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DataPlay - Flash Killer or Copy-Control Nightmare?
theancient1 asks: "Coming soon to MP3 players, PDAs, and digital cameras: DataPlay: a $10 coin-sized disc that holds 500 MB of data. The catch? The discs have content control implemented as part of the file system. If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it. Keys can expire after a given interval, and although you can transfer files to your friends, they'll need their own key. This proprietary, SDMI-ready device is the RIAA's dream -- if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist." And the war over digitally control content escalates. Will this system be cracked as easily as SDMI, or might this be something to worry about?
"On CNNfn, the CMO says it's great for record companies that want to re-sell their old music in a new format. In their press FAQ, they essentially claim to have invented the CD-R. (Patents pending.) All new hardware technologies seem to come with content control strings attatched. Is CD-R the last truly open storage medium? Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?"
I'm not sure that Napster-like p to p wouldn't exist. Regardless of the sotrage medium, at some point the sound of the music has to be released into the air so my ears can hear it. At that point I can grab it with some cheap microphone and convert it to an unencrypted .wav or something. Quality would not be as good as a direct rip but the vast majority of folks either don't notice the subtle differences or really don't care.
Just another way to screw with users...
This reminds me of another Bill Gates-ism.
If the general public choose and buy open storage technologies, even at a price premium over equivalent content control alternatives, the control technologies will go away, just like Betamax.
Now if I can just motivate 100 million sheeple to boycott Dataplay...
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
Ha ha ha ha....
I'm sorry but I'm not sure I understand. The headline is 'copy-control nightmare', but I don't see how it's a nightmare.
It appears that if someone has protected something, you can't play it.
So? This is like saying that 'New stronger lock for front door is a thief's nightmare'.
Sure it's a nightmare to the thief, but we don't really care about them do we - they are the ones that are in the wrong - they are the ones trying to steal something belonging to someone else. We wouldn't describe that as a nightmare, except by qualifying it - it's only a nightmare for the bad guy.
So it is in this case - people are given a chance to protect their property (the music they own and have written), and I can't see that that's a nightmare.
Why, in these cases, is it always portrayed that everyone has the right to someone else's music? We wouldn't say that I have the right to go into your house and steal your possessions, so why encourage stealing music?
Before anyone says, 'ah but with music, they still have it - you haven't taken anything', let me point this out: for artists and musicians, royalties are vitally important. Most artists (of whatever kind) earn far less than the average wage, so by denying them their royalties, you are effectively stealing the money out of their hand.
Please, have a little consideration here. Imagine it was you.
What if people had the chance to take your salary away, and as a result you were poor and destitute? Can you picture that? I do hope so. There is never an innocent victim in these cases.
You're never hurting the fat cat - it's the little guy that gets the blame. Not the high-earning Backstreet Boys, but the minority band earning $10,000 a year that gets shafted.
It's not the company director that gets fired when revenues are lost because of 'free' music, it's the worker in the factory - it's someone like you. It's just an ordinary decent guy who's getting screwed. Now just remember that the next time you talk about free music.
--
Hi!
Okay, I'm not a massive fan of the expiring keys idea, but why is everyone so strongly against this? Are you all worried that suddenly you may have to pay for something you use?
I've heard, and agree with, the argument against recording companies. Okay, so can anyone tell me why this media means that artists can't offer music downloads from their site, as well as allowing people to buy keys?
Personally, I like this idea. It means I can go out, download music & key, and play it instantly. It's portable, and doesn't interfere with existing systems in the way that implementing copy control in harddrives does.
This will never work, just like all the other stuff like Divx. Why? Because mp3's already exist for a small file format and cdr's are as cheap as dirt these days. It's not like DVD where it actually brought something new to the table (tens of gigs of storage, which cdr's still can't match). This dataplay thing is just the same old same old, recycled and re-deployed.
Besides, there ain't no way for software to be 100% un-crackable, period. Haven't we all learned that by now? Absolutely no way. This thing will waste away just like divx did.
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
Can you imagine what would happen if hardrive manufacturers could implement this protection? Goodbye mp3s...does our salvation maybe lie in ogg?
if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist.
I don't see how you worked THIS out - why wouldn't napster exist? I wouldn't buy a copyprotected system if it's not going to let me do what i want with my music, i'd keep on using napster and use an alternative storage technology.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
Why am I exasperated? Well we have seen the same claims again and again. Unless we have a series of tamperproof blackboxes with a fully encrypted I/O (perhaps even with a time code to prevent replay of the encrypted stream) between the storage media and the D/A converter, the content can be copied digitally by anyone with access to the media.
In may stop my son from exchanging stuff with his friends but it will do absolutely nothing to prevent mass piracy.
See my journal, I write things there
What you say?
This is the wireless interconnected fair digital music control that could appease the RIAA and consumers alike.
What would mess up this beautiful equation is if RIAA doesn't allow that one copy. That's taking it too far. If they do that I can't share a song with my friend or keep a copy on my laptop and desktop.
_ _ _
I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.
What, me worry?
Their web site.
... (fanfare) THIS! Meet thy nemisis - HideousGeekParodyMan!
I can't believe they actually have a picture of that man both holding his thumb up *and* pointing at you whilst holding up the crappy product. I just imagine the cartoon version:
SuperAdvertMan: Prepare to die "dataplay", all purchasers worship me for my advertising powers...
Dataplay: Aha! But we have (flourish)
SuperAdvertMan: (bursts out laughing) But nobody will buy products associated with *that*
Dataplay: oops...
HideousGeekParodyMan: (grinning inanely) buy this kids! It's got like different coloured stuff on it!
I hate the it all already...
0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I use napster myself, very often in fact, and when all this copy protection stuff started happening was the first time I realized that, for most purposes, napster is illegal. The RIAA is nuts to be worried about it, but don't they have a right to go after people who are stealing their music? Personally, I don't buy CD's anymore because I can find everything I want on napster. The music industry lost about $120 there, and I'm just one person who doesn't like music all that much anyway. Napster was nice while it lasted, but now that it seems like its gone we'll have to start acquiring music legally again.
I think the real thing we have to be worried about is copy protection on hard drives - what is the status of that, anyway?
This space intentionally left blank.
Why is it that the industry (be it music, movie or software) simply does not understand that trying to gain this form of control over what they own only makes people more inclined to copy it?
I buy my CDs, DVDs and software. I also have all my CDs encoded as mp3's while the discs themselves are stuffed in a shelf (and rarely used, I might add). I like paying for my CDs because I want the artists to keep making music that I like. It's very natural to me.
So would it be a problem for me if they started trying to prevent me from encoding the songs to mp3's and do whatever I damn please with them? It would piss me off. It's my right to decide if I want to listen to the song I just bought in my RIO when I'm out walking or on the stereo with the mp3-jukebox in the livingroom.
Mini discs have been around for years and they are a very cool technology. Controlled by sony, they have not flourished as much as they could have although they are a better tech than CDs (read/write 80 minutes stereo, 160 (!) minutes mono) and they have copy protection for digital to digital copies.
I don't really see anything (besides size, but hey, my MD walkman is barely 1 decimeter square by 1.5 cm thick. Tiny!) that is really new and exciting here.
