Slashdot Mirror
BMG's New Copy-Protected Audio CDs
PCB writes "I found the following on www.heise.de:
BMG-Entertainment started selling audio-CDs using the Cactus Data Shield, a copy-protection system developed by Midbar and Sonopress which makes it impossible to grab the music from the CD and to listen to it using "an old CD-Player" or a CD-ROM-drive. It is used on the albums "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club. What's worse: the copy-protection is not even mentioned on the outside of the CD-case, and as these CDs are not really RedBook-compliant, they actually don't contain CD Digital Audio. " You'll need use the Fish of Many Languages to translate into your appropriate native tongue.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you?
What an interesting idea. You're right, paying with a credit card opens one up to that sort of abuse, doesn't it? Cash purchases, though, are (for now) anonymous.
But it would still cost the record biz a mint - every CD package would have to bear a sticker with the CD's serial number in bar-code, or some similar scheme, so the checkout computer could match up the purchaser and the purchased material's serial numbers. Manufacturing the CDs and packaging could get a lot more expensive. Either the CDs and the packaging would have to be carefully tracked to ensure they matched up, or the packager would have to have a quick way to scan every single disc for the watermark when putting the disks in the cases. Then of course the retailers would have to cooperate by setting up their systems to read the extra bar codes and reporting everything to Big Brother.
It's certainly possible, but I doubt the record biz is likely to foot the bill, so I'm not worried about it just yet. Heck, my favorite CD shops allow trade-ins, which sidestep the money thing all together.
Yeah! Go US! Take over the WORLD! We don't need those other CRAPPY cultures! Please (including my home country especially, Canada) do us a favor by allowing us to be included in your baseless, mind numbing, and ultimately boring melting pot!
Wooooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooo!
Hi-fi equipment now is cheap. More than that , the trend is towards cheap (ok not expensive or in other words affordable) digital based players, whereby you can capture all de-crypted (for DVD) stuff going right to your super=duper speakers, which would give you exactly the same quality, all you need is to compress it back.
Now, there is no doubt that big time pirates had very expensive equipment to copy ANYTHING for ages, and they are the real trouble for software/music industry, because people who are BUYING pirated music/software indeed could have bought the authentic ones, and thus really do hurt sales, unlike little guys who make a copy or two of a music CD to listen not only at home but also on their way to work/school.
Thus, all these copy protection measures are just a hassle and extra problems for end users. Almost anyone can make a very high quality copy of an audio=cd and this will only be more common in the future.
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
I think java in general is top heavy.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
You think I'mm gonna tell the guy at the store what the serial number on my CD player is? If they won't sell it to me without recording that, then I will buy my CD player elsewhere!
:-)
Heck, I flat out REFUSE to send in those registration cards that come with most equipment, not only because most of them want to know my earnings and how many kids I have at home, but also because THEY ALWAYS SAY FREE POSTAGE IN THE US ONLY! WTF? Does Canada not exist? I give all those companies a big "fuck you" for that. If you can't be bothered to spend 50 cents to find out that info from me, then SUCK MY ASS! I will not pay to tell you ANY of my info!
BTW: You don't need to send in that crap to keep your warranty valid, anyways, even though they would like you to believe it. Just keep the sales receipt.
Besides, a serial number doesn't prove piracy. It DOES prove someone could have been in your house and looked at the number on the back of the unit, or borrowed a LEGIT CD copy from you (ie, they own it). Both of these are very valid, IMHO.
If you REALLY want to keep your nose "clean", simply pay someone to steal the unit. Tell the police it was stolen. Have them put it on your porch the next day. Boom, plausible deniability with a POLICE record! (Of course, it IS illegal to do this... buuuut, no one has to know. Oh, and don't do this. Really, don't. It is BAD.
Lack of vision? Simple minded? You're the one who's advocating that a huge amount of work be done in a slow and poorly-supported language to accomplish basically the same things that NNTP has been doing for decades now. I bet it wouldn't take much effort to hack on most of the extra things that slashdot provides to an NNTP server, and then we could all be happy. You'd only load those comments you actually want to see, everything would be in a nice list instead of hacked on to this ugly web page, you could get rid of comments you've already viewed, etc.
Just because I don't agree with you doesn't make me simple-minded, or show that I lack vision.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Maybe I can't break the latest protection schemes. I'll just leave that to the experts and then buy from them. China's "most favored nation" status will ensure that gov't will continue to turn a blind eye to China's illegalities and market their stuff here unfettered by any laws.
(In my experience, most of the slashdot slowdowns I've seen are because of the ad banners taking forever to load).
Java has it's place, but it unfortunately hasn't lived up to its hype in time for it to be the ubiquitously accepted language touted to be. The fact that you have to stop just short of sacrificing your first child to the java gods in order to get IO to implement cleanly doesn't help much either. Yes yes, I know you can get newer versions of Java which "fix all the old problems". Unless you're using it as a language for embedded apps or intranet glue (or other situations where you have direct control over the running environment), you're producing products for the general populace and most people's java availability begins and ends on their webbrowser.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
ok, care to wager how long it takes before there is open source software to defeat this copy protection? I give it a month. The media companys just don't understand. All copy protection methods can and will be defeated. It's not "if" it's "when".
If all people want to do is make a copy of the audio then the workarround is utterly trivial...
It just might take a little longer. If you can pop it in a CD player with RCA outputs, you can run it into your computer and copy it that way. I have done this with my tapes and records to put them on CD.
It is more time consuming, but comes out sounding just fine.
There is really no way to get around people recording sounds (ie copying cd's). If it makes a sound, it can be recorded -- it just might be a little more difficult in some cases than in others.
PEACE
HTH? That's a new one for me
But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
Actually, I have a Sony Discman with optical out, and I have seen soundcards for around US$100 that have optical in.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Yes, but I would tend to believe that this "fit for purpose" clause isn't really a viable excuse.
The store or record company would simply say "We intended for it to be played on standard home audio CD players. And we purposely engineered it so that you couldn't rip the data onto your computer. That is the new format's purpose and there is nothing you can do about it, ha ha."
I think the very most you might get BMG to do is put a label on the outside of the disc that says something along the lines of "This CD is not compatible with CD-ROM drives."
Look at Acer. They make the world's crappiest monitors. At my local college, where I work, we are returning almost 40% of our Acerview 56's. They ALL have a real bad tint, most are very dim, and 10% of those are COMPLETELY unreadable at *any* resolution.
5% of our Acerview 78's are CRAP. Most get strange problems that cause the image to get "jumpy" or fuzzy to the point of unreadability.
10% of our Acerview 77c's are REAL CRAP. Not just annoying "gotta return it AGAIN!" crap, but "Holy sh*t, FLAMES!" crap. Yeah, I've seen those cheap Acerview 17" monitors set on fire. And not only that, I've seen a better image on a 13" IBM original PS/2 VGA Colour display.
I had to open up a 77c. From what I remember about that horrid experience, there is NO sheilding whatsoever inside these things. The circuit board is a single unit, and holds the flyback transformer. It was, at most, 3/32" thick. No screws inside, either. The only way to remove the board is to flex it. GARBAGE!
I also "dropped" one of those 77c monitors. It didn't really drop, it tipped onto the tube. The shadow mask was ruined. It must have been glued in or something.
These percentage points are just my personal estimates... Although the 40% for the 56's is my estimate from actually counting those monitors.
And Acer still continues to sell their crap. And I suppose they profit somehow, or they wouldn't continue. Oh, and FYI: I am told Acer is ISO 9000 approved. Tells me that ISO means "International Stupidity Organization".
thats right. And i'll prove it, if they can't play it in the cd player in the store, i think they'd have to give me my money back. It was not labeled as requiring anything different or a new cd player, so if it doesn't work in ANYONE's cd player, i'd say the store sold it to me under false pretenses. AKA false advertising.
Well, if they think this will stop cd pirating, you know someone will record to mp3/wav from an analog stream instead, and then record to a blank cd, or distribute the mp3s... (Then again, some people (like me) would be too lazy to wait that long =)
Before anyone starts yelling about audible effects, I'd like to point out that white 1-bit noise is already added; a paradoxial effect of sampling and quantiziation is that a small amount of white noise will actually enhance weak signals.
Mind you that is _adding_ noise, wereas the watermark would imply _replacing_ the lowest bit with noise. But still. Just goes to show how inaudible that sort of thing is.
I believe this implies that you must buy a new CD player. But that can't be right, can it?
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
This method of copy protection seems useless. Although it may stop poeple from dumping mp3's the old fashioned way (until someone out there does a little hacking) what is to stop anyone from taking the audio out off of a cd player and throwing it into the audio input of the computer and ripping that way? I don't see how they could stop this? Is there anything? If there isn't then this is a very wasteful attempt at creating copy protection. It seems like if it is possible to play the CD then it is possible to rip it with no exceptions. It's not like a VHS tape where they could play with the AFG and screw it up. I don't see what they could do with an audio line to keep it from being recorded and still allow it to be playable. Anyone know?
- 95% of all users won't even notice.
- 3% of all users play CDs on their computers, but don't copy them. They will be annoyed, but won't notice that copy protection is the issue. They'll play the CD on regular CD players only.
- 1.5% of all users have an old CD player that chokes. They'll be pissed, and hopefully some will return the CD.
- The reminding 0.5% are slashdot readers who definitely will return the CD.
Okay, so there is a potential 2% of users who'd return the CD, but currently there are only 2 CDs out there. How many of those 2% do currently own the CD? Almost nobody! How many people are willing to go out, buy the CD just to return it? Well, make your guess, but I doubt it'll be enough.Certainly BMG will closely monitor consumer reaction. And I am sure they will pull all strings to prevent this information to be reported in news. And probably they will be successful, as big corporations are pretty good at controlling the media. I mean, isn't it weird that nobody mentioned any US news source about this?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Within six months, this system will be cracked. The atmosphere surounding the geek-media company relationship is far more negative than it has ever been, thus someone will have to punish them- PUNISH THEM FOR THEIR INSOLANCE!!! Muhuwawawa
No, the WinNT 4.0 Telnet is the same one.
W2k comes with a fully functional one IMO.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
I'd think they'd claim your diskman to be defective and enforce their on-open-no-return policy. Furthermore, to support their naive (or devious) theory, they may walk you over to their top of the line stereos, pop it in, and glare at you in disgust as it plays.
On that note, drag the bastard to their top of the line cpu's on display and pop it in, and glare at him in retaliation.
Uhh.... Dude, they Arrested the guy....
(Ok, so they don't have a leg to stand on, still, they Arrested the guy. There's no such thing as "the hacker tank" at the local pokey, you're in there with bad people).
Not only that, but this is a relatively safe trial balloon. If it flops on no-name bands, they haven't lost much money. But if they put out the latest Jewel (or whatever's popular now, I don't keep up) CD with the new format, and it flops, they've lost millions.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
The correct term is "homosexual" cable.
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
I'm sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about whether or not some consumer hacker type can still copy it or not. I have a problem with the idea of a gradual shift over to formats I CANNOT PRODUCE! I've been going through absolute hell simply getting the ADAT I bought into working order (fortunately all the repairs are being covered by the seller, who didn't check the machine out enough before selling it), and I am not thrilled with the idea of a new generation of CD players made to no longer understand Red Book Audio. What the hell is happening to the world?
If I seem frantic, it's because I am already profoundly committed to pushing MP3s as hard as I can- and hoped to be able to earn small amounts of bread money by selling _master_ _CDs_ of the music that's being MP3ed. I know I can put out quality that's worth getting an 'audiophile' copy, and people who want to 'support the artist' can be encouraged to get that, I don't have to build timebombs into the mp3s or go for pay-by-play or anything psychotically disgusting like that.
Now the other shoe drops, and I find that the industry is quietly shifting the CD format out from under me to some other sort of format that won't play on normal CD players.
Bets that the industry won't phase out Red Book? Anyone?
Bets that the new format will be available to me and my little borrowed CD-Rom burner? Anyone?
What the hell do I have to do, try to make _cassette_ _tapes_ for God's sake, to get a medium with a future? Press vinyl? Actually I could do that very well- but NOT in tiny small runs. And there's the rub.
DAMN it! Anyone who can't see where this is headed is an idiot... and anyone who still claims MP3s are against the interests of artists in the face of this steady 'power shift' is crazy. I don't see MP3 copiers cutting off my access to the public- I see them enhancing it, in a strictly non-profit sort of way. I see the INDUSTRY steadily, subtly cutting off my access to the public, 'deprecating' the media I used to have increasingly easy access to- and I'm freaking out! What the HELL?
This morning when I got up I would not, in my wildest flights of suspicion and paranoia, have dreamed to suggest that the music industry was taking steps to DEPRECATE RED BOOK AUDIO.
What the _hell_? :(
--
The shareholder is always right.
