED book audio on the
  disk. It does absolutely not install any kind of spyware,
  shareware, silverware, or ladies wear onto the users
  system. You can find more information on the technology used
  
  
  here.

This is what EMI has to say about it:

Reports that spy ware is being included on the Beastie Boy's CD, To the
5 Boroughs are absolutely untrue.

While the Beastie Boys CD does use copy control in some territories, there is no
copy control on the Beasties Boys discs in the US or the UK. Where copy
protection is used, it is Macrovision's CDS-200 technology; the same technology
being used for the past several months around the world for all of EMI's
releases in those territories. This Macrovision technology does not install spy ware or vapor ware of any kind on a users PC. In fact, CDS-200 does

not install software applications of any kind on a user's PC. All the
copy protection in CDS-200 is hardware based, meaning that it is dependent on
the physical properties and the format of the CD. None of the copy protection in
CDS-200 requires software applications to be loaded onto a computer.

The technology does activate a proprietary Macrovision player in order to play
the CD on a PC, and that player converts WMA compressed files to audio on the
fly. It also temporarily installs a graphic skin for the player. Nothing is
permanently installed on a hard drive. These details can be verified in the 'install.log'
file in the computer's root directory

Every product that I've ever bought from SonicBlue has been malformed and returned to sender.

The technology sounds cool, but I'll probably wait until it's available from another vendor.