The fact is that the more free and open the media/standard is, the more prelavant it will become. It also helps bunches to have pro quality masters of the media I want (music or data) on these formats.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
If there's a market for it, let it come.
It will be cracked, we will use the media for our own purposes, even storing music previously under copy protection. We will have ways of re-recording things without content control, and no content control system will keep us from moving the data into another medium.
To some extent, yes you have.
Speaking as a non-earning musician.... I think it would be nice if music were a tad less commercialised. Under the current marketing regime, yes you are dead right. Fewer record/CD/micro-optical-gizmo sales will effect the little guy. The point of the issue here is that we have entered the age where scarcity (of the IP) has just about been eliminated. The system of distribution we have for music is based upon a false premise.
The loss to the little guy is the result of a crap distribution system. Good music has the ability to make listeners' lives better. By introducing hardware controls on the distribution simply to line the wallets of particular entrenched interest makes fuck all sense.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if the good music could propogate amongst friends and/or communities?
NB I'm not personally proposing a replacement system here. Let it evolve like the last one. I imagine there are a bunch of well paid musicians out there who wouldn't be too happy about this, but then there are a stack more not-well paid musicians who produce music because they want to produce music and be heard. Now that we have the ability to do that, why wouldn't we?
When some smart techy comes up with the trick to reproducing rice as easily as we can now reproduce bits, would you be calling that theft from agribusiness, and stressing out? Some people would think of it as an end to hunger.
Read a bit of Andre Gorz, and realise that what may be the beginning of the end of scarcity is a GOOD THING.
The issue here is the failure of capitalism in its current form to deal with this form of distribution.
Yes, there are problems with this, but we should be looking at this as an opportunity, not a reason to be clinging to irrelevant paradigms.
Something is wrong here, but it's not the 'celestial jukebox' concept, it's our inability to deal with it. Of course we should look after our artists, but that is not going to happen by tying the hands of the music lover and denying them the ability to appreciate the artists' work.
Buckets,
pompomtom
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
The problem we all have with these copy-control systems isn't the systems themselves. The average consumer doesn't *care*. They're glad to have the cool new tech.
The problem is the DMCA that makes it illegal for us to purchase gear and then modify it to avoid a copy control system, or to share information about how to do that.
I have no use for a device with content control. In a market with competition a variant of such a device without the content control will soon emerge or the invention will simply vaporize (like most storage related inventions seem to do). I read slashdot regularly and anouncements of the next generation storage devices (holographic storage, new and improved optical storage, better harddrive) are about as frequent as discussions on Gnu license issues. So, my guess is that this will fail (provided it ever evolves into a product which I doubt). BTW. 500 Mb isn't even close to the actual size of my mp3 collection, I need something larger.
Jilles
I don't see why they just don't agree on a sound quality standard that is copyrightable(is this a word?). Lets say that anything below 112 is considered a 'sample quality' recording. I know I'd purchase a cd or 'cd quality file' eventually for the higher sound quality. In the meantime I'd listen to my slightly scratchy version. I think most people would like to be legal in their music listening but are sick of the bullshit tyranny.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Let it come. Then let's crack it, rev-engineer it and send both results back to the RIAA.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
My response to byte.com's article:
In your January 22 article about the DataPlay storage device, the author writes: "How long this claim, and its copyright-protection features, survive contact with the anti-intellectual-property-rights types remains to be seen". I believe this is misunderstanding the philosophy behind the opposition to SDMI. The big media corporations have consistently and repeatedly abused the rights of both the artists and their consumers, both by lobbying for new laws such as the DMCA and the "Sony Bono" Copyright Extension Act, and by twisting existing copyright law and ignoring international copyright treaties with such abuses as region coding of DVDs (which has been carried over to DVD Audio, making a mockery of their reasons for using it on DVD movies). Fair Use and the first sale principle are being eroded or bypassed entirely, with the introduction of the "You're buying a licence, not a copy" model, which, if effective, will remove the need for the recording companies to respect the consumer side of copyright law.
Did you follow the link? All is explained.
You make an important point. It doesn't matter if it can be cracked or not. The reason why it won't work is because it doesn't offer much to the consumer. If smaller size and being able mix and match songs is considered so important by Mr Joe Consumer then we would all be using Minidisks.
We already have MP3. We already have CD-R. It sounds great for music publishers, but why would I as a consumer spend money on DataPlay?
--
Simon
Why just one copy?
The original serial copy management system that by-law must be implemented on digital home audio recording devices , and is in use on CD (and in them mp3 format, but nobody uses it) that never really gets used (I'm sure some DAT drives use it) has 2 bits.
1 bit for 'copyright' and another bit for 'original'.
If the copyright bit is set, and the original bit is also set, the copy software is supposed to allow a copy, but turn off the original bit.
If the copyright bit is set, but the original bit is off, then the device/software is supposed to refuse to copy.
If the copyright bit is unset, then you can make all the copies you want.
See, what they were scared of with digital copies was that, a copy is as good as the original. This scheme was to prevent serial copying going on forever... it meant that sure, you yourself with the original could hand out hundreds of copies even, but those who you handed them to couldn't....
Of course, scms specifically exempted computers...
Even if there was, the DMCA prevents you from distributing the code that allows you to make your own copy.
It does not matter if you are making a copy for a legal purpose!
The RIAA will swoop down and litigate and threaten anyone who talks about breaking the copyprotection. That way, they keep everybody in line with the threat of a lawsuit.
Fight Spammers!
Well I haven't been watching the recent inflation figures in the USA, but do they have already $10 coins? And how big is that, then?
We all know how well that worked before.
Vermifax
Vermifax
Logout
I agree with what you say, and I can not understand why protecting ones copyright could ever be wrong. Does everyone have the right to everyone elses music? If I want something, I usually have to pay for it. Why? Because that is how it works. You can't GET everything for free. That's not even a utopia. A utopia is supposed to be something good, right?
Will work for bandwidth
That's the question.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Samsung have most of its units zone-free by using a code on the remote controller; and usual models by other manufacturer like Toshiba, Pioneer, Sony, etc can be made zone free. I bought my Toshiba zone free just to be able to enjoy unreleased in France movies.
Hub
Right now big corporations own databases of our private information, and the only way to put control back into our hands is copy protection.
What scares me is the media companies trying to make peer-to-peer networking illegal, trying to make peering into their secret decoder ring illegal. Hey guys, you can be safe without being so litigous!
You realize this is the same bunch that cost the radio industry the ears of my younger brother's generation.
I suspect my daughters, who will be buying music of their own in 5 years, will probably get most of their music by swapping it at school and over the internet. And it won't be from members of the RIAA, but from some garage band with a PC/Apple based editing studio.
RIAA's real fear shouldn't be Napster & P2P, but that my grandchildren will read about them in the history books, and that the Harvard Business Journal will have articles about how it all went so wrong.
gets off the medium digitally. Unencoded. See where I'm going? The only way around this would be some kind of fancy analog cryptography. Yeah, right. Quality loss deluxe, I'd say.
This isn't really true.. right now it is, but I'm sure a fancy designer could put the decode circuitry and a DAC in the same package to have encypted digital in and unencrypted analog out. What all these groups miss is that if I have a high quality sound card and some good mastering software, I can take their noise-free analog signal and resample it, then encode that - given that the mp3 codecs are lossy, I don't think my untrained ears would hear much of a difference.