My CD player happens to be my Macintosh. I choose to listen to my music as MP3's because that's a convenient method of playback for my lifestyle. If they've gone about making sure I can't play back my CD's in what is, to me, a normal method based on the standard format that has been in use for many years, then I simply have to consider their product to be unplayable and defective and demand my money back.
AFAIK, NPH is not part of the HTTP protocol, it is just certain CGI applications special because they get to print the HTTP headers that get sent back to the browser.
With a normal CGI application, you print a few headers such as Content-type or Location or Set-Cookie and the server takes care of all the rest (like the Status header). When you move your CGI application to a filename beginning with nph- (that's the only check Apache does to treat a CGI file like a NPH, I saw the code), it must be the one to print the Status and all the other headers, and they get sent to the browser as they are print.
It is not part of the HTTP protocol. The protocol is just the same whether you are using a normal CGI application or a NPH CGI application.
Am I wrong?
Azul, who is still in school, password-less.
Hey, wait up: I want to know more details about this home entertainment system you say you built, particularly what components you've used.
What sound card do you have?
How have you addressed the video side?
What size and type of TV or monitor display?
What is the best solution for fast 3D graphics and high quality TV out?
Are you using DVD with a hardware MPEG decoder? Do you have an hardware MPEG encoder to compress video on the fly?
Does your solution allow you to override DVD region coding?
What kind of hard drive setup do you have for recording video?
Apologies for the brusque interrogation but I just can't seem to find someone who's actually done this sort of PC-based media system and achieved quality approaching "domestic" consumer equipment.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
While they're at it why don't they release movies on Betamax.
Thankfully money talks; the millions of people with 'old cdroms' will gracefully return their 'faulty cd' and buy a cd that works on their 'old cd player.' Does Joe RedNeck know that there is a 'new cd player' for playing such cd's? Didn't think so.
If Divx failed, what makes them think something like this will not?
Thankfully smaller and independent labels have some sense of dignity, and try to promote the music, not promote sales.
Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
There is an interesting conundrum here where the industry hyped new media like CDs which provide "better audio quality", requiring the music listener to ditch their reasonably adequate vinyl records. Most music listeners are actually quite happy with analogue sound - that's how it hits your ears!
But as part of pushing CDs, the industry created a demand for "digital sound" which is extending as far as digital USB speakers for your computer. But by making everything digital, they increase the number of places in the sound chain where the sound can be ripped!
This highlights the idiocy of the industry's attempts at copy protection. If they were going to be able to do it properly, they'll have to sew up not just the media, but all the places where D/A conversion occurs. S/PDIF may not be common now, but you can bet that pro level interfaces are *always* going to find their way to consumer level. You'd think they'd remember that DAT copy protection didn't work?
Danny
BMG Entertainment, the music department of the Bertelsmann company, has since short audio DS in the trade, which is provided with the copy protection Cactus DATA Shield. This mechanism was developed in co-operation with the Israeli software enterprise Midbar and Sonopress from Germany. So far the albums " Razorblade Romance " of the group of Him and " My private ones are were concerned " the former Independent Heroen Philip Boa & The Voodoo club. The copy protection prevents not only the selection (Grabben) and a copying of the audio TRACKS with the PC, but also a playing on all D-CRcOcM-cDrives as well as on older audio CD players
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Don't you have a Fair Trading Tribunal (or analogue) or lawyers over there?
Everything I've ever read about watermarking indicated that not only was the watermark intended to survive a simple D/A/D pathway but even conversion to and from a (very!) lossy format - like MP3. In fact, surviving MP3 (and its ilk) is pretty much the reason for using such an animal. They can be much more sophisticated than merely twiddling a few least-significant bits. With powerful, modern DSP at one's disposal, I'm sure they could base watermarks on things like subtule (to the ear) frequency-response variations, minor (again, to the ear) inter-channel phase anamolies, and other far more complicated things that I'd never understand. I'm sorry that I don't have a link to more info on this topic. Anyone else?
So if one were to create an MP3 that was made of a cassette recording of a CD, it would still be possible to find the serial number of the source CD in the watermark.
What I've never understood about the watermark system is what good it would do. Sure, you know this MP3 was ripped from CD#1237853, but unless you know who bought that particular CD, you haven't got a lead.
As far as I can tell, the best they could hope for with this scheme would be to do some sort of region coding in the serial number, allowing the authorities to figure that this pirated MP3 was originally ripped from a CD that was sold in, say, Ohio.
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
Good thing, too.
Difficult to see what claim you could possibly raise against BMG, since the contract for sale is between you and the retailer. Boycott might work. Personally I'm going to see if I can order these records in from about a dozen stores and then return them the next day because they don't play on my box. Retailers bitching at BMG might prove most effective.
Realistically though, in a few years time we can expect all music sold to be encrypted in some form ...
As another poster mentioned, so the old players can't play these discs? Why get a new player when you can get a DVD player made to handle the new, non-Red-Book format?
You'd be surprised how quickly it'd become possible to deprecate Red Book so thoroughly that the newest DVD players WON'T PLAY RED BOOK any longer. Only the copy protected version! But that's okay, because you can buy the music all over again... I mean, because you had it all MP3ed anyway! So who does this hurt?
Musicians. The artists. We are seeing the end of an era where, for the first time in history, you can master the preferred audio format (I'm not counting cassettes here) ON YOUR DESKTOP. You don't have to be signed to anywhere to produce the media. You can burn Red Book Audio CDs! The media becomes accessible to anyone with a CD burner!
We are seeing the first attempts to take that power back- and fussing about how expected new non-Red-Book-playing DVD players 'harm the consumer' is accurate but a horrible trivialisation of the real damage here. (And who wants to bet that the industry will preserve the rippable, uncontrolled, unwatermarked, publically-accessible Red Book Audio format? Who really thinks the industry wouldn't turn their huge collections into useless coasters?)
This story freaks me out worse than any DVD-oriented story I've read- because I had subconsciously trusted that Red Book would always be there for me, that the plain old audio CD with all its obvious faults and clear limitations would at least be a public media format I could count on. I mock the audio CD- I think it is no sort of audiophile wonder- but I trusted it to stick around, to remain hugely popular and common.
I can't say that anymore, in fact I can identify several plausible means by which the industry can deprecate it and shift popular audio onto something strictly industry-controlled- and I'm scared shitless, as Red Book was the media I hoped to use to sell to people who wanted a little more than mp3, which I intend to make lots of and give out freely.
I see the industry saying, "So you like MP3s, do you? Let's see you sell them!" and taking away the audio CD (which I hadn't thought possible), returning me to the days in which you couldn't produce popular media without going through the industry channels. This time, mp3s are likely to remain widely popular through sheer user saturation- but who the hell is going to sell them? I don't even WANT to try and sell mp3s! I think of them as radio, you should be able to listen to all the mp3s you want and only pay if you want to buy your own nice copy of something! And the day may come when indy musicians (again) can no longer produce any of the DVD-hosted, corporate-encrypted public media, without getting signed and spending huge amounts of money and time for the privilege of releasing public media.
This will happen through the deprecation of anything people know how to produce, such as cassettes and Red Book CDs. MP3s may well remain a huge ghetto of underground music- but it's technologically possible to relegate such musicians to only the (freely exchanged) MP3s and deny them access to any new popular media that people are used to paying money before. And that's how it will be done... and ten years from now, today's 'nice' Red Book-savvy CD player is going to look awfully old, most will have broken by then, and it'll be taking up space needed for the new DVD player which also plays the revised CD format, just not the old Red Book format...
I wish I was sleeping, so that this could be a nightmare :( I can't believe this is already starting to happen. And for anyone who doesn't think the industry can make you throw away all your old media and buy the music all over again- remember the CD?
Hi, just my thoughts on returning such CD's (based on german laws)
1. You buy a CD, it's marked as a Audio-CD (Red-Book compatible), if not noted, it's implicit, that this CD will work in your Player
You try it and notive a label on the CD itself, that it is copy-protected, you couldn't see this, before you bought this CD. This CD doesn't work with your Player => this CD isn't Red-Book compliant, so it isn't an Audio-CD. You had no chance noticing this before, though you can return this CD regardless what the Policy of your CD-Shop is.
2. You buy this copy-protected CD and you can play it, but you cannot copy it with your cd-recorder (the audio-type pioneer makes for example). Then you can return it. Because under german law, you can make copies of tapes, cd's, video etc if it's for personal use und you pay the fee to the gema (a kind of a record company association, that want's to be sure to get it's money). But because you pay your gema-fee with every audio-tape, with every video-tape and every cdr-audio you buy, you have the legal right to copy an cd you own or to make a sampler of your cd's for your car for example. I think in the US the same concept is called fair-use.
So in my opinion, two rights (which you have according to german laws) are not taken into recognition:
First: when you buy a product and it doesn't work for you (even if you see it at a first glance but even more, if it's kind of a shrinked license agreement which states, that this is a copy-protected disc, after you open the cover), you have the right to return it to the distributor (eg the CD-Store). If the owner of the store tells you, you cannot return it, he's wrong, because he has the obligation to get a product back, that doesn't work. And a term like 'Sie können dieses Produkt nur ungeöffnet zurückgeben' is not valid, because it puts obligations to the buyer which aren't valid and so worth nothing. You have allways the right to return something that doesn't work for you and you couldn't know that or weren't told, that it might not working with your equipment.
Second: under german law, you have the right to make copies of videos, cd's etc for personal use. If there's a cd that you cannot copy, this is a violation of german law. For your CD in your car you have the right to make a 'Best-Of' Compilation, regardless what CD's you want to use. You paid the company for their music and now you have the right to listen to this music (a little bit like the DVD Case: you baught the DVD and now aren't able to use it on your computer....Why didn't anybody sue the Companies who provide programs to copy Audio-CD's ? That's even worse, than providing the facility to PLAY DVD's on a Linux-Box....(I'm not suggesting people to sue Firms like hawkeye etc, I only want to make it clear, that there's a difference between playing and copying...).
So, that's all for now...
Hope to see you later,
Matthias
Ok no cheating this time, get yourself a copy of the cd, load your fave debugger and get cracking. A nice clean reverse enginearing is what is needed here, none of this debuging xing to get the details wus boy cheating (joke!).
Last one to crack+wideband buys the beer!I'm going to do the opposite of a boycott. Get all my friends to go into the store, and empty the shelves, then one week later, go back en-masse and demand my money back under the (UK) law. Hopefully this will cause enough trouble to get large stockists to boycott the defective CDs all on their own - it'll cause so much hassle for them. In the UK, you'd be within your rights to claim under the Trades description act (it's sold as a CD, but doesn't act like one), [Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the Supply of Goods (Implied Terms) Act 1973, but you're additionally protected under the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994, which states that goods must be of Satisfactory Quality (section 4(9) of the act which states that the goods must be as fit for the purpose for which they are commonly supplied as it is reasonable to expect). I'm sure a big internet call-to-arms is possible here....
So why do they put this on crap like "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club, that no one in their right mind would want to copy in the first place?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
of SCMS?!
I've noticed that problem with Weird Al's latest (not trying to copy, but just using DAE to play it since I have no audio cable), however the point at which it screws up is past where the final track *should* have ended (and indeed does end on a conventional CD player). Do yours fail during the music itself?
Isn't that some kind of copy-protection too ?
It could be, but there's always the possibility that there was a bug in whatever produced the CDs. Remember, "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity".
--
Hang on, if it isn't Red Book compliant, what is it going to play in?
> Italics means BabelFish blew it so thoroughly I couldn't make sense of it.
Well huh. I looked said stuff up in a German dictionary (just Ask Jeeves where you can find a German dictionary) and here's what I got:
What a difference a human makes!
Kenneth
Disclaimer: This is an educated choice from the possible translations of a German dictionary (Foreign Language Master). I know no German besides that which sounds a lot like English (according to one of my friends who is taking German, this is about 50%).
If you record in wave format, there will be very little loss in quality. Or you could record digitally if your stereo and soundcard support it with no loss in quality.
Wade.
That's simply downright sneaky. FYI: CD Players generally look for the TOC of the first session. (Multi-session) CD-ROMs look for the last session. That's currently how PC-only information is hidden from a CD Player. It's a quirk of history. Wade.
In Canada, and the US, I believe.. stores have every right not to take *any* returns, so long as the product was sold legally, and not under false pretenses.
If I you go to WalMart and buy a bicycle, try it out, and decide you would rather have purchased a TV Set.... They are under *NO* obligation to take it back. The sale was a legally binding act, and was final. (of course, wal-mart explicitly *states* that you may return it, under certain conditions.)
Now.. if the bike said 'aluminum frame, gold plated rims.. etc..' and you unpacked it and it was plastic.... then you could return it, and they would *have* to give you a full refund as the sale was fraudulent.
So.. if you go buy a CD, and it's marked as CDDA or whatever.. and it's *NOT*.. it is a fraudulent sale, they have *NOT* sold you what they led you to believe you were buying... so they *MUST* take it back, and refund your money.