Whadda I know anyway :)
..don't panic
Quite a few audio cards have digital out - you could simply record it into a harddisk recorder, and then record it back to your computer without losing a single bit of audio quality. Almost the same goes for MiniDisc recorders, allthough here the sound is compressed / decompressed. In other words: your initial stand was correct (if you can hear it, you can rip it), but it doesn't have to include a quality loss.
-- Haje Jan Kamps -- www.kamps.org -- Freelance journalist / Photographer
It might also be possible to keep copies of the song on many players, but only when the (hopefully lifetime) license is transferred will the hardware play the song.
Two copies would essentially allow two users to always use the song simultaneously, in which case two user licences would have been bought. The RIAA will never go for this.
Most crackers couldn't care less whether it's legal or not - it will still be done. You have to KNOW who did the crack to sue 8)
The Game Guy
So RESIST the urge to EVER buy anything with content control. It will then proceed to go away (ala DIVX - but way too many people still bought into that stupid idea)
The Game Guy
What I'd like would be to have my personal/medical/private/whatever data on devices which do NOT allow copy without my consent. If you want to do marketing stats, you ask me for the key and pay the privilege. If you "happen" to have a copy of my medical records, I want to be sure that I authorized you to do it. Why it's always "their" data which gets protected and never "mine"?
(hmmm... since privacy online is the current political trend maybe I should point this out to some politician?)
In other words, children, we have yet another customer tracking tool.
This will never work. Having this kind of protection on such a freely distributed media such as music, will only cause the h4ck3r community to work around it, or, consumers will not buy it at all. There is always the chance of forgetting keys, or other issues like that, that consumers will not want to be bothered with. After all, it's just music, not top secret US government files. I don't think the music industry is ever going to with this battle with the current strategy they are using.
-Maverick8080
"Develop like it doesn't hurt, code like there is no tommorow...."
But napster (etc) is good for the unknown little guy. Very few people buy albums by artists they have never heard of, but you may well download such stuff (I know I do). Then, if it turns out to be good, you might go buy an album by them. (Or not of course, but it still ends up with more albums sold.) Provided they have albums of course. But if they don't, their popularity when free might convince someone to sign them..
It is reported today that three of the Big five recording companies have signed a deal worth $100 million a year for the next five years with a consortium of leading bathtub and shower manufacturers.
A spokesman for the recording industry said.
'It has come to our attention that people are reproducing our artists copyright works using these facilities. It cannot be right that they are reproduced in a way that is seriously degraded by the sound of splashing water. It is only right that our artists either get a fair cut in the profits of this reproduction technology. From now on a recording industry approved lable will be positioned between the taps to show the user that they are entitled to sing in the tub.
Richard Stallman is giving up all physical contact with water.
if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist.
All music isn't distributed that way, and Napsters pretty close to not existing anyhow...
Sounds similar to dvd technology. So whats the point They encrypt it I take my Valid Key Play it back as it plays I Digitaly Record it to MP3 (Sounds like the orginal way poeple ripped DvD's) then wow look piracy is back. Give it time somone will crack the encryption have his own direct converter out . Wait sounds like decss there. Man the music industry is smart I fear there skillz
-Thorne
DVD chapter 3 8min-3sec.
scene far-future:
Neo removes the hacked DataPlay's with unprotcted mp3s stored on them replacing with the wad of ultra-devalued dollars, paying for the stash.
Bloke: 'Halleluljah, You're my saviour man, My own personal Jesus Christ'
Neo: 'You get caught using that.....the RIAA will have you in chains.'
Bloke: 'I know, this never happened. You don't exist.'
No the REALLY look like DataPlays, check it out.
I think chances are this thing will let you just copy mp3s(wavs or whatever) to just like mp3 players so the thing is what if you just dont set the copy protection bit, if the thing is truly a cd-r no ones going to buy it if they have to use thier software that will only let you d/l from a perticular site in some unknown format. If thier just a replacemnt for music cds (i.e. purchase in stores) whats the point of cdr. im sure its one of thoes things like windows media ware you can have copy protected/unprotected in the same format and the player realy doesnt care ware it came from. what im saying is chances are you'll be able to copy all your curent mp3s that are not copy protected to it and it will work just as well as any that you download that are protected, I could be compleatly wrong and the thing will only work with its format, if so its doomed for failure
Even if they had a tamperproof stream from first medium to speaker: nothing is easier than setting even the stereo boxes into a closed cabinet along with a decent microphone.
(Un)Fortunately our brain still has (copyable) analogue input and especially no bit scrambling - so all and each system share this kind of weakness.
You maybe remember the videotaped movie theater movies (StarWars E1, Martix, whatever)? Even with (oldfashioned) media control (movie reels) copy protection and pay-per-view (in the theaters) it was not a problem to get fairly decent quality.
Too bad the quality is crap. I was checking one of those things out. I had 50+ cd's stolen while on vacation in South Africa (by the mofo tour bus driver, nonetheless).
Ever since, I have been trying to come up with a decent removable media for hauling my music around the earth. I know a couple people with MD's and the quality is MP3-style and hence not good enough for me. Although, maybe the newer players are better, cause these are a couple year old sony's.
Until then, I am eyeballing a DAT player. Crap part is how inconvenient it is compared to CD/MD for ease of copying and track zipping through. But, 6 hrs on a cassette and it sounds great.
If people would just stop locking their doors at night, their valuables would be free as well- and I could get back to what I do best.
Cat burglaring just hasn't been the same since that deadbolt lock salesman came to town. How can they do this? Is this even Constitutional?
Join me in my struggle. stand up for your fundamental right to pilfer!
I think the major problem with the record companies enforcing content control over us all is simply money. Think about it: in order for an content control system to become effective, you MUST phase out CDs, thus killing MP3rippers at source. However, doing this instantly would cost a huge amount of money, and in the best case, it will take years.
... band together and establish their own distribution channels over the web? Without the record company taking most of the money they could sell their stuff cheaper on the internet... Maybe the content control systems will be the downfall of RIAA and major recording corporations, since they allow the small-time companies compete on a more even playground? Who knows...)
Now, if you have a choice between using your normal, average computer (which you already have), with your CD player (which you already have), with new CDs coming out constantly (which they will be doing) to get your MP3s, and buying new, expensive, proprietary technology (disk may be cheap, but that does not mean that players will be), that will take away all your fair use rights, which one do you go for?
What's stopping you from simply taking your existing equipment, putting the MP3s on that new 1Gig IBM Microdrive player you got, and whistling on?
In order to sell something like this, the record companies would have to sell the music really cheap so that the consumer would want to buy them instead of the CD. I suspect you can't do it really cheap, because a) the artists still want their cut and if they get less than from CD sales, they will be unhappy; b) The record company still wants to make money; c) Somebody is going to want money from licenses for the new, proprietary technology.
And you would still have privacy from people who are technically savvy enough. Taking the analog output from really good equipment and recoding it back to MP3s is entirely possible, and probably most people just wouldn't care about the loss of quality. Come on, people buy bootlegs =).
It is possible that the record companies stand to lose some serious money if they insist on pursuing on this trail. The cat's out of the bag...
(Question: Isn't it the major reason why new bands sign on with big companies that that way they get access to their major publicity machine? Well, you've got the internet now... Why don't bands
Ultimately, even if they managed to completely protect the digital copy of the music, with copy protected file formats, hard drive, sound cards, amplifiers, everything in such a way that each level of that protection was totally unbreakable (yeah right), at some point in time, two little copper wires have to connect to a diaphragm in a speaker somwhere. In analog copying the greatest, no, the easiset, no, but it can be done so as to lose almost no sound quality. Honsestly, the average Joe can barely tell the differenced between cassette and cd, or even well-cleaned vinyl, and then only if the two forms are played side by side.
This gadget might enjoy life as a giveawy item in cereal boxes, but damn if I would use it to store any of my personal files.
How does this stop piracy anyway? What would stop me from creating MP3's and storing them on a DataPlay? Am I missing something? All it does is block the piracy of files you'd pay to download in the first place.
Unless the music industry reverts back to a non-digital format, piracy will always be easy to commit. Get used to it or go buy a record player. :)
Lets get things clear here. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COPY CONTROL. Just put a mic next to a speaker and poof the music is recorded. They need to just get over the fact that people will do what they want with what they own.
#=-weo-=#
If I can take it off the media once, I can copy it, and/or change it to a different format. Something like this would not kill services like Napster, it would simply force people to switch from CD rippers to whatever software could rip the sound off this media.
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Tanstaafl. You're assuming that they will distribute CD-to-DataPlay ripping software, when in fact you'll probably have to buy it all again, or wait until a third party produces such a utility, probably without the blessing of the record industry. In practice, you'll probably have to get keyed material from the record companies... Still, someone will crack this, even if it's just by writing a driver that pretends to be a sound card - that receives an unpacked digital buffer, which is promptly blasted to a storage file.
*fluff*.
I see the possibility of a device that plugs into your soundcard speaker-out port and records the song onto its own internal hard drive, or flash memory, or whatever.
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People don't license music. They purchase a copy of it. And it's not the RIAA's business what you can and can't do with it, it's written into copyright law.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm not sure why they expect this technology to take off. Unless I read the spec sheet wrong, Dataplay media aren't rewritable. So why pay $10 for a proprietary media with only 500 megs of space when I could go down to the local microcenter and pick up a 100-pack of 80-minute CDS for $20?
Maybe you should Jon Johansen, or the people who raided his house, about that.
Fight Spammers!
Mod this guy up!
:). I further don't object paying for the distribution of the music to me (e.g. to my ISP). But it costs me about 17ukp for a CD (for those not in England, that's about the cost of 20 2L bottles of soft drink :-))! Something has to change.
As a non-earning musician, and a buyer of / listener to music, I cannot believe the approach the RIAA (et al) are taking to the "protection" of "their" intellectual "property".
There's lots of call for technology to protect information, because anything in digital format now has to be treated as extremely volatile - once it gets "out", there's no getting it back in. Here's a few examples of places where copy protection could be (but isn't) used:
* Governments & the military would dearly love to be able to keep their secrets from falling into the wrong hands. How do they do this? They try their hardest to hire responsible people they can TRUST and implement a strict heirarchy of control. Most countries have laws forbidding the betrayal of military secrets. They use encryption techniques. But they couldn't do their jobs efficiently if any sensitive material was copy-protected.
* Medical Records and other personal information - you don't want this falling into the wrong hands, but so long as you TRUST people (doctors) to keep it in the right hands, there's no problem and everyone can get on with their work.
* Examination Papers - if you're a lecturer/teacher and you prepare your examination digitally, you'll be wanting to ensure they're protected from the prying eyes of your students. In order to be used, you have to duplicate them.
So where do the record companies come in? Their product, I would argue, needs to be duplicated in order to be used (under the current concept of fair use); but they treat their customers as if each and every one of them is a criminal!
I don't object to paying for music - if I don't, I won't be provided with any more
I want free music, as in free speech. The technology exists to give it to me. The artists are happy to be heard, I'm happy to hear. But not everyone feels the same way. Most people are too used to the media selectively supplying them with whatever information they deem appropriate. They think they have choice, because they have 20 TV channels to watch! They don't see their freedom being undermined, and they won't buck the trend because they actually believe the big record producers' propoganda!
I need to calm down.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Fuck that.
/. comments here, please).
Sounds good at first, but wait 'till you drop one in the car while headed down the interstate. I have enough trouble with pulling spare change from between the bucket seats now. My big fat fingers just can't handle such small items reliably when the other hand is occupied (no off color
No thank you. I'd much rather have a media that is easier to handle.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I buy some nice brazillian or french house on vinyl for $10-$20 and then if i want it on CD, I would have to fork another $15-$30 for that medium. GUESS WHAT :) I don't. It's amazing how i can run a cable from my mixer to the line in on my sound card and from there burn a cd. That's what i think of this. Screw them :)
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
As for the inconvenient-copying problem: I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be suprised at all if there were software available that can bulk-dump CD and/or WAV audio to a DAT tape high-speed via a backup deck (many of those use DAT tape as well). Still never going to match the time requred to burn a CD, though.
Does anyone have a utility to change these bits on MP3s? I found one, but it was unreliable and screwed up some of the files, causing them to play at double speed. Are there any "MP3 Repair Kits" out there?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Not since I had a pentium-90 have I had them. And every device I've ever owned reads my CDRs.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
by lobbying for new laws such as the DMCA and the "Sony Bono" Copyright Extension Act
The senator and entertainer spelled his name Sonny Bono. If it was a typo, it's not a big one. But what an APPROPRIATE nickname for this bill! Next let's see the Philip Morris Omnibus Appropriations Bill, and the Novell Netscape Lott Antitrust Act.
[
What's the problem here?
All music that its author wants to distribute for free doesn't have the protection. Everything you do yourself is not a problem, also not protected.
This doesn't harm your rights in any way.
All it does is ensuring that people who want to get paid for their job gets so if you want their products. You are not forced to pay for something you don't want. This is a very fair deal!
Where is the problem????
Allow each song to be copied once.
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
A song could be downloaded and copied onto a mp3 player. The song on the player cannot be copied.
It can be played, though! And if it can be played, it can be copied.
The song on the hard drive cannot be copied until [...]
A song on a hard drive is a sequence of 0s and 1s. It's just a data file! Any data file can be copied, as long as there's some available room on the destination medium.
What would mess up this beautiful equation [...]
... is a good dose of ugly facts. Welcome to the real world, hope you enjoyed your stay in RIAA Fantasy Land.
In Boston, MA, USA (Just for contrast/reference) A CD costs about the same as 15-17 bottles of soda.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
I am not old enough to remember this, but can someone answer this question for me (and by doing so you will reveal your age ;-) ). Here is the question
when the tap recorder was interdicted, what was the reaction of the music industry? Did they went up in arms that everyone will now start recording from a tap? Or how about recording from a radio station?
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Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I doubt too many execs at movie companies lost too much sleep over people swapping copies of movies-taped-to-video!
Same goes for taping music from a speaker! If they could limit piracy to just that, they`d be laughing!
But wouldn't you just copy the content to a PC harddisk, pop the protection bit there and copy it back? Problem solved? I mean, it said that it would still allow copying of protected files between people, so I'm assuming here you can copy it via the 'net and as such onto your harddisk...