FYI: CD Players generally look for the TOC of the first session. (Multi-session) CD-ROMs look for the last session. That's currently how PC-only information is hidden from a CD Player. It's a quirk of history.
Wade.
why waste your time...take a day of work file in small claims court and wait...no way is the company going o send a rep to every county to deal with a $1500 lawsuit....you will win by default and tBMG will lose money AND ustomers...
Yes, when you mark something as Offtopic, that's a negative point. You can fix the bug of the posts going to -1 by logging in before you post, so they only go down from 1 to 0.
Sheesh, some people.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Apparently, an unprotected version of the album leaked out and was released 3 days before the store date by an MP3 crew I'm not going to name here ;)
So, the "protection" was quite useless.. and this is probably the first case a "pirate" release is better than the original regarding digital audio.
Seems the whole thing has backfired already.
it is a wonder we left.....too many ASSHOLES LIKE yourself...ignorant inbred....
By the way heise produces the only two computer related magazines in Germany that are
worth a read.
Why be so modest? I think c't is probably the best personal computing magazine... Best one I ever read anyway (and I've seen alot...)
iX is nice too.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
I still buy CD's, but I only ever put them into a drive one time. After that, they sit on a rack, never to be opened again. To me, the CD is just a transport medium.. a way to get the data (songs) from the store and into my 'system'. You see, I have every song dumped onto a 25GB drive in my server machine. The house is wired with Fast Ethernet, and there's a pizza-box sized PC underneath the stereo in the family room that has one purpose: entertainment. Using homegrown software, a decent touchscreen monitor, and a wireless keyboard/mouse I have the best CD jukebox I could own. I can search by anything... title, artist, genre, etc.. or even just browse artwork from the jewel case covers. It even surfs the 'net. :-)
/. is running like molasses. (It's only 7 hops from my dialup to /., but it feels like 30. How can /. be overloaded? Is slashdot feeling it's own slashdot effect?)
.sig... that's what no sleep gets you:
This is the audio system that the music/entertainment industry won't create.. so I had to take matters into my own hands. Does this make me a theif, or a breaker of the law? No. What it does mean is that the entertainment system that I poured time, money, and effort into can't potentially be used to play newer titles, without even more legwork and bulls*it. Figures.
This whole thing reminds me of when I was big into my Commodore 64... Electronic Arts went though a lot of trouble to make an unbeatable copy-protection system for their floppy disks.. even so far as to deliberately thowing the drive into a destructive head-smashing fit. It didn't take too long for "Fast Hack 'Em" to have, among other things, an 'Electronic Arts' copy function.. that made backups possible for my disk-eating-prone 1541. (I later found that this was due to misalignment, caused by EA's disks!)
It's over a decade later, and the game hasn't changed at all. Seems that the guys at the proverbial top of the corporate ladder have their heads in the clouds... still.
The problem with things like DeCSS isn't the fact that the code is out there, but in the fact that it wasn't underground. In the olden days of the Internet, the mainstream didn't really notice, or care, what happened. If DeCSS or something to 'fix' these noncompliant coasters wants to survive, it needs to do so on the underground, at least in the beginning.. long enough that many, many people have it and have perfected applying it to some useful product that the average Joe can point-and-click to use it without even knowing that he's using DeCSS or 'unfuck' or whatever the current industry-hot-potato is. Once it's reached that saturation point, let it surface. By that time, the source should be obscured well enough that the CCC(tm) (Corrupt/Confused/Contorted Ones - lawyers, corporate machines, FUD campaigns, et. al.) can't find the source and don't have the care to do so (too much time/money to locate it.)
"Locks are for honest people." It's true. A lock only serves to keep honest people honest. No matter how tight you wrap something up, it can be copied/stolen/etc. Obviously, locking stuff up isn't the ticket... it's time to rethink the issue. What the industry needs to do is look at the root cause of the problem. (Really, very basic troubleshooting procedures.) You can spend all damn day/year/decade/century dealing with side effects (pirating CD's, DVD's, VHS tapes, games, even Microsoft mice) and still not have done a damn thing to fix the problem that is causing the undesirable actions. In this case, the #1 root cause is price. CD's are way overpriced, every poll I have seen over the years that even goes near this issue reflects that fact. (I'm sure the record companies know it too, but they're so fat that they have to eat that much, or they'll starve to death. Funny.. dinosaurs were that big too, look what happened to them..)
Well, I think I've said enough. Sorry for the formatting, but
Ssc
--
don't mind my dumb
--
*kerchunk* *beep* "...Operator."
A bit off-topic. But I couldn't find an email address for you. Dish Networks sells their non-premimum stations unbundled for $1.50 each, minimum order of 10 unless you allready buy some other package. So for $15 a month you can have what you wanted for $10 plus 2 or so extras. I suggest A and E (for the Biography show).
Back on-topic, I want the same thing. Why should I have a whole wall of ER tapes when I could pay roughtly the same to get random access to any past show? That would kick.
But I'm not sure i would be as intrested if I couldn't FF over the comercials, nor would NBC be as happy cutting the deal if they figure 80% of hte comercials will be FFed over. Plus this is a lot of bandwidth to carry. Not just over the last mile, but from whatever regonal server. Far worse then 100 cable channels. And if the movies live on a disk we are screwed, the bandwidth may be tere to feed 100 diffrent video streams off of one RAID, but the seaks will kill it. And you don't need 100s, but 100,000s or more.
I don't think the problem is just political. The technology isn't there yet. and may not be for a decade or more.
You have the right to make archival copies, and not be prosecuted. It's legal.
This in no way implies that anyone has to provide you with a method for making said copies, it just means that if you DO make copies, you are within your rights.
IANAL, but this is fairly obvious.
New to me, too. Maybe it's a European thing...they usually think of things first. Then the American's make cheap rip-offs.
Bah! Stupid Americans! You move out of Europe to make a better life and steal the ideas of those who you left behind. Stupid Americans! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!(I am an American cynic.)
But really, what did you mean by HTH? Had To Happen? Hard To Handle? I'm sure we could have fun trying to think of more!
Verve is a label owned by Polygram. Not really a small one either. Thomas
I don't think that's entirely true.. I understand that recording a movie from a DVD was very difficult before DeCSS. If that were entirely true, the whole DeCSS problem wouldn't exist.
It's easier with sound tho..
So, is anyone working on a "DeCDS"? :-)
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
You are correct, nph is a CGI thing. The filename requirement is not true as of Apache 1.3, though. nph scripts are now implementation defined, meaning the server has to determine whether all required headers have been supplied based on the content rather than the filename. Much more robust that way, you have to admit.
Take a look at this link
My /dev/null contains 2^64 bytes of WOM.
I'm EXTREMELY curious to see how this stuff really works and would love to grab one just for educational purposes... but I can't find the doggon CD's on BMG's site by searching for it. Weird; perhaps they pulled them already though.
Does anybody know where I could get a CD "encoded" with this stuff? Online prefably.. I am a geek after all.
Justin Buist
I don't want to sound snippy but what you think and what is fact are two separate things in this case. Java, or any other language on the server side, is not "top heavy". There is a cost for startup, that no client ever sees (all a client cares about is whether a server is up), and a cost for launching a servlet. Servlets, and java in general, are lightweight processes in comparison to CGI processes which are forked processes carrying all of the requisite baggage.
If you are talking about java clients, then you have a point, albeit not significant if the client is coded correctly. This is not 1995 anymore. Java technology, in spite of what you have heard of here in slashdot, has grown considerably. You should take a look. You would be pleasantly surprised.
LOL is easy enuff...just use someone els's CC# :) Not only do they pay for your music, when you make copies they do the time also...gota love the nimrod who failed to think out his strategy..must be upper management with an MBA :)
I had 30 CDs stolen out of my car and it's NOT GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN. If I can't copy a CD then I'll return it.
and how long did you say you've been on the internet?
Sheesh!
It should be fairly easy to circumvent the copy protection.
The way this scheme prevents CD-ROM drives from reading the whole way through a track is ru
***
THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AS A THOUGHT CRIME. THE ORIGINATOR HAS BEEN PUT TO DEATH.
HAVE A NICE DAY
-MINISTRY OF TRUTH
The reason for that is probably security - as it is set up now, at least someone can not censor you by pretending to be you, they may only send in new material that does not fit in your average opinions, thus clearly noticable by other /.:ers. /. posts where submitted over SSL or pgp signed, but as it is set up now, all posts are, from a security viewpoint, AC's.
Perheaps that would be a good idea if
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
It does not matter that the 'kid' behind the counter is a 'moron'. As a 'representative' of the company, if you buy in good faith based on their recomendations, make sure you get a name, then you are covered through the store or in court. Soon the companies will have their rep's stating I am not able to make any recommedations due to legal repercussions....yada yada yada
so who has got a home for this budding protest ???
To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.
Of course, when you buy a CD with a credit card, you do present your ID to the store, don't you? Disk space is very cheap now and the general public has no need to know. So I see no reason why stores would not keep a database cross-indexing credit card numbers and CDs serial numbers. Easy as pie.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Copying DVDs to tape isn't difficult at all. All you need is something to get rid of Macrovision; this can either be (1) a device in the video line from the DVD player to the VCR to strip Macrovision out or (2) DVD playback equipment (such as a modified DVD player or some computer-based DVD solutions such as the Creative Labs Dxr2) that can be set to not add Macrovision to the video signal.
Copying DVDs to other digital media is another matter...I've tried DeCSS, but haven't gotten very far with it (maybe because my "DVD player" is a K6-200 with a Dxr2).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Call Visa/Mastercard/whatever's applicable corporation, tell them your local record store ripped you off by refusing to accept a return of a clearly defective product and that you wish to have them cancel the charge. Call the bank, stop payment on a check if that's how. Cash - Call your local TV Station and usually they have some guy on the 10PM news who will go and harass/embarass them into refunding your money (as long as it's worth ratings).
After going to french and back your last paragraph becomes:
The ampèreheure, recreation with the babelfish, it never becomes tiring. For those of you who did not test it, test a modern version of day of " telephone ". Write a simple paragraph within the framework, translate-the with German, translate it with English again, translate-the with French, translate it with English again, and so on until you did the whole the languages... then compare your initial paragraph with the translation.
To German and back:
The ampèreheure, recovery with babelfish, becomes it never fatiguing. For of you, which did not check it, check a modern version of the daily " of the telephone ". write a simple paragraph within the framework, translating with German, translate it with English again, translating with Frenchmen, translate it with English again, and so on, until you did the whole, the languages compare... then your output paragraph with the translation.
->Italian->English->Portugese->English
Ampèreheure, backup with babelfish, transform into it that never ** is not gotten tired teams-out ** end v if est you, of whom t not control, into control a modern daily version paper " telephone ". escrev a simple paragraph picture, translate with German, still translates with English, translates with Frenchman, still translates there with English and and consequently through, until that one you t not faç all, language to follow to compar... its paragraph have escaped translation.
And the last one: to Spanish and back:
** Time-out ** Amp2ereheure, safeguard with babelfish, to transform into him whom never ** to be not to obtain outside tired equipment-towards ** extreme v if est you, who t noncontrol, in control one modern newspaper version paper " telephone ". escrev one simple paragraph panel, to translate with German, still to translate with English, to translate with French, still to translate there with English and and consequence to traverse, until that one you t not fa1c everything, language to follow to compar... its paragraph to have to save translation.
My suggestion to the owner of the disk was to use the S/PDIF output of a DVD player and hook it to his S/PDIF interface card. Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
SB Live! has S/PDIF digital in/out. If you get the Platinum, then the connectors are right on the front of your Live drive (pretty sweet thing, that Live drive). Bonus: Creative even supports the Live! under Linux.
I realize I didn't explicitly say this, but my commentary about Java was more of a personal issue than a general statement about the language itself. Because of my platform of choice (Macintosh) and the relative cruddiness of Java support on it, Java works extremely poorly for me. It is slow and not well-supported.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Of course, it my be easier said than done - "Hello, Sony Tech department? Can you stop working on standard CD players so everyone has to use ours? I hope that isn't too much of a problem."
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I wonder why no one of all the techies here had the idea that maybe the whole protection might be that the TOC says "CD-ROM" instead of CDDA.
Most CD players just start to play CD-ROMs, and then mute the line-out if the data does not make sense. So; a CD-ROM or another in any way "smart" drive will try to read the ECC data starting at byte 2049 and ending at byte 2352 of the sector, and fail.
The CD player does not care about TOC, the full 2352 bytes are audio data in the CDDA format anyway.
The classical idea of the "killertrack" with data written in the ECC field..
Like you said, modern DSP's can do
watermarking in real time.
Since these (supposedly) can only
be played on a new type of CD player,
let the watermark be encrypted into the CDDA
stream _by_ the drive, with it's serial number,
everytime you play an audio track through it.