Doesn't anyone remember Divx? (the DVD rip-off, not the compression) A large number of educated consumers would never support products like these. The corporations just haven't figured it out yet...
From the site:
ContentKeyTM is an e-commerce and promotional tool that allows consumers to activate additional pre-recorded content on DataPlay digital media over the Internet without the need for time-consuming downloads.
So basically, ContentKey is designed for pre-recorded media, so that companies can use it like Divx. But, it does not affect the blank media that consumers can buy. Unless they implement some crazy scheme where you have to pay for the blank media AND pay for the keys, there's nobody that can stop you from putting anything and everything on those disks.
- it's write-once, which I don't find acceptable anymore. I only buy CD-RW and want the same capability in any other medium.
- it's hideously expensive, especially for a non-reusable medium.
- since it's mechanical, the reading mechanism will always be larger, more fragile, more expensive, and require more power than solid state devices
I think I would be kind of glad if this killed Napster. It would go a long way to keeping the RIAA off our backs. Sorry ppl, I would rather lose Napster than see the whole of the internet and all the computer hardware I own remotely controlled by the entertainment industry. Lets hope this thing takes off.
This "end of scarcity" thing is as false as popular.
Partly, it is true - we can make practically any number of copies of a work with practically no cost.
But.
It does not mean that the original work does not have to be created. There IS still scarcity. There are NO infinite number of works, just (virtually) infinite number of copies.
Get the difference?
So, the scarcity is STILL there, it's only the distribution cost that went down remarkably.
--
Real life is overrated.
Eventually, there will be a PC reader for these discs and someone will code something that will decrypt the filesystem and allow you to compress the music with a codec of your choice, which you can then distribute to others via Napster, GNUtella, LimeWire, or etc. It doesn't matter what "the industry" comes up with, if people want it bad enough, they'll find a way to get it.
If it's got content-control and a variety of key possibilities, and can have data stored on it, can I put my secret files on this and give keys only to people I want to be able to read it?
And if a court demands a key, can I sue them under the DMCA and have search warrents and government cracking tools declared tools for piracy?
There's got to be a problem when the government is trying to keep people from enchanging information without letting other people read it and simultaneously trying to keep people from reading information while letting other people distribute it.
On another note, check this clip from DataPlay's Company FAQ:
One thousand years of management experience? Either everyone there has 'Manager' written into their titles (don't laugh, I've seen it done), or they're harnessing Charlemagne as their CEO.Does anyone have a utility to change these bits on MP3s?
MPEG-Layer 3 Bitstream Syntax and Decoding. (It's a zipped MS Word document, so break out unzip and catdoc.
If that's too heavy, here's a simpler explanation: the MP3 header is 32 bits (bit 0 through bit 31). Bit 28 is the copyright bit, and bit 29 is the original bit. You can view them with mp3info -f '%O %o' foo.mp3. You can change them with a hex editor (set the second nybble of the fourth byte to 4, assuming the emphasis bits are 00).
If you needed to read this message to learn how to do this, I strongly suggest making a backup of the file before you edit it.
With the content control that is in this storage medium, perhaps there should be two more book titles there: 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Interesting information that you've posted there. It does kind of make me wonder though why I can't make 1 generation of digital copies of DVD soundtracks. I'm not really sure why I'd want to do that, but I did notice the other day after pushing the wrong button on my stereo that attempting to record the sound from DVD movies on my MD recorder causes it to flash "No Copy" and not record anything.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
If there is anyone writing for WB independent new media, then I think it is about time the general public got the facts - how about an article that would make this clear. Maybe Newsweek, the Economist, or the daily papers would be a good place.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
yes, the audio sucks compared to what we have today. but there's ZERO chance that any kind of copy protection can be retrofitted to the good ole' analog compactCassette.
the copy process is lossy but there's no "spy bits" or "mafia bits" you have to watch out for. plug line-out to line-in and go to town.
(I'm only half joking here. when joe consumer finally gets fed up with anti-digital-copying, this could very easily backfire and cause digital audio (dedicated) product sales to plummit)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This is a write-once media (a fact they avoid making).
Comparing it to flash memory is comparing apples & oranges. While DataPlay certainly has higher capacity, flash is completely reuseable. They solve different problems.
Comparing DataPlay to CDs tends to ignore the 20x difference in price, ubiquitousness of CD-ROM drives & CD players, upcoming CD-MP3 players/standards, and the convenient size of CDs (compact yet not easily lost).
The financial brilliance for DataPlay is that it is a consumable, which will make someone a lot of money if it catches on.
This quarter-sized write-once media certainly will have its place in the gap between flash & CD-R. The content-control aspects are moot, as the control bit WILL be squelched by some creative hacker.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It looks like DataPlay and Microsoft already have the anti-copy stuff working ;-)
The truth shall set you free!
Big deal/ If they don't make money, they go the way of the z80.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
.....for photo capture and archival. Jeez you folks are so music centric. This media is a near holy grail for the digi-cam folks. 1) Write once media so you never loose pictures 2) Extremely low cost per megabyte that allows you to use the disk as backup permenant archival. 3) Allows you to take unlimited pictures on vacation versus toting along thousands of dollars of flash memory. 4) Rugged versus flash or mini-hardrives Yeah the RIAA may love it and see it as another way to sell Led Zepp's Freebird YET AGAIN but the photo guys see it as cheap, tiny, and the answer to a lot of nagging problems.
As long as electrical engineering degrees are still legal. ;-)
I so fervently wish that dumbasses like you would get a clue, and realize that when you steal my couch I no longer have a couch. When I copy a song, the original copy remains in absolutely perfect condition, exactly as useable as it was prior to the making of the copy.
Intellectual "property" that can be non-destructively copied is only property because it's thusly defined. This idea that content creators are being cheated out of potential profits presupposes this property concept. Does that promote content creation? Maybe, but at the expense of everyones obvious freedom to make non-destructive copies of information. Why it's taken as gospel truth that the world absolutely needs content creators (and most importantly the megalomaniacal corporations that acquire and market the content) to spew forth ever-more "art" is beyond me. I don't give a rat's ass if some garage band in Idaho won't be able to create content if people freely copy their songs. Tough shit.
Until they outlaw microphones and personall sound recorders. You'll always have free music.. You may just have to pay it on a different format ( oh my no ). And speaking as a musian who gave up and now works as a programmer (Computers do rock - just not as much as Coltrane ).I feel the more they push this kind of techknology the more people will realize how there being taken advatage of, and I think this could help cause a push back to grass roots music and a end (if there is a god) to the corpurate music era.
While they don't like bootlegs made with a cam-corder, or recorded at a concert or from a CD, they tolerate them because they know generational loss will make the product lousy enough that anyone who would have paid for the real thing will do so anyway.
But if one person with a good sound setup played their copy protected music and recorded it, they'd have a digital copy so there'd be no generational loss. Then they MP3 that and release it on Napster (or AudioGalaxy, or Gnutella, etc) *without* the copyright bit set.
So exactly which filetypes have a "protected" bit in them?
If MP3 is the only format affected (in this case), and, if MP3 is to be replaced by Oogs Codpiece (never can remember the correct name for that new format), then this is a non-event.
How? By forcing the original copy to self-destruct?
The same way Minidiscs do it. Tracks can be marked as protected/copyable, protected/uncopyable, and unprotected. When recording digital out/digital in, the bits are checked, and a protected/copyable is changed to protected/uncopyable on the duplicate. Digital copies from non-MD sources are also flagged, though I don't recall the details. There's no copy protection on analog copies, but because MDs do compression there'll be steady degradation in quality the further you get from the original.
What this means is that you can make as many first-generation copies as you like, but you can't make second-generation digital copies. When MDs came out, that was regarded as plenty of protection, because you don't have a growing number of usable sources for copying.
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
i say ftriaa ( fuck the riaa) if there so great and every thing how come so many bad totally hate the recording industry, thats my insightful though today and if you don't belive me get some songs from nofx, exspecially dinosaurs will die, and tell me that they don't hate the music industry
It used to be that only a publishing company could afford the equipment and initial costs of copying. Those were the days when Copyright law was written. In those days, Copyright was enforceable.
With computers, and with their nearly instant and cost-free capability for duplication, the assumptions that the Copyright was based upon are no longer valid. Everyone is now a "publisher" with resources several orders of magnitude above what anyone could have imagined back then.
In its current state, Copyright law is impossible to enforce no matter how far people's privacy is invaded. It needs major revision.
1 bit deciding whether or not it's going to use some sort of protection? If anyone's done any type of disassembly, this doesn't seem that hard to crack.. especially we assume the mp3s are going to originate from your computer. your computer = your bits = do what you want with them (provided you know how to do it).
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
scms - a bit set in the digital stream that most consumer MD units respect. You can buy kits kill scms, they just flip a bit.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
If you have a full-duplex audio card, what's to stop you running that cable from the speaker-out port to the line-in port on THE SAME CARD? That's about as low-tech as you can get. No new gadget required :-) And quality loss would be low-to-almost-none if you used a good cable with good plugs.
Freedom: "I won't!"
If any of these copy protection schemes finally take root, what will the future see when they try to access the culture of the 21st century? Once all the readers for a particular format are gone, and the content could not be migrated forward to new media, will our culture be lost to the future? Will they see this as another "Dark Ages"?
-Eldurbarn
Good- Cheap, Holds alot, and is small. Great for digital cameras.
Bad- Will kill the market for MP3 players. No body is gonna buy a $200 device to listen to music that they have to keep rebuying every so often. Thats just insane.
If I was an artist, I would start the "Free Music Foundation"
Franklin was a man who understood the value of open, redistributable media -- for without it, America would not exist. The US did not get started by a bunch of businessmen acting in corporate interest. It was started by a large number of outraged citizens, and fueled by the leaflets and pamphlets which they continuously distributed.
Where would we be if Ben Franklin had to contend with copy protection? What if he was distributing DVDs with his message, which couldn't be played because he didn't have the money or clout to get a key from the MPAA?
We, as Americans, claim to hold freedom so dearly -- when, in fact, we destroy the very tools that make freedom possible. Try to lock down my music, and I will stick to outdated formats. Encrypt new hardware, and I'll just keep running Linux on the old stuff. Don't tread on me.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I encode my own music cds into mp3, and I suspect that most downloaded mp3s will be privately encoded as well (i.e. from others mp3 collections).
These will simply not have the protection bit set and so the 'copy protection' is rendered irrelivent. Only when they come up with some way to protect the original music source (cds / dvds etc) will we really have something to worry about - and then we'll probably find a crack within weeks (remember decss!)
D.
Big deal/ If they don't make money, they go the way of the z80.
.
;-) I used to code Z80 assembly for Sega GameGears and Nintendo Game Boys and I'll admit it was a bit scarring. (C and other language compilers for Z80 abound.) But it's bread and butter stuff. And still serious profit for all involved. Don't be slaggin' the Z80!
You sure you want to use that analogy?! We should all be so lucky yourself to have a product that "way of the Z80"! The Z80 is/was a fantastically pervasive and successful product. It's still a cash cow for Zilog after 25 years. There are gazillions of them in use. It has tons of unforseen applications and spin-offs. Just ask any kid over the last 12 years including today that plays a Nintendo Game Boy (color or otherwise).
Here are a bunch of Z80s and dev tools you can buy
An interesting offering from Zilog themself: an embedded Z80 web server.
And if you need 32-bit address space for your app, there's a Z80 object-code compatible Z380 in the family.
Okay, end of Z80 rant!
All content protection schemes are based upon one or more secrets created by a small group of people that represent a finite amount of intellectual capitol.
Once a content protection scheme is released to the world, a VASTLY greater, and in some ways unlimited, amount of intellectual capitol is brought to bear upon cracking it's secrets.
The fallacy continuously proffered by the content-protection "industry", is that "our PHD's are the best money can buy". Sadly, this is irrelevant.
ALL OF THESE SCHEMES ARE ARTIFACTS OF HUMAN INVENTION, AND HENCE, ARE SUBJECT TO COMPRIMISE BY OTHER HUMANS.
It is time for our society to abandon this childish game of intellectual protectionism and one-upsmanship and realize that COPYRIGHT is no longer a viable moral OR legal concept.
I have spoken. No further posts are required.
-END TRANSMISSION-
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
The Consumer Electronics Show is like a strip club for geeks. Really though! For instance:
GeekBeta: Man, my girlfriend is going to kill me for going to a place like this.
GeekAlpha: Come on, just chill out, enjoy the scenery...
GeekBeta: Ok, but I feel guilty. Jessica says I neglect her too much and spend too much time at *cough* electronic shows...
GeekAlpha: Damn! Look at the Linux on that one!
Announcer: Everyone, say hello to Yopitta, the mobile Linux workstation which fits on your lap!
*screems from the crowd* Woooo!!!! TAKE IT OFF!!! Take off the dust jacket!!!
GeekAlpha: Lets see her booty! I mean, lets see her boot!
If I buy (or sell) a cd or tape at a garage sale (yard sale, moving sale, whaterver you call it), it is untaxed and there are no royalties of any kind. How does this fit into the RIAA's grand scheme of things? If they don't approve of garage sales, does it mean that eventually they too will be under attack? If they do, then is there really that much difference between these sales and music trading that goes on at napster? They don't get money either way.
Personally, I have never bought music in a store for myself in my life. I go to a lot of garage sales where with some luck I can find something I want for $1 instead of $15. I don't care about quality that much anyways so I normally just do an analog rip from the tape to mp3. Then I don't care where I got it from.
I do use napster, but either to learn about bands I hadn't heard of, such as TMBG, and then if I see their music at the sales I may or may not buy it, or I will use it to find music that is hard to find (yes I have looked in the music stores, just not bought anything), such as music from old movies (such as Paint Your Wagon and South Pacific) or just strange stuff (stargate sg1 theme, speach from braveheart).
I don't see DataPlay as too much of a problem. If I could find the music I wanted for a resonable price, I would buy it. Does anybody have any idea how much these things will cost if you buy them with music already on them? How much does the player/burner for these cost? If you copy your existing mp3's to them, do they still have the contentkey?
Well, I have to get to class so if I think of anything else I'll post it later.