(This could even work with older CD in the new
drive). Then, when they find a pirated
mp3, get the watermark, track sales records,
find the drive that played it, and find the
pirate (or at least the original owner of the
drive). Sorta like the PIII serial numbers.
(RANT)
Gah!
If any of this has a grain of truth, I'm
NEVER letting go of my old CDROM drive.
Curse their copy-protected foulness!
(/RANT)
-Slackergod
That's why we need pre-fetching and cacheing, TiVo style.
If I can hear it, I can record it.
If I can see it, I can record it.
NOTHING CAN CHANGE THIS TRUTH.
You're right, you can record it, but the fight isn't over making recording, it's about making copies (as in the same quality of the original). You can always hold your old boombox up the speakers and record what comes out, and no one is going to complain (I remember holding my boombox up to the radio to make tapes way back when). The difference being that the quality is so bad that you can't distribute it to anyone (well, you can sure try, but I doubt anyone will take you up on it). No one cares if you make a copy, they care if you make a copy suitable for redistribution.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
All this will do is stop the average (honest) consumer from making mp3s.
Think about it. Using the analogy from someone else, "Joe" consumer goes to the store and buys said cd. He takes it home, trys to make an MP3 and fails. Well he's shit outta luck, even though he bought the disk.
Here's how it would happen for the "mp3 pirate": "Joe2" non-consumer decides he wants the latest stuff by some band. He fires up his computer and proceeds to look for the mp3. He finds it (kindly ripped by someone else with the technology to do it despite the copy protection) and downloads it.
Now who gets the short end of the stick?
The article stated that there was a 2 year old Phillips CD player that wouldn't play the protected CD's. More than 1.5% of all CD users must have CD players that are more than a few years old. Especially since (non-portable) CD players don't wear out and there really havn't been any major advances in technology since the CD changers. If you bought a 5-100 disk changer CD player with remote control 5-10 years ago, malfunction would be the only reason to replace it. The number of non-compliant CD players must be at least 10%.
If new but really cheap CD players won't play them either, then maybe Wal-Mart will refuse to sell the protected CD's, "Hey, they piss off our el cheapo CD vendors", and then BMG will be really really sorry.
- bridgette
It's a shame that I wasn't one of those people. Some coder *I* am. ;D
;P)
It's a shame Slashdot doesn't allow the original author to edit their post (for just such an emergency.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
Sure it worked. It protected most consumers from buying into DAT.
(Oh, but yeah you're right, it doesn't have much an effect on whether or not people make copies. Nor does it magically know when you're making a copy for someone else or whether you own the copyright for the tape in question.)
But I guess they wanna do it all over again anyway. Maybe the current PHBs are too young to remember the 80s.
such a scheme, network instead of physical distribution, is undoubtedly how things will end up. but the current companies, for the most part, have their vision fixed firmly on the past rather than the future, and will try to preserve the "natural order" that has served them till now. they will make a lot of trouble as they are dragged into the future, and unfortunatly it is the forward-thinking techies that will suffer most of that trouble, eg the recent search and seizure in norway.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
ISO 9000 only means that you document what you do and do the same thing each time so if you document stupid practices and contiue to
use them each time your are ISO 9000
but it sure makes you sound better from the outside.
The same goes for CMM companies. No mater what the methodology if you don't follow the spirit instead of just the letter of the rules you don't get any better.
Jojobe
On that note, drag the bastard to their top of the line cpu's on display and pop it in, and glare at him in retaliation.
Or just grab a handfull of your own CDs from home to show that it is the media and not the player that's defective.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I realize that this message may be misplaced in its delivery to one or more of the people who have received it, but I am sending it to any and all addresses for BMG employees that appear to be potentially applicable (or who may know where it should be forwarded).
It has come to light that recently BMG has begun releasing copy-protected music CDs to the general public. Due to the fact that these CD's are not Red Book compliant, they do not play on many conventional CD players, nor do they play on computer CD drives. They do not bear a label or message anywhere on them that states this. Now, I don't know if you're aware or not, but many retail outlets do not accept returns of opened CD's (after all, someone might have copied it). This means that I, as a consumer of music, stand an indefinite chance of purchasing a useless plastic coaster anytime I purchase a CD from BMG Entertainment or its subsidiary companies. I also am a significant user of the MP3 music format. I have a household network with computers in many rooms of my home, including one hooked up to my stereo system. I have an MP3 player in my car, and also a portable player. By removing (or, as I'll illustrate in a momeny, simply complicating) my ability to convert a CD that I legally purchase into a *legal* copy for listening, you have removed a great portion of the reason for me to purchase that CD. In fact, you have not even removed my ability to perform that conversion; there are several ways that such copy-protection could be circumvented - and one of them is certain to work.
I am a long-time member of the BMG Music Service in the United States. As things stand, I have no guarantee that when I purchase a CD from you that it will in fact be a CD Audio (Red Book) compliant disc, nor that it will work in my high-end (but old) CD player. If this matter is not resolved acceptibly, this leaves me no choice other than to cancel my membership with BMG Music Service.
Here's a link to an article (in German) if you hadn't already heard about this: /data/cm-25.01.00-000/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker
For those that can't read German, here it is (poorly) translated through Babelfish:c ker/data/cm-25.01.00-000/&lp=de_en
http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/trans late?doit=done&urltext=http://www.heise.de/newsti
Sig broken, watch for
...huge amount of work be done in a slow and poorly-supported language
Are we talking about the same langauge -- java? Put away your 1995 benchmarks my friend, java has grown up. I won't even address the issue about poorly supported. I was close to retracting my comment about you being simple-minded, but you had to ruin it with that comment. Java has garnered more support than anyother language other than C/C++. There are numerous libraries, IDEs etc. It is there my friend. Just open your eyes.
If you want to make mp3s of the music, why don't you just connect your stereo to the line in on your sound card and record? Then you can burn it to a normal cd too if you want.
Let's be serious I have my computer connected to my amp and have many audio programs that allow me to do interesting things with cd tracks, I like to compile my cd's into a comlation and what is wrong with that. Any real professional pirate has a whole av set up and simply uses a high c=quality cd player ans some av cables spends a few hours remastering the cd then records it on his 150 drive recorder in 9 minutes. Guess what this guy justy cleared 1000 and will recieve more. why hurt the consumer when the pros cost the record companies thousands each day. Al I have to say is what ever the record company doesn't get they deser ve. The record companies make a lot of money and the lyricist, artist, and technical people never see this kind of money. Why do you think these rap artists have labels. It allows them to negiotiate with the record companies.
my my slashdot seems to be overrun with nazis these days sieg heil little nazi. i will dispell the half-truths you post
**was the watermark intended to survive **
i should hope it will survive better than the jews you tried to extinct
***is pretty much the reason for using such an animal**
yeah typical animal humping nazi
**I've never understood **
this much is evident you jew hating swine
**they could hope for with this scheme would be to do some sort of region coding **
yeah...just like how you branded the jews with serial numbers before marching them into the ovens
**was originally ripped from **
you sick sick freak
***not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public***
too late to show any remorse nazi boy you already showed your true colors
From a technical perspective, I like your solution. But where does the small, innovative content producer fit into the scheme? Isn't that what many of us really like about the web, the many-to-many aspect where anyone can publish a web page, book, even a movie or album online without having to get approval from some bureaucrat in a huge corporation?
Giving large corporations control over how the royalties are divvied up among their artists in a scheme like this will only end up hurting the artists. IMHO of course.
-- This
Except for it being illegal in most civilized countries except the US...
Real countries have laws to protect personal integrity.
This is what my SB Live card is for. Anything that is played through the wave output can be recorded. So, if I had a player that could decode these new CD's I could then be able to record them. Granted it would be more annoying that just ripping a copy from the CD, but nothing is perfect I suppose. Now, the problem occurs if the CD player itself does the decoding and doesn't have a digital output on it to interface with the digital input on my Live card. That would truely suck and I suspect that might be the case if any company decided they actually want to make a CD-ROM drive that supports decoding these sorry CD's.
Taddeusz
-- Ignorance is the pinnacle of religion - Me
Obviously, neither of those techniques are viable for music CD's, however they are very effective in the anti-"game piracy" effort. Furthermore, it seems to me that the technique being employed here is most likley along these lines, somehow causing the device to fail and not the software. This could throw a monkey wrench in the whole cracking works.
On a related note, I once tried to get my burner company to open-source their Flash-ROM so I could make a version of my own. The tech support gentleman was quite confused and directed me to their hiring manager. I attempted at great length to explain that I wasn't interested in a job, but would be willing to make improvements and modifications to their software for free. After nearly an hour of unsucessful explaination, I gave up.
Sincerely,
Ryan Taylor
You see I have my CD Player hooked into the Line In port... WAV recording software, and BladeInc... and thus: CDs (and records and tapes and radio for that matter) become MP3s!
Still, it is simple enough to get a CD Player that will play these CDs, hook up the audio out to your audio in, record it, and encode it into an MP3! I doubt anyone'd know the difference. it's not as if you're using a MICROPHONE or anything.
How would the quality be "so bad"?
a direct audio (it's analog, but so what?) encoding into a wav would sound just as good, i think. and then you need just put it on a CD. voila!
It's Limp Bi Z kit
so what is the point i know you can't rip data off the CD but can you play ? If yes, there's no problem, just record the data from the sound card line-in. With good quality sound board won't hear any noise.
but mp3 encoders (like bladeenc) are opensource. if they stumble on the watermark, we can rewrite the encoding logic.
also, if the watermark 'steals' lower order bits, its quite easy to rewrite those bits with our own. I'll certainly trade a bit of my own white-noise over their stupid fingerprints!
all you have to do is put the signal (digitally) thru a filter of some sort - like a highpass peaking filter and voila; the lower order bits (and all of them, actually) become changed. GONE is their fingerprint (and good riddance). and you have the benefit of having a slightly more 'present' upper end (which is great for the car).
finally, 100% digital extraction via the spdif signal (like many other posters have said) could still be done. many folks own spdif 'sound cards' and this will retail the bit-for-bit copy of the music. sure, its 1:1 (realtime) and it can introduce errors if you're not careful. but if you REALLY care about the digital quality of the audio, this might be the only way left.
of course getting a perfect digital copy of a 'mucked with' protected disc is moot. the whole point of a pure digital copy is to reduce the noise and distortion inherent in going thru an analog phase. BUT - since they ALREADY MUCKED with the audio (by stepping on and replacing the lower order bits) - going thru an analog phase won't be all that bad. the hi-end part of the audio has already been lost during the copy^H^H^H^Hread protection at the factory!
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Watermarks don't prevent copying. So who cares if they do that? As long as the listener doesn't hear the difference, it doesn't matter. If it catches pirates, that's fine. Fuck the w4r3z d00ds!
If they can come up with a good watermarking system that I can't perceive, survives transformations as I convert my media collection to the latest and greatest every few years, and then toss out all copy protection, then they'll have a winner.
But that's not what they want.
Why? Because they don't really care about piracy. They care about control. They want money for the players. They want people to buy the same content again and again instead of converting their collections to new formats for free. They want people to rent/buy movies and not have open source players automatically skip over the advertisements. They want other things for dark motives that my naive virgin mind can't even conceived of.
Revenue from the content is only a fraction of the total value in having control over the media. Otherwise, they wouldn't be pulling all this shit.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The distributors and stores don't have the truely monsterous profit margins.
a 2-3% return rate would significantly eat into profits, (extra work returning and taking care of them would help)
they would notice.
I've often dreamt of suing Microsoft for their so-called TELNET programme which actually doesn't. (It violates the protocol, or at least the Win95 version did).
It may be helpful, once the data is ripped, to look for the silences between tracks. This isn't perfect, just helpful; sometimes one track segues directly into another, and sometimes there's silence or near-silence within a track.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I wonder exactly what type of crack they had to be smoking at BMG's Executive office when they came up with this flop of an idea. No one is going to rush out and buy a new cd player just so they can lose part of their right as a consumer to make copies for their own personal use. And even a few years from now if all the cd players bought and sold support this new format, you can bet that cd sales will start hurting. People will just switch over to a new format that does not restrict how they use what they purchase. And I certainly hope (for their sake) that BMG does not try to release these cds on this format before the "newer" cd players become standard because I just can just immagine millions of cds returned because "It didn't work."
just buy it cash fool
Ahhh, now I understand the "scam" that is ISO 9000. Wow, and I was always told at the stores that ISO 9000 meant "good"... :-D
Hmmm... Weird Al's latest did have a (IIRC)Quicktime movie on it. Could that have been causing the problems? (I had no idea about the movie when I bought it, but I was playing cds at work through the computer shortly afterwords, and noticed files on it...)
--Arcum
4 years. I still don't know every acronym. Of course, I am slow. It took me a day or two to figure out BRB, a few months on IANAL, IIRC, and IMHO. It took me a year to figure out FUD (and only after I saw it in print). Of course, there's always the acronym FAQ, but I don't like to go look things up, y'know? Maybe it's faser to ask on one that's obscure (like HTH, which I didn't know and had never seen til today). OTOH (hmm...another nice acronym), maybe it's just better to flame the ignorant SOB who has the audacity to ask WTF HTH stands for....
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
... is to boycott BMG in all its forms. I won't let this crap stress me. I have enough to do at work and home (laundry! AIEEE!) to let some junk like this bother me.. who's on the BMG roster anyway?
;) started with this, it'd be time to whip out the old tires and do some executive necklacing...
Though if Verve or Blue Note (or Def Jam
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
He imagined a society that decided to round up all the "usless" people so that only the creative and productive ones were left. The usless people incluced hair dressers, telephone sanitizers, etc. The creative people were wiped out by a virus spread by dirty telephones.
> BMG Entertainment, the music division of the Bertelsmann company, has started selling CDs with copy protection using the Cactus DATA Shield. This system was developed in co-operation with the Israeli software enterprise Midbar and Sonopress from Germany. So far the albums "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by former Independent Heroen Philip Boa & The Voodoo club(?). The copy protection prevents not only playing and copying of the audio tracks with the PC, but also playing on all D-CRcOcM-cDrives(?) as well as on older audio CD players.
The italics are an uncertain fix. I (or preferrably someone else) should look them up in a German dictionary to verify the exact meaning.
Maybe it's time to get some OpenHardware (with the help of MP3 this is coming to the Audio Hardware) instead of OpenSource ;)
If the three largest record companies start using another media, all we can do -and i hate to say it - is whine and follow.
'BE the difference that makes a difference' - JEWEL
For one, I haven't figured out how to get newlines to work in my posts. Makes the ideassortofruntogether. But other than that I have my own personal war to fight against traditional English 101 essay structure. Anyway, you seem like the perfect individual to begin this boycott, classify it as you like. All you have to do is write a nice essay about it (should be no problem given how nicely organized this one was which you popped off right before lunch), mail it to your friends at slashdot (as you say you do in your explication of the 'passive boycott'). There it can be it's own headlined frontpage boycott proposal, and you have your advertising automatically. We don't need to call libraries, grandmothers, any of them. Just make a story about how there could be a stink about dvd's, and this alone can (with luck, be brave!) be enough of a story to be picked up by more mainstream media, who are always looking for stories to reprint rather than find their own (witness how noone thinks that the blatant lies about DeCSS being about copy protection might be of interest to investors large and small alike). And there you go, you have a nice shot at a successful 'active' boycott which you say might have an effect, and all at the personal price of engaging in the 'passive' boycott which you said you allready engage in to a significant degree. We're counting on you.
well, in that case wouldn't you just be able to make copies of the encrypted data?
hmm..
I've never moderated, but do you absolutely have to mark something down to -1 to make it offtopic?
If so, please fix the bug. This doesn't deserve -1, although the offtopic is correct. 0 maybe, but not -1!
Free speech is trampled by moderators with loose cannon syndrome.
The obvious solution which other people have suggested - filing criminal fraud charges against the record store and label - are unlikely to go anywhere because no DA will prosecute a case where the loss is the cost of a CD. Individuals will probably win in small claims court, but that's a hassle and BMG will continue to rake in money from the public -- and harm the reputation of its artists.
This is what class action lawsuits are for.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Looking back at it, my "fix" of DS to CD is obviously incorrect. Is this supposed to be "audio DVDs"?
Oh my god. This is just TOOO funny. Why in the name of hell would i buy a CD if it doesn't play in my 3000 bux TECHNICS system or in My car's alpine system or in on my PC's CD-ROM. Seriously with what reasoning are these guys putting out that crap.. Now if i can copy it to mp3 orwhatever i couldn't care less. Since my PC can play the damn cd's i never go through the painfull process of encoding the damn htings on MP3's. But come on!!! What GOOD is it when it CANNOT fscking PLAY ?
AP- South Florida Hacker arrested for breaking music copy protection and publishing it on the web.
"Really, I dont understand it.. I was just telling people how I use the digital output on my new CD deck to input the audio into my computer so that I can run it through nwfiir to make it sound better.. and all of a sudden the cops were kicking in my door."
This is stupid. If you can play it, you can copy it.
1. Can you strip the copied disc or does it still have the copy protect on it (as in, is the copy protect inherently in the setup and gets duped too, or is it disc-specific, prompting a question as to whether or not the disc can be read by a proper player w/o the copy-protect....ad nauseum)?
2. If the duplicate CD is also copy-protected, is there a way to modify blindread to act as a pre-stripper for an mp3 program?
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Spoke with a tristate sales manager who also told me about technology they want to use to prevent copying. Using some sort of digital watermarking, it could prevent/reveal who copying of cd's. Pointed out to him a simple wiring of stereo-out to mic-in for the simplest way of copying. Didn't seem to understand copying was always possible even though this method is easily divertable..
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Besides, let's hope it will make more young musicians to distribute their artwork by themselves, with the MP3 format.
Anyway, just because it's challenging, we can bet that a complete rip-and-encode-to-mp3 solution will be released by next week by many different hackers.
Didn't buy a Rio for nothing, dude. I want to listen to my CDs with a non-moving parts portable convenient device.
--
User began thinking - must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
>where does the small, innovative content producer fit into the scheme?
.4 cents. And I bet he hates being called Puffster. (No, I didn't work out the math - it's just relative, for illustration purposes)
I've been thinking about that one, and I'd even go further than what you suggest and say that a corporate hegemony over such a system would be flat-out unacceptable. It wouldn't be much different than what we live with now, OK, but still - I get warm fuzzies thinking about the boundless opportunities before us for subverting our corporate oppressors. No, really. I do. I'm that kinda guy.
So I don't have the Ultimate Solution for this yet. I know what the properties of such a system are:
1. It has to be bilateral open-access. Anyone who pays their monthly fee can access anything, and anyone who publishes can get a piece of the action.
2. It's gotta be flat-rate. Micropayments might make more sense, but IMHO consumers just won't go for it. Flat-rate rules.
3. Royalties have to paid out in an equitable manner that's highly resistant to abuse (ah-ha! that makes it really tricky, eh?).
So let's give this a shot:
I think ye olde public/private key encryption is called for. Let's call our secure audio/video streaming format "MP5", and say that it's open-source. Anyone can use FreeMP5 to freely encode their A/V stream and post it on their website or FTP or MP5 server.
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key... and there's probably a nominal fee for this, like a buck a song or ten cents per minute of video. I don't know who manages these databases, but it should work something like how the domain name servers work now (only... a little smoother, hopefully).
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it. After some consideration, I think the creators should be paid per second a slice of the flat-rate pie. So if I pay $50/month for media service and I listen to and watch nothing but Peter Gabriel for a whole month straight, Pete gets all $50, but if I watch a straight day of CNN in there, then Pete gets like $48 and CNN gets $2. And if I listen to one Puff Daddy song in there (what are the odds), the Puffster gets like
I guess in this system, our media service provider would be the maintainer of the database. This could be separate from both our ISP and the provider of the DSL/cable/wireless connection. I still don't fully comprehend how the whole domain name debacle is working, but again, that seems to be the sort of model I'd be after, where if one service refused to log my MP5 song called "Tits.com" because they thought it was offensive, I could just find someone else who'd do it and the experience for both the artist and consumer would be seamless because they'd interoperate like DNS. Does that make any sense?
Of course all this will require some heavy duty infrastructure... but what the hell, in another ten years we'll have it anyway... gotta use it for something!
Comments appreciated...
-----
GooseKirk
The US rulz. We could literally wipe every other country off of the face of this planet with ease. We wouldn't be missing much by doing so either. If its not the US, it SUCKS!
IANAxxx - I Am Not A (whatever, usually Lawyer)
IIRC - If I Recall Correctly
AFAIK - As Far As I Know
IMO/IMHO - In My Opinion/In My Humble Opinion (also IMnsHO: not so humble)
More can be identified at this handy little Acronym Page.
HTH. HAND.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
CD protection, right, there is always a way around things and if these small mind slobering morons think that they will stop CD copying they got anotherthing coming. -Your village called their idiot is missing. Teufel_Forelle (Vidboy has used this but has stopped)
Uhh, that was real hard to read (no paragraph breaks), but I will say this is the reason by DVD players are being bought:
Because they offer *features* and *quality* that other home formats can't even hope to touch!
The encrypted CD offers NOTHING to the consumer. If there isn't a benefit, why waste your money?
And, unlike VCRs, CD players have very few mechanisms that wear. You can get 10 years from a well treated CD player. Older models will last (my guess) 20 or 30 years until they are completely unrepairable. DVD is a decent replacement to VCR, as long as recording isn't needed. And since you usaully only get about 5 years service from a cheap VCR (if you are lucky) we are likely to see many more DVD players being sold.
Bottom line: Why buy something you don't want or need?
95% of my CD listening is at a PC. If I can't use the CD in a CD-ROM, it is just a useless hunk of plastic, little better than an AOL disk.
I'd say this calls for a boycott, but why bother? They're products are useless. Obviously, no one is going to buy a useless product.
And looking around the office, and seeing the number of headphones hooked into computers, I'd say that they've grossly underestimated the impact of this. And we're not talking about just techies, either.
Anyone got an e-mail for BMG so that I can inform them that they are starting to produce products that are useless to me?
The cake is a pie
I say not only return the defective things but I would say that this calls for a boycott. BMG is a major label. I doubt that they want the publicity.
They sell a device which goes between the data source and the mastering equiptment, so it can't be fiddling with the format too much. I would guess that they screw with the formatting information that gets written (such as the block headers and whatnot)
From their web site:
I can't imagine it would take too long to crack it.I'll be brutally honest about the setup I came up with. (Even though it will probably get my previous post's moderation of 1=Interesting complemented with a 1=Overrated ;-)
/. crowd, the program is written in VB. (Hey, I learned C64 BASIC first, then VB in '95.. didn't learn Perl until '96, and don't have the time to pound C into my thick skull... i've tried. Oh well, someday. (damn pointers!)) The machine 'runs' Windows 98 , and has a run-of-the-mill PCI soundcard. Nothing fancy. I don't remember the brand of the touchscreen, it was an extra that work had, so I picked it up cheap. It just looks like a serial mouse to Windows, and works like those GlidePoint-style touchpads that many laptops have in them these days. The video card is just an ATI with a video-out, so that I can switch the reciever to Video3 and surf the web on the bigscreen if I want. It works.
:-)
Much to the chagrin of probably most of the
The server, if you will, is a p120 running Mandrake 6.1 and Samba... so the box logs into an 'NT domain' (or so it thinks) and maps a drive to the mp3 directory. The software uses an M$ Access database, i'm just parsing the filenames (I have an ugly, but workable format) to extract the Artist, Title, Album, and Track information. It's a pretty crude setup, and could be whipped up by a good programmer in a day I'd assume. I've tinkered with it on and off for months. (It doesn't get used as much as you might think, as I've got a 5-week-old daughter to contend with, and then there's work and more work. Top it all off with a good fresh dose of being bitten by the 'Jeep bug', and well.. you see.)
It's evil, but I like it. Not too high-tech... but different. I did it mostly because shuffling around physical media to me is NOT AN OPTION. I hate moving media around.
Technology is advanced enough that we shouldn't have to.
On a side note, what I want to know is whatever happened to the quartz crystals (or whatever it was) that they were using 3D lasers to store about a terabyte of information in a 1-square-inch cube? I think they used one color laser for the X and another for the Y axis. (Something like how DVD's work?) I said that years ago I wanted to bury a huge piece under my next house in the basement. Anyone know? I saw this on TLC or TDC years ago.(Does anyone even know what I'm talking about?)
As for '...achieved quality approaching "domestic" consumer equipment...' I'd have to say it's not nearly that tight... although perhaps one day it could be. That, however, is beyond my abilities!
-SsC
--
*kerchunk* *beep* "...Operator."
We've spent the last few months going on how about if you can read / play music / video, you'll always be able to make a copy. The response from BMG?
A music format no-one can read!
BMG are evil. More so than the other three big record companies. This is exactly the sort of shit one would expect them to pull.
The thing to know about BMG is that they are control freaks. They play hardball. They aggressively prosecute the copying of long-deleted albums once released on their label, to an extent that the others don't. They're not called the Big Mean German for nothing.
Fortunately they don't seem to release much worth getting (other than David Bowie's single releases). Unless they own lots of "independent" labels and keep quiet about it.
1) People copy off copyable media.
2) Companies get angry, include simple copy protection.
3) Crackers defeat copy protection.
4) Companies get even more angry and start including protection at the cost of pissing off honest consumers.
5) Crackers defeat copy protection.
6) New read only media comes out with no writable drive.