Drummer beat & piper blow,Harper strike & soldier go,Free the flame & sear the grasses,Till the dawning Red
This thing have been coming soon for over a year now. Sounds like vaporware. Anyway, just because it support SDMI, does't meen one has to use it. You can always rip your cd's on your computer using a program that doesn't support sdmi and then copy the files over. And if you buy a disk with music it still doesn't matter, if you can hear it you can rip it. Saif
It has wires to trasnfer files doesn't it? If it's not USB then the trend would be to buy pirate adaptor cables like people buy pirate cable boxes. But it will be even more common for techies as it's only a cable. Once the thing is hooked up to a computer the computer can encode the files however it likes as whatever encryption will be broken. If the machines know how to break the encryption then crackers will break them open to learn their secrets. I give any encryption scheme six months tops on the market. And to all the crackers out there. Don't fall for their reward challenges. Wait until they get it on the market and then milk the SOB's until too many crackers figure it out. If they keep replacing the encryption scheme every six months they won't be able to sell units since who is going to buy a $200 dollar unit that is going to be useless so quickly?
If some giant like Sony, with its PR power, hardware developers, and advertisement were able to get it without a copy control, and then pass it off as a multiformat disk, then DataPlay would be finished in the first place. It kinda like the whole business with hard drives being able to keep people from pirating copyrighted music....
I think you are partially right. RIAA willbe gone soon.The idea that an artist can not create without having a limo, gold chains, and a 4 million dollar house is wrong. Art should never be a business. Art will expand, not contract in an open universe. The curent system rewards a few artists that market great, but have marginal talent. Imagine a world where the song is more important than the image. Coming to a world near you!
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
This is a fairly long and comprehensive statement from one of the EFF members regarding the whole matter. It is fairly long but makes a good reading. Seems like EFF is the one who fights for your rights. From: Michael Pearce (mp@moonmac.com) Subject: The new copy protection initiatives will hurt us all Newsgroups: fa.music.ecto Date: 2001-01-21 13:26:08 PST Sorry to fill an entire digest with this one post, folks, but this is the best all-around summary of the problems facing us as music and video consumers in the future. His points are very well organized and answer many of the unstated fears and criticisms we have had. This is making the rounds of the net like wildfire. Something very good may come of it. Be sure to pass it on. Michael ---------- Forwarded message ---------- This is a very good rundown of what you can expect out of consumer electronics over the next few years. Customers will have no rights, except the right to remain silent... [BTW, John Gilmore is one of the founders of the EFF. Ron Rivest is the "R" in RSA.] Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 17:06:07 -0800 From: John Gilmore To: cryptography@c2.net Cc: Ron Rivest , gnu@toad.com Subject: What's Wrong With Content Protection Ron Rivest asked me: > I think it would be illuminating to hear your views on the > differences between the Intel/IBM content-protection proposals > and existing practices for content protection in the TV > scrambling domain. The devil's advocate position against your > position would be: if the customer is willing to buy extra, or > special, hardware to allow him to view protected content, what is > wrong with that? There is nothing wrong with allowing people to optionally choose to buy copy-protection products that they like. What is wrong is when people who would like products that simply record bits, or audio, or video, without any copy protection, can't find any, because they have been driven off the market. By restrictive laws like the Audio Home Recording Act, which killed the DAT market. By "anti-circumvention" laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which EFF is now litigating. By Federal agency actions, like the FCC deciding a month ago that it will be illegal to offer citizens the capability to record HDTV programs, even if the citizens have the legal right to. By private agreements among major companies, such as SDMI and CPRM (that later end up being "submitted" as fait accompli to accredited standards committees, requiring an effort by the affected public to derail them). By private agreements behind the laws and standards, such as the unwritten agreement that DAT and MiniDisc recorders will treat analog inputs as if they contained copyrighted materials which the user has no rights in. (My recording of my brother's wedding is uncopyable, because my MiniDisc decks act as if I and my brother don't own the copyright on it.) Pioneer New Media Technologies, who builds the recently announced recordable DVD drive for Apple, says "The major consumer applications for recordable DVD will be home movie editing and storage and digital photo storage". They carefully don't say "time-shifting TV programs, or recording streaming Internet videos", because the manufacturers and the distribution companies are in cahoots to make sure that that capability NEVER REACHES THE MARKET. Even though it's 100% legal to do so, under the Supreme Court's _Betamax_ decision. Streambox built software that let people record RealVideo streams on their hard disks; they were sued by Real under the DMCA, and took it off the market. According to Nomura Securities, DVD Recorder sales will exceed VCR sales in 2004 or 2005, and also exceed DVD Player-only sales by 2005. (http://www.kipinet.com/tdb/1000/10tdb04.htm) So by 2010 or so, few consumers will have access to a recorder that will let them save a copy of a TV program, or time-shift one, or let the kids watch it in the back of the car. Is anyone commenting on that social paradigm shift? Do we think it's good or bad? Do we get any say about it at all? Instead, consumers will have to pay movie/TV companies over and over for the privilege of time-shifting or space-shifting. Even if they have purchased the movie, and it's stored at home on their own eqiupment, and they have high bandwidth access to it from wherever they are. This concept is called "pay per use". It can't compete with "You have the right to record a copy of what you have the right to see". These companies can't eliminate that right legally, because it would violate too many of the fundamentals of our society, so they are restricting the technology so you can't EXERCISE that right. In the process they ARE violating the fundamentals on which a stable and just society is based. But as long as society survives until after they're dead, they don't seem to care about its long-term stability. What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your OWN disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your OWN recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product. It isn't just Apple who is misleading the consumer; it's epidemic. Sony portable mini-disc recorders only come with digital INPUT jacks, never digital OUTPUTS. Sound checks in -- but only checks out in low-quality analog formats. Intel touts the wonders of their TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Architecture). You have to read between the lines to discover that it exists solely to spy on how you use your PC, so that any random third party across the Internet can decide whether to "trust" you -- the owner. TCPA isn't about reporting to YOU whether you can trust your own PC (e.g. whether it has a virus), it doesn't include that function. It exists to report to record companies about whether you have installed any software that lets you make copies of MP3s, or any free software to circumvent whatever feeble copy-protection system the record company uses. Intel is pushing HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) which is high speed hardware encryption that runs only on the cable between the computer and its CRT or LCD monitor. The only signal being encrypted is the one that the user is sitting there watching, so why is it encrypted? So that the user can't record what they can view! If the cable is tampered with, the video chip degrades the signal to "analog VCR quality". Intel is also pushing SDMI and CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media) which would turn your own storage media (disk drives, flash ram, zip disks, etc) into co-conspirators with movie and record companies, to deny you (the owner of the computer and the media) the ability to store things on those media and get them back later. Instead some of the stored items would only come back with restrictions wired into the extraction software -- restrictions that are not under the control of the equipment owner, or of the law, but are matters of contract between the movie/record companies and the equipment/software makers. Such as, "you can't record copyrighted music on unencrypted media". If you try to record a song off the FM radio onto a CPRM audio recorder, it will refuse to record or play it, because it's watermarked but not encrypted. Even when recording your own brand-new original audio, the default settings for analog recordings are that they can never be copied, nor ever copied in higher fidelity than CD's, and that only one copy can be made even if copying is ever authorized (if the other restrictions are somehow bypassed). Intel and IBM don't tell you these things; you have to get to Page 11 of Exhibit B-1, "CPPM Compliance Rules for DVD-Audio" on page 45 of the 70-page "Interim CPRM/CPPM Adopters Agreement", available only after you fill out intrusive personal questions after following the link from http://www.dvdcca.org/4centity/ . All Intel tells you that CPPM will "give consumers access to more music" (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/a w032300.htm). Lying
to your customers to mislead them into buying your products is wrong.