7) Companies migrate to new media, and relax protection measures.
8) New writable drive comes out.
7) GOTO 1...over and over and over...
People NEVER LEARN.
-- www.bteg.com | bleh.n3.net | hac47.dhs.org
A simple thing: do not buy. Ask the seller explicitly whether CD's are copy-protected non Red Book compliant. Let's hope this format will follow DIVX. Let those greedy bastards shoot themself in a foot. Cheers,
If I can play the sound into my speakers, I can record the same damn thing on a tape to take in my car, or equivalently, record it as an mp3 to play on my computer. The only way they will EVER make an encryption format that prevents copying is if that format cannot be viewed or listened to at all. And then, of course, they will not profit much.
Consumers should protect themselves from this disturbing
development! Please please please use caution when buying
CD's! Do not buy any CD's that have this "feature", the
manufacturer will take notice when sales drop off!
Hey.. I do what I can.
I guess you don't mean BMG but Bertelsmann (BMG = Bertelsmann Music group) which is the I belive 3rd biggest media company in the world.
BTW Bertelsmann is IIRC not a publicly traded company. It's owned by 68,8 Prercent by the Bertelsmann foundation.The rest of the stock is owned by the family Mohn and an other foundation.
Since I don't see how redoing the server side of things in Java would change anything, I assume you mean making a Java client.
Let me tell you something.
If I have to turn on Java just to view slashdot, I will never come back again. Since this sentiment is likely shared, or at least that many people wouldn't like it, that's probably why it isn't done.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
If they're willing to put that much effort into preventing CDs from being copied, then I'm willing to put that much effort into plugging a malemale 1/8" phono cord between a CD player and my Line-In jack on the soundcard, and record the WAV with an analog step in-between. This is how I make MP3s out of songs on cassette tapes anyhow...
the real at&t mix
Ngh. You could be right.
I don't know - if I liked a CD enough to buy it, I think I could stand to listen to it through once whilst ripping it.
Quite. Once again, a copy protection system inconveniences the legitimate customer whilst failing to prevent the pirate from copying the material. Why do they do this stuff? Do they get some kind of control-freak sexual kick from it, or something?
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
I say exchange it as many times as possible to make a point, until returning it.
The situation would be like when I bought a crappy VHS tape years ago from Best Buy. Not only did the movie suck, but they recorded at low speed on low quality tapes. I tried to return it, They said "it's open, we can't let you". So I explained that the tape was defective. They said "ok, exchange it". I said I would be fine with that, but the next one is most likely defective also. I explained that I would probably exchange and return every copy in the store. Ok they let me return it.
If an audio CD I wanted to buy was written in the encrapted format, I wouldn't be so easy on them.
Buy the CD,
Hey it's broke, it doesn't play on my CD player(made in 1989).
Exchange it.
Hey, this one's broke too.
Exchange it. Wow, must have had a bad batch.
Third ones broke too.
Best Buy "Exchange limit, sorry, something wrong with your player?"
My cd player plays my other 100 cd's fine.
Ok, refund.
After a few thosand people return these things, they would have to at least sell them as a separate format. So then only Circuit city would sell them in the CIVX section.
Yep, that was the reference I was after.
Which was rather unfair, of course. Hairdressers do a necessary job, after all, and we all know what happened without the telephone sanitisers.
I'd define the useless third as that breed of hangers-on whose only work is self-promotion. They join groups ending in 'AA' whose only goals are to promote their own existence at the expense of everyone else. They have their companies fight each other. They sue. They are the lawyers. They are the politicians who are in it for the power, not because they believe in any particular vision of the future.
Stick 'em on Ark Fleet Ship B and back to Golgafrincham with them!
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
At some point the music (or video, etc.) has to be unencrypted for your enjoyment. Any "protection scheme" can thus be compromised and just makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to duplicate.
If this is the only problem, then I'll bet you that we see a few computer cd players and mp3 rippers that accept external track info, so that you can get the directory info you can't just read. Then you can trade the file on IRC, or with Napster. There's nothing illegal about a file that just lists offsets into a CD...
But, if it's a real CD and just uses an odd format, it won't be long before programs are written that manually decode it.
All this copy-protection stuff with dvds and I guess cds now seems to be bad buisiness. As was allready pointed out, just return the cds that don't work with your player. Then noone will make money off them and it will go away. We ought to organize the same thing with dvds. Movie companies aren't going to respond to a boycott of all movies, but someone like Sony is not going to sit back and let billions of profits evaporate if dvd goes the way of Beta and LaserDisc. Dvd is still young enough that if we made a big internet stink about boycotting it, and it became news-worthy (which it would be; first international e-protest is a good buzz-word for cnn), enough people would question whether or not they should buy a dvd player and dvds and risk having another betamax doorstop. The beauty of it is, it's the 'geek' market that is the first wave of dvd acceptance, because it's geeks who blow their money on high-tech toys first. Really want to make a difference? Everyone email George Lucas and say, "Never mind about that DVD thing. We don't want it after all." So how do you start an internet boycott? Does anyone really read these replies?
Simple reason: Those beasts are mass-produced. They make one master and then physically bake+burn-or-whatever a few thousand 100% identical copies from it. Making the master is the only expensive part of this process.
They could use CD-RWs instead, but burning them takes too long, which would eat into profits even faster than the cost of the CD-RWs.
Probably the same type stuff you would wind on playstation discs and some PC game CDs... Most often, they'll do something like multiple FAT entries (say, 1000 copies of track TEN or something) that'll work on a regular(stupid) CD player but will make any player that tries to make sense of the table barf.....
For the loss of quality, you may as well buy it on cassette and save a little money.
John
John_Chalisque
John
John_Chalisque
The XING Mp3 Encoder allows one to grab data from the audio stream, and make that into an mp3. Sure, it's not as convinent, as you might actually have to stop and start the tracks when you want, but it's effectively the same thing.
They cannot be played on a CD-ROM drive since it cannot read the table of contents. You can still rip the actual data but you need to know the block offsets and modify your ripper to ignore the error when reading table of contents.
My guess is that CD players and CD-ROM drives use the CD subcode channel differently. These disks probably trash the parts used by CD-ROM drives.
A simple modification to the CD-ROM firmware can probably fix it but I don't believe CDROM manufacturers would be inclined to do that.
My suggestion to the owner of the disk was to use the S/PDIF output of a DVD player and hook it to his S/PDIF interface card. Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
John
John_Chalisque
Many end-users do not use Java due to security concerns and also since Java often causes browsers to crash (at least on Window machines).
Slashdot generally runs fine for me on my 56kb (44kb typical connect) dial-up connection.
This may be the stores policies, but I believe it's also law. The stores are not really getting raped- it's the record companies (and game companies in some cases).
This sort of copy-protection scheme has been proposed before, and discussed before on the Adaptec CDR users' list - http://listserv.adaptec.com - and the technical lowdown usually seems to be that they put some bogus track data in the disc TOC that will be ignored by an audio CD player (which doesn't understand non-CDDA content) but will confuse a CD-ROM drive which tries to interpret it as a data track, or whatever. No watermark, nothing stopping you recording the analogue signal, no new-generation audio players needed to play it. By 'old' they probably mean *really* old CD players, the kind that already have problems with discs that don't obey the letter of the Red Book law.
I expect the Adaptec list will be lighting up like a Christmas tree with this issue shortly, so go there for the scoop.
For the paranoid, though: doesn't history show that the hardware manufacturers always get the upper hand in the end? Think consumer audio CD recorders, video recorders even, and all those other products that were never 'supposed' to happen. If any CP system becomes standard, some CD-ROM maker somewhere will cash in by selling a player that can read it... with a cute disclaimer 'not to be used for unauthorised duplication of copyright works', just like they already say.
Tom
According to this page at Midbar, it is said to be "fully transparent to the consumer." It claims to work on "existing commercial players and drives". It's not really clear to me whether it can be played on older devices or not.
I'm the author and maintainer of a Windows (don't flame me) dll for ripping CD audio, and so this interests me a great deal. But the bottom line is this -- if it can be read by a standard CD player, then there's no way that they can rip-proof it. Since it's quitting time here in Europe, I may head down to the local record store and see if I can't find either of these two CDs and get back with some hard, technical details, rather than the marketing hype from the article and Midbar's web site.
---
"Go Metallica. Die RIAA." -- Linus Torvalds
Combine this question with the fact that they don't even say on the cd that it's so protected, and you're going to get a LOT of people who will return these cd's. Will BMG tell them, "you have to go buy a new cd player if you want to buy our album?" Nope. So they just reduced their market to people who have 'newer' cd players -- and so far we don't even know what exactly that means.
Obviously BMG won't release a 'non-protected' version of the album, that would defeat the purpose of the protection in the first place. It looks as if they've just reduced the sales of their albums, far more than piracy ever will. Either this will pass, or it will take a long time to take over the entire industry(such as the en masse switch from vinyl/cassette to compact disc). By that time, someone will crack it. He'll get thrown in jail, but he'll crack it.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
but not if you simply just trash their bits by doing some very simple processing of the digital audio data.
in fact, just doing one d->a->d conversion step would totally lose their fingerprint. it would have to. I see this fingerprint technology as a very delicate munging of bits. as everyone well knows, if you convert to analog then back again, then try to diff the resultant waveforms, they will never ever compare 100%. and even today, using even consumer style analog/digital processors, you could go thru 5 or more conversions and still not hear much degradation - even from "golden ears" folks.
so while I'm not in love with doing 1:1 transfers, if I'm forced to create redbook compliant discs this way, I'll do it.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
A lot of stores have strict return policies - if you open the CD then you can't return it. At most, you can exchange it with an identical album.
The rationale is simple, and compelling in college towns (such as where I live) - the store is trying to prevent students from buying a disk, ripping it to tape (or MP3 nowadays), then returning the album for a full refund.
Of course, that policy will *not* work if a label starts defrauding the public by using an incompatible format without clearly labeling it as such. The obvious solution which other people have suggested - filing criminal fraud charges against the record store and label - are unlikely to go anywhere because no DA will prosecute a case where the loss is the cost of a CD. Individuals will probably win in small claims court, but that's a hassle and BMG will continue to rake in money from the public -- and harm the reputation of its artists.
The only way to stop BMG sppears to be a class action civil lawsuit (hmm, is fraud = breach of contract and subject to treble damages?), a successful boycott, or sending the Norwegian police to arrest the president of BMG for "economic crimes."
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Wouldn't something like unfuck.exe make the CD's copyable? (Besides the obvious analog copying)
Get Teraterm; not only is it free and is generally good, there's also a free addon that allows SSH connects with the program. A definite must-have Windows client.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
We have a legal right to make archive copies of the media we purchase. It would seem that this technology is infringing on that right. Say that I purchase a CD, and it gets stolen with the hundreds of others that are stored in my car. Say that I purchase a CD, then it fals off the coffee table and the cat takes off playing with it, scratching it to hell and back. Wouldn't it be great if I had already made a perfectly legal copy of my own media?
/. regularly, am I off base on this one?
I know that a number of lawyers read
But when I encode my MP5, if I want to make money off it, I register it with a public database with my public key...
Digital signature. The artist would have a keypair, and sign the work with her private key. The artist's public key would verify the signature, ensuring the consumer that this really is the artist's work, and that the royalties will go to the person who deserves them.
First we gotta educate the masses about public key cryptography. Which reminds me, I need to contact someone....
The software I use to playback the MP5 stream sends a private key to this database, unlocks the stream and hits a counter for it.
Private keys are never sent across the wire. In the ideal scheme the consumer doesn't need a keypair at all. The request itself is sufficient to trigger the counters so that the accountants know where to send the royalties.
Of course, we won't get the ideal scheme, because the human race resists that. We may end up with some sort of compromise in which consumers send digitally signed requests (the electronic equivalent of "Dear Atlantic Records, I want to listen to Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel right now. Signed, Greg."). That way, the people who run this can track us more closely. They get off on that.
Personally, I could live with that compromise, but it's probably going to be a dilemma for people who like to watch "adult" videos. They will quickly realize that there's a database somewhere that contains their entire viewing history... and that this information is available to some humans somewhere, and could conceivably be revealed to other humans who might have a motive and sufficient bribe money to obtain that information. And unless my guess is wrong, aspiring politicians are right up near the top of the adult video demographic. (Successful politicians no longer need the videos; they can get the real thing. See Clinton, Bill; Kennedy, John; etc., ad nauseum.)
If its not Red book compliant, why would any CD player be able to play it? What about it prevents only "old" CD players and PC CD players from playing it?
When and if they drop anti-consumer ploys like SDMI, CDs that don't play back in CD-ROM drives, CDs from which you can't extract digital audio, and CDs with the SCMS bits improperly set to NO COPY, then maybe we can resume business as usual.
As so many others have said, it's not going to work, for many reasons. Installed base mean anything to bmg? I guess not, I guess the millions of cd players worldwide are broken now...
The only question is, how long can stupid schemes like this be cooked up for? First, we've got the DVD "protection". Which really just tries to control playback. Hm, that's been blown wide open. DIVX? Dead because it wasn't convient to the end consumer. The only reason that things like this come out is so corporations can "protect" their profits. Well, DeCSS isn't hurting profits. And people *not* buying a new, non-interoperable format isn't going to help their profit either. So eventually, the bean counters are going to realize it costs less to put out good content, then to try to hide it behind whatever the new idea of the hour is. Copying? No problem. Put extras you can't copy easily, like cover artwork, posters, etc... but give me easy to read cd's. Sheesh, I could go on forever, but I think this makes my point pretty clearly.
David
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
The copy protection prevents not only the selection and copying of the audio tracks on a PC, but also a playing on all CD-ROM Drives as well as on older audio CD players. A reader reported to "c't" that one such protected CD malfunctioned even on a two years old Philips Player. Particularly annoying: There is no note on the outside; it's only on the CD that one finds "note: Copy-protected CD - Not playable on a PC!" The warning is to be taken seriously: After approximately 30 seconds playing on a PC aborts; also MP3 data cannot be created.
The "c't" laboratory is checking whether the copy protection also affects copying by SPDIF Digitalausgang on a better CD player; possibly it influences the error correction of the player and with it concomitantly (therefore) the digital signal. If that is, those CDs might not be entitled to use the Compact Disc Digital Audio seal due to the Red Book standard. When asked by "c't," BMG confessed "certain difficulties" with the copy protection. Until these are cleared, no further new CDs using it will probably appear for the time being.
Also what few sales were made weren't even enthusiastically: Saturn Hansa for example registered a increased return ratio because of alleged inability to use the CDs. A Brinkmann worker complained about not being able to play the Him CD on his store's radio station system with which customers can listen to CDs before buying. The Linux based music server crashes when reading the CD so thoroughly that only a cold restart helps.
Italics means BabelFish blew it so thoroughly I couldn't make sense of it.
-- "Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday" -- Don Marquis
Thanx for the clarification Uncle. Their "world view" is "interesting" to say the least. Do you happen to have the links to any material on the Bertelsmann foundation? Older /. posts perhaps?
you never lose in ure razorblade shoes......Beck-Hotwax
Idiots like you and why I don't use java.
BMG is a company who is VERY set on "public morality" I belive we have seen some disturbing news from them before.. links to follow...if i can dig 'em up. They have a major interest in the morality of the public. Read their mission statement. Do some diggin see for yourself. BMG is a MUCH bigger brother than what most people see them for. They control a good chunk of the European media and have (for years now) used it for leverage. /. has covered some of this before.
you never lose in ure razorblade shoes......Beck-Hotwax
Ok, let's see: me my dad still has a Technics SL-D1 turntable. And has also an old Technics CD player bought 10 years ago ar a price of $500.
I think that my dad if after discovering that the CD will not work in theit CD player, changed it, still not work, when all other cds are readable, will ask for a 33 rpm disk. Then will make a cassette copy of the disc because he will also like to listen his lp on his car.
On my side, an SL-1210 costs $600 I think, and a
good cartrige costs $200...
What would be kewl is if the java was used as an alternative interface, I would use this because it would be kewl. And I have a 500MHz Athlon so Java runs well for me :-)
There isn't enough information here for this article to represent anything but fear mongering.
Are there clearly different CD players needed to read these new "protected" CDs? Or were 'features' quietly added to recently produced "normal" Music CD players that will allow playing CDs produced that use the new format.
Vague mention in the article summary that the CD won't play on "an old CD-Player" isn't enough information. How old of a Cd player is meant? All this story looks like at present is FUD being spread by CD ripping enthusiasts.
I do slash at 28.8 all the time... I telnet to a server and run lynx there. Try it sometime... works fast. Can you get java everywhere? No... ANSI BBS style dialup... yes.. Java is a big fuck-you to the simpler living netheads.
I wonder how many people noticed what number came after 8 on that list.
1. If the CACTUS DATA SHIELD system renders it impossible to digitally duplicate optical media, then there exists no optical media that can be duplicated.
2. It is not the case that there exists no optical media that can be duplicated.
Therefore, premise 1 must be false - it is not the case that the CACTUS DATA SHIELD system renders it impossible to digitally duplicate optical media.
But seriously folks.. many people have an audio CD player with digital out. Many people use a seperate CD player and DAC also.. wouldn't raw digital data be going from the CD to the DAC? Couldn't you just hook it up to a DAT player, a standalone hard disk recorder, or a sound card with digital in (like the SB Live)?
A digital watermark could conceivably come through on a copy (depending on how the watermark and copy were made).
---
This comment powered by Mozilla!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I'd say the thing to do is order these protected discs TODAY, before they start some sort of "click to agree"... to more licensing terms than you can shake a stick at!
S lashDevSlashDSP
The way I see it, if I can walk into a store and buy one off the shelf (with cash) and not agree to any "no reverse engineering" terms and conditions, then it'll only be a matter of time until someone posts a linux based player. It'd be really interesting if a linux player appears when there's not yet one for windoze.
I just hope whoever cra.. er, reverse engineers this thing gives the player a more honest-sounding name than DeCSS. Maybe:
CactusPlay
or maybe even
ThouShaltNotRedirectThisCactusDataToAnywhereBut
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Well, this is just brilliant. Whatever music that gets released in this format will be pirated rampantly. But if a non-pirate goes into a store and mistakenly buys one of these CDs, they can't actually listen to it. So the customer get frustrated and takes it back, with a mental note not to buy any more BMG CDs.
Total sales revenue: $0.00 It looks like BMG has essentially taken a pro-piracy stance. If I were a musician signed with BMG, I would sue 'em.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It is interesting that "newer" CD players can deal with these mangled discs at all. Have manufacturers been trying to sneak protection into a new CD non-standard standard or is it just luck that they work at all?
Technical details very lacking at Sonopress - http://www.sonopress.de/sononews /15-99/protect.htm is about all there is.
Of course as a copy-protection method this is utterly hopeless -
- even if somehow the digital interconnects are disabled - which would seem to implicate player manufacturers in the protection scheme - it will still always be possible to save any sound a device can play back at us.
The music industry wants us to keep paying for the same music again and again, on new formats, or as old media wear out (yeah - I've got CDs that won't play properly any more already, but that's no problem once they're MP3d), or simply through making us rent all music. But since CDs the cat is already way out of the bag, and clumsy attempts like this - and DVD-Audio - to stuff it back in just won't work any more.
Oh quick, more news coming in...
Useless Third sues Rest of World
California, 25 January - A group of lawyers today issued writs against society in an attempt to preserve the livelihoods of their clients.
Moschops Ankleduster, attorney for the useless third of the population commented, "My clients feel that it is unfair to deny the vital importance of the Useless sector - those jobs that are neither productive nor creative."
"Industry bodies and bureaucracies must be permitted to make great sums of money from the work of the artists who create the products and the workers who physically create them", he continued, "and we will fight for the rights of all those upstanding citizens - ourselves included - who contribute absolutely nothing to the world".
Asked whether existing modes of distribution were still viable in a rapidly-changing information-based society, Ankleduster commented, "Fuck off".
Douglas Adams was unavailable for comment.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
Some music shops will let you exchange if you don't like the music. (HMV for cert I think)
Slash should be redone on the server side. A java server version could virtualize each story which would allow all comments to be asyncrhonously exported to all clients attached to that particular story. This would reduce the need for me, the customer, to repeatedly refresh in order to see the latest comments.
Please, do not let your lack of vision ruin it for the rest of us. I fear that Rob Malda suffers from the same myopia. I understand the attraction of Perl. It's nice and easy. I personally use it to for disposable projects. I would never use it for something like Slashdot.
I don't think Slash is not done in java in fear of losing a few simple minded people like yourself. It is not done because Malda graduated from Hope College and is just not smart enough.
The fish sez: So far the albums " Razorblade Romance " of the group of Him and " My private ones are were concerned " the former Independent Heroen Philip Boa & The Voodoo club.. Man them krauts are kinky. They have a group called "My private ones were concerned"? Kinda makes "Limp Biskit" look silly doesn't it?
According to the fish, "The copy protection prevents [...] a playing on all D-CRcOcM-cDrives"! How will I listen to it?? I play all my music through my 26x D-CRcOcM-cDrive!
The fish also tells me that "Possibly also the seal Compact Disc digital audio is not entitled to the product". Ok, well that may be fine for "Compact Disc digital audio" but what about my pet seal Lenny? Is Lenny entitled to the product? (Man those germans have wierd names for their seals).
Ah, fun with babelfish, it never gets tiring. For those of you who haven't tried it, try a modern day version of "telephone". Write a simple paragraph into the box, translate it to german, translate it back to english, translate it to french, translate it back to english, and so on until you've done all the languages... then compare your original paragraph with the translation.
Could you translate this into English so I can respond?
Sevan always came after eight....what are you complaining about?
What I wonder is how many people noticed what came after the two. I mean, come on, three? What was Cebert thinking?
-Smitty
± 29 dB
I'm pretty sure that they have to make a notice on the cover to the effect of "This disc is not Redbook Compliant, and cannot be used in all audio devices." I recall reading this notice on many CDs with 'hidden tracks' such as the "Songs in the Key of X" compilation CD (it had three songs before track 1 - in the 'pregap' I believe). I was also never able to rip those tracks (which was too bad, because it was really a pain in the ass to hold down the 'rewind' button whenever I wanted to listen to them).
Drink! OHBC >O+
Obviously BMG and co. don't seem to appreciate the significance of what they're doing. Now it will be impossible to rip your favorite CD encoded with this technology for use on a portable MP3 player. I can't imagine Diamond and other companies will be too happy about this, considering it would make their devices useless except for older discs and MP3s sold online. Or maybe it would... Perhaps we just haven't heard about Diamond's deep investments in MP3.com ;-)
There's been a lot of talk bandied around here about "if you can play it, you can copy it." This is true, but not in all cases.
This new CD format, I'm guessing (and I really am guessing - I can't get decent info about it), uses some kind of audio watermarking process. This would mean that they have applied extra information to the signal in a way that is masked by the music or whatever. This would create some distortion, but if they do it right, only audiophiles will notice. This may also screw up some older CD players if the process assumes some kind of reconstruction scheme that they are too old to have is used for the D/A conversion. Doing a bitwise copy of the music (using CDParanoia or cdda2wav, for example) and writing it to a CDR will result in a copy that is playable on any CD player on which the original is playable.
The "protection" comes into play when the track is converted to MP3. MP3 encoders remove a lot of information from a track in order to get the high compression rate they have. The trick, though, is that they only remove information that you're not likely to hear. If the watermark is somehow cleverly designed to stand out when this extra information is removed, then any MP3s made from the protected disc will be of poor quality. The solution would be to to remove the watermark in the encoder, but this would extremely difficult. No one would know how the watermark is generated, and that even if one did figure it out, the record companies could just switch watermarking methods every second or so.
It can be done.
bp
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
Here's what I think about all this...
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
-----
GooseKirk
are you not allowed to make copies of your own media for yourself? Isn't that part of the law? Like software, you are allowed to make a personal backup copy for yourself... Is this just a item by item law, or is it a general thing? Cause this seems to me to be breaking a long standing tradition of allowing people to make copies of what they want for their own use...
hail yeah-- i hope this thing gets ging for the simple fact that I can mock everyone who jeered at the minidisc. I pop a CD into my 20th anniversary Mac, run a 1/8" cable from the line out to my sharp702 and let it run for an hour- no one will ever stop the audio from coming out. ..."it's not solid state memory" they say...."It has too many moving parts" they say....."youre minidisc player is obsolete" they say...well, obsolete this!
Assumption is the mother of all &$#!-ups
This troll was ok until you had to go AND MAKE IT COMPLETELY OBVIOUS in EACH AND EVERY reply. Please learn to troll a little better, and to make it funny. Thank you.
They cannot be played on a CD-ROM drive since it cannot read the table of contents. You can still rip the actual data but you need to know the block offsets and modify your ripper to ignore the error when reading table of contents.
Please be advised that by publicly explaining how to defeat our protection, you are opening yourself up to lawsuits, fines, and eventual imprisonment. We will not accept people such as yourself actively subverting our excellent protection technology. This is unacceptable.
Yes, I'm kidding.
The American audience won't put up with this. Facing competition from other sources of music, they should be making CD's look as attractive as possible - "don't lose all your music when your drive crashes!" - "infinite shelf life, storage is free!" - etc.
Or, add features. How much could you do with 50K of magnetic tape around the inside/rim of a CD? Keep programs, track titles, whatever. You've already got a laser there, why not make it magneto-optical to prevent data loss?
But they're not. They're making CD's look unattractive, and themselves to look hostile, and it'll scare away customers. Mebbe not everybody rips their CD's, but a lot of people like to play them in their computer anyway. Their behavior is typical of companies that know they're getting behind tech & the times. Word'll get out.
Oh no, not "Razorblade Romance!" I wanted that one! Well I guess they're just experimenting w/ unpopular music first...
Where is my mind?
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
FWTW: "Razorblade Romance" works well in my 10 year old Sony CD player, in my 8 year old Kenwood CD player and in my 2 year old car stereo. When I put it in my CD-ROM drive, the MS CD player applet won't recognize it as an audio CD. BTW: "Join me" by "Him" is currently number one in the german single charts.
Going this route is an unbelievably stupid move on the part of the labels.
... he's heard a lot about "MP3 pirating" and how it's so wrong to deprive the artists of their money ... but then he realizes, what's the difference between ripping the CD himself, and downloading an MP3 of the CD? He's already paid for the music. If he had the proper equipment to rip the CD, he would wind up with a bit-for-bit duplicate of the online MP3 file anyway.
They can't stop people from using the MP3 format, but they are in their last and best position to influence the basic ethics of CD ripping and MP3 use. Products like the RIO and other standalone MP3 players are not going to go away. If anything, they are going to gain wider and wider acceptance.
Take for example a law-abiding, honest person. Let's make this person the "music listener of the future." He buys CDs, but he has a large collection, and he can't really lug it around, because he's on the go too much, and wants his music in walkman format. When he wants new music, he goes to the store, purchases a CD at retail price, rips it on his computer, and downloads it to his walkman-sized MP3 player, so he can carry it around with him.
Life is good.
He would never think of going to the web to "steal" MP3s from pirate sites. His conscience is clean. He has broken no laws, and hasn't even skirted any laws. He's paid for his music, and is engaging in perfectly legal use of the software.
Now, the music industry begins distributing CDs with copy protection that can't be ripped. This person, following his usual routine, goes to the store, and unknowingly purchases a copy protected CD. Now, he takes it home, tries to rip it as usual, but can't. Now he's mad, because he just paid $15.00 for a CD that appears to be defective. He goes online to find out what is going on. He discovers that he can't rip the CD because it's copy protected.
Someone suggests that he look for an MP3 of the disc online.
After all, this scheme doesn't prevent EVERYONE from making MP3 copies. It just raises the bar -- now in order to make MP3s you need special equipment.
At first, this person hesitates
So he downloads the MP3. In the process, he notices that the same site has lots of other interesting stuff that he doesn't have. Maybe he doesn't download them, but eventually, as more and more new releases are copy protected, and he finds himself going to the web again and again to obtain MP3s of his own CDs, he realizes that there is no point in buying the CDs anymore, because he is just going to have to go to the web to download the MP3 so he can listen to it.
Now this person either keeps buying the unusable CDs, and starts to feel like a sucker -- used and abused by the record labels, or simply stops buying the useless CDs, downloads the MP3s instead, and suddenly has a lot more free cash to spend on other things.
The RIAA says that copy protection "keeps honest people honest." Instead, it's primary effect is, has always been, and will always be, to turn honest people into criminals.
If anything, they should use C. Java is pointless overhead on a server.
I think that a java client is wrong too. How about nph's and/or a nntp-based protocol, with added headers for moderation/threading
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
hail yeah-- i hope this thing gets going for the simple fact that I can mock everyone who jeered at the minidisc. I pop a CD into my 20th anniversary Mac, run a 1/8" cable from the line out to my sharp702 and let it run for an hour- no one will ever stop the audio from coming out. ..."it's not solid state memory" they say...."It has too many moving parts" they say....."youre minidisc player is obsolete" they say...well, obsolete this!
Assumption is the mother of all &$#!-ups
The way to kill this thing is to make it cost money. Make sure BMG eats all their production and promotional costs, without getting a return on them. If you buy one of these discs by mistake, return it for refund. This also costs the store, and they may stop carrying such discs. Without retail channels, BMG will have to drop the format and go back to regular CD. Kill it the same way we killed DIVX: stay away in droves. It's the only way.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If I can hear it, I can record it.
If I can see it, I can record it.
NOTHING CAN CHANGE THIS TRUTH.
Get it, now?
Can anyone say DIVX.
DIVX was extinguished by the community of people with sense about technology spreading the word that DIVX was a big fat load of crap. DIVX did not fair too well. Tell your friends that this is a big hoax designed to steal your money and take away our ability to use technology the way we have expected to. CD has the ability to be exchanged in new ways, regardless of what the laws are(that were set up for analog media). They gave us CDs without really asking us if we wanted them, we are going to use them how we want.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
Pardon me if this question seems a bit naive, but is this really the first case of a CDDA protection scheme attempt ?
Before the 80 minutes blank CDs, weren't some CD's purposely extended (by adding unnecessary extra-tracks for instant) to more than 74 minutes to prevent them to be duplicated (mp3 weren't well known at that time) ?
Some special CDDA+Data formats seem to prevent in some way digital audio extraction. In order to listen to them in my car (so a legal copy), I've tried to make copy of two of David Bowie's back catalogue remastered CDs published by EMI in the late 1999. On these two CDs, I got a SCSI error while extracting the last track (tried with three CD readers and different DAE utilities). Isn't that some kind of copy-protection too ?
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
I listen to cds, I might sometimes burn a compilation of different songs to listen to on my portable cd player, I find that perfectly harmless. A technology like this would render this impossible (without a bit of cracking, which is not my area of expertise). I'm so sick of corporations trying to control what I can and can't do, I just want to maintain my freedom, this is silly.
meow
Ok, I don't even OWN a "CD-Player". I own several cd-roms, an amplifier, and some big speakers. My CD-ROM is my stereo. If any cds I got came crippled so as not to work with my stereo system, they would get them sent right back with quite an angry letter. Guess if this trend continues, we'll have no choice but to rip the cds to mp3 to listen to them - I thought the music industry didn't want that.
-lx
Have you tried looking at Natalie Portman naked AND PETRIFIED...?
OMG!!! You're right, ever since I started doing this my nightly masturbation sessions haven't really worked, and all along I thought it was just the rays from my monitor!!!
"I swear, I just ran it through that filter to reduce the background noise..."
--
If there's one thing we have learned from the Year 2000 debacle, it is that people keep old equipment and technology around for FAR longer than even its originators ever would expect. The relation here? Simple: this copy protection mechanism is going to confuse the naive decoders in older vintage CD players.
Alienate the non computer literate CD buying public and they alienate their most loyal and honest customers.
Meanwhile, in the CD-ROM drive universe, workarounds will quickly be implemented. Since a Red Book CD is not encrypted, all they really have to distort is the 'encapsulation' of the data. Since the digital audio itself is recorded on the disc as plaintext... this really is a losing battle for the record company any way you slice it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I heard that posting stupid, unfunny trolls to Slashdot causes impotence.
A passive boycott is really simple. Don't buy a company's products. Send email to your friends recommending same. When the world goes to hells, say "at least I didn't contribute." I practice this kind of passive boycott on a lot of different products/classes and depending on what you want to boycott its harder than it sounds to stick with it. It also rarely changes anything.
Then theres the advertised boycott, which is more of a media driven protest than an actual boycott. Thats where we make a web page all about the issue, get all the geeks to add a "boycott nasty new CDs! Click here for details" button to their web pages, hype it to a net presence that will sound impressive to non-techies, then write a press release about the "first international e-protest" and blast fax the major media (as well as semi-major media in the hometown areas of 5-10 major players with a press release emphasising how they got involved.)
Thats a lot harder, and requires a fair amount of cooperation. It's also a lot more likely to work, since the threat of a sales drop, even if you couldn't really get everyone who signs on to do it, will work a lot better than the tiny drop that comes from a few people sticking consitently to their guns. It also helps if you can get some public institutions involved ie "the massachusetts public library consortium has stated that they will not include XXX's CDs in their publicly avalible music collection because the company's policy conflicts with the library's mission of providing freely usable media."
Anyway, lunch break is over, gotta work.
...will work for Chick tracts...
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I listen to cds, I might sometimes burn a compilation of different songs to listen to on my portable cd player, I find that perfectly harmless. A technology like this would render this impossible (without a bit of cracking, which is not my area of expertise). I'm so sick of corporations trying to control what I can and can't do, I just want to maintain my freedom, this is silly.
meow
It is easy to see how you've bought into the hype of the Java programming language. You seem to be talking about using Java server-side (you mention servlets). I don't see any reason why using Java would make Slashdot reply faster to HTTP request than the current model (Apache modules, mod_perl in particular). I have seen the code in ApacheJServ and the code in Mod_Perl (I studied it for writing HB) and both seem just the same. But then you seem to be thinking about using Java client-side (either that or you are claiming that using Servlets can reduce the number of bytes downloaded, which is something completely unrelated). I'll just say that would *suck*. Fortunately Malda knows it. Besides, he has URLs with simple text-only versions of Slashdot and, as you may know, there are clients that use them to fetch all information. What you really need here is not a Java applet, but perhaps make some more URLs that would only show certain information (for example, you could use the query string so they only show the comments that have been posted after a given date, for your program to add them in the list that it downloaded already). I don't see any relation with Java here. Applets can't even save information on disk (I know, you can allow them to, but... let's just say most persons would rather read this the way it is than go change the JVM's settings just for that). Your statement about Perl being a language for kids only is pathetic. I'll refrain from replying to it. I'm just glad Malda is mature enough not to buy into the hype of Java. And I pretty much doubt anyone but the most stupid kiddies hate him. Thanks for your wonderful job, Rob. Azul (who is in school and doesn't know his password and doesn't want to go through the process of having it emailed just so he can post this message logged in).
If you pay cash, nothing can be traced, but can they trace product (UPC and SKU) codes to your checking account/credit card?
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
YES I HAVE BUT I THINK IT WAS HER HEAD ON SOMEONE ELSES BODY. I WROTE A LETTER TO ASK HER IF SHE WOULD SEND ME REAL PICTURES OF HER NAKED AND PETRIFIED, BUT SHE SENT ME SOMETHING CALLED A RESTRAINING ORDER. I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS BUT I THINK SHE WANTS ME TO VISIT HER TO GET THE PICTURES IN PERSON.
Ok, even if it was susessful. Even before this technology is 'cracked', they didn't say anything about makeing whole diskimages of the cd's in question. So the file is about 650mb. big woop. So on in the next version of napster will include a .bin or .iso option. Only diffrence is that instead of 5% of the bandwith at universitys, it will occupy 30%.
ROTFL!
:-)
God, that was funny... I'm going to have to use "Your troll sucks" next time I'm angry at a troll.
Play them for the manager who says their policy is up to 3 exchanges and no refunds. Play the fascist-protected CD and watch nothing happen. Play another regular CD to again show the player is just fine. Demand money back.
You either have to add HTML codes to your writings or change the pulldown menu beside the Submit/Preview buttons from "HTML Formatted" to "Plain Old Text". Enjoy.
CACTUS DATA SHIELD is fully transparent to the consumer.
Unlike conventional protection methods or identification technologies, there is no need for software keys, hardware dongles, plugs or other external equipment or processes.
Why would you need software keys or hardware dongles if you can't use the cd in a cdrom drive?
Does anyone know if the CD's listed are the only ones on which this play-protection was used? I have recently bought a Die Krupps "Odyssey of the Mind" CD distributed by BMG which refuses to play properly in 2 of my 3 CD players.
--
Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
[ home ]
It is easy to see how you've bought into the hype of the Java programming language.
You seem to be talking about using Java server-side (you mention servlets). I don't see any reason why using Java would make Slashdot reply faster to HTTP request than the current model (Apache modules, mod_perl in particular). I have seen the code in ApacheJServ and the code in Mod_Perl (I studied it for writing HB) and both seem just the same.
But then you seem to be thinking about using Java client-side (either that or you are claiming that using Servlets can reduce the number of bytes downloaded, which is something completely unrelated). I'll just say that would *suck*. Fortunately Malda knows it.
Besides, he has URLs with simple text-only versions of Slashdot and, as you may know, there are clients that use them to fetch all information. What you really need here is not a Java applet, but perhaps make some more URLs that would only show certain information (for example, you could use the query string so they only show the comments that have been posted after a given date, for your program to add them in the list that it downloaded already). I don't see any relation with Java here. Applets can't even save information on disk (I know, you can allow them to, but... let's just say most persons would rather read this the way it is than go change the JVM's settings just for that).
Your statement about Perl being a language for kids only is pathetic. I'll refrain from replying to it.
I'm just glad Malda is mature enough not to buy into the hype of Java. And I pretty much doubt anyone but the most stupid kiddies hate him.
Thanks for your wonderful job, Rob.
Azul (who is in school and doesn't know his password and doesn't want to go through the process of having it emailed just so he can post this message logged in).
Pd: Sorry for not formatting my earlier message right.