What is wrong is when scientific researchers are unable to study the
field or to publish their findings. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton
studied the SDMI "watermarking" systems in some detail, as part of a
public study deliberately permitted by the secretive SDMI committee,
so they could determine whether the public could crack their chosen
schemes. (SDMI would not allow EFF to join its deliberations, saying
that we had no legitimate interest in the proceedings because we
weren't a music company or a manufacturer. There are no consumer or
civil rights representatives in the SDMI consortium.) Prof. Felten
was in the New York Times last week, saying the SDMI people and
Princeton's lawyers are now telling him that he can't release his
promised details on what was wrong with these watermarking systems,
because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's OK to tell the
SDMI companies how easy it is to break their scheme, but it isn't OK
to tell the public or other scientific researchers.
What is wrong is when competitors are unable to build competing
devices or software, vying for the favor of the consumers in the free
market. Instead those devices are banned or threatened, and that
software is censored and driven underground. Such as the open-source
DeCSS and LiViD DVD player programs. Such as DVD players worldwide
that can play American "Region 1" DVDs. EFF spent more than a million
dollars last year in defending the publisher of a security magazine,
and a Norwegian teenager, from movie industry attempts to have them
censored and jailed, respectively, for publishing and writing
competing software that lets DVDs be played or copied but does not
follow the restrictive contracts that the movie studios imposed on
most players. The movie studios spent $4 million on prosecuting the New
York case alone. Few or no manufacturers are willing to put ordinary
digital audio recorders on the market -- you see lots of MP3 *players*
but where are the stereo MP3 *recorders*? They've been chilled into
nonexistence by the threat of lawsuits. The ones that claim to
record, record only "voice quality monaural".
What is wrong is when the controls that are enacted to protect the
rights reserved under copyright are used for other purposes. Not to
protect the existing rights, but to create new rights at the whim of
the copyright holder. Movie companies insisted on a "region coding"
system for DVDs, because they would make less money if DVD movies were
actually tradeable worldwide under existing free-trade laws. (They
couldn't charge high theatre ticket prices if the same movie was
simultaneously available on DVDs, and they couldn't combine the ad
campaigns of the theatres and the DVDs if they waited a long time
between releasing it to theatres and releasing it to DVDs.) This
system results in the situation where a consumer can buy a DVD player
legally, buy a DVD legally, and put the two together, and the movie
won't play. The user has every legal right to view the movie, but it
won't play, because if it did, movie companies might make less money.
Similar controls exist in DVDs to prevent people from fast-forwarding
past the ads or those nonsensical "FBI Warnings".
Microsoft built some deliberately incompatible protocols into Windows
2000 so that competing Unix machines could not be used as DNS servers
in some circumstances. Microsoft released a specification but only
under an encrypted file format that claimed to require that readers
agree not to use the information to compete with them. When someone
decrypted the trivial encryption WITHOUT agreeing to the terms,
Microsoft threatened to use the DMCA to sue Slashdot, the popular
free-software news web site, who published the results. (Luckily for
us, Slashdot has a backbone and said "go ahead, we'll defend that
suit" and Microsoft chickened out.) Copyright doesn't grant the right
to prevent competition, or to restrict global trade -- but somehow the
legislation that was enacted to protect copyrights is being used to do
just those things.
What is wrong is when social policy is created in smoke-filled back
rooms, between movie/record company executives and computer company
executives, not by open public discussion, by legislatures, and by
courts. The CPRM specification, for example, allows a distributor of
a bag of bits (who has access to software with this capability) to
decide that future recipients will not be permitted to make copies of
that bag of bits. Or that two copies are permitted, but not three.
This policy is not legally enforceable, it was not created by law.
The law says something different. But the policy will be enforced by
equipment built by all the major manufacturers, because they will be
sued by the movie/record companies if they dare to build interoperating
equipment that lets consumers make THREE copies, or copies limited only
by their legal rights. Is it unexpected that such back-room policies
end up favoring the parties who were in the room, at the expense
of consumers and the public?
What is wrong is when the balance between the rights of creators and
the rights of freedom of speech and the press is lost. Because any
increase in the rights of creators is a DECREASE in the public's right
of free speech and publication. Whenever copyrights are extended, the
public domain shrinks. The right of criticism, the right to dispute
someone else's rendition of the truth, is damaged. The First
Amendment gives an almost absolute right to publish; the Copyright
clause gives a limited right to prevent publication by others. Any
expansion of the right to prevent publication diminishes the right to
publish. For example, nothing that was created after 1910 has entered
the public domain, because as the years went by, the term of copyright
kept getting extended. But the copy-rights created by technological
restrictions are not even designed to end. There is nothing in the
SDMI or CPRM spec that says, "After 2100 you will be permitted to copy
the movies from 1910".
What is wrong is that a tiny tail of "copyright protection" is wagging
the big dog of communications among humans. As Andy Odlyzko pointed
out, (http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html, see "Content
is not king" and "The history of communications and its implications
for the Internet"), "The annual movie theater ticket sales in the
U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that
much money every two weeks!" Distorting the law and the technology of
human communication and computing, in order to protect the interests
of copyright holders, makes the world poorer overall. Even if it
didn't violate fundamental policies for the long-term stability of
societies, it would be the wrong economic decision.
What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate
scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those
who profit from scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind
of information that can be compactly represented in digital media. We
can replicate it worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs,
affordable by individuals. We are working hard on technologies that
will permit other sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily,
including arbitrary physical objects ("nanotechnology"; see
http://www.foresight.org). The progress of science, technology, and
free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A
hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using
outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now
even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat,
clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires
of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical
want in the near future.
We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth!
Instead, those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating
scarcity are sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our
cheap duplication technology so that it WON'T make copies -- at least
not of the kind of goods THEY want to sell us. This is the worst sort
of economic protectionism -- beggaring your own society for the
benefit of an inefficient local industry. The record and movie
distribution companies are careful not to point this out to us, but
that is what is happening.
If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as
copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So
that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that
furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds
and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders
won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be
duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would
cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them
underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples'
jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural
advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly
overtake the rest of society?
I think we should embrace the era of plenty and work out how to
mutually live in it. I think we should work on understanding how
people can make a living by creating new things and providing
services, rather than by restricting the duplication of existing
things. That's what I've personally spent ten years doing, founding a
successful free software support company. That company, Cygnus
Solutions, annually invests more than $10 million into writing
software, giving it away freely, and letting anyone modify or
duplicate it. It funds that by collecting more than $25 million from
customers, who benefit from having that software exist and be reliable
and widespread. The company is now part of Red Hat, Inc -- which also
makes its living by empowering its customers without restricting the
duplication of its work. It's no coincidence that the open source,
free software, and Linux communities are among the first to become
alarmed at copy protection. They are actively making their livings or
hobbies out of eliminating scarcity and increasing freedom in the
operating system and application software markets. They see the real
improvement in the world that results -- and the ugly reactions of the
monopolistic and oligopolistic forces that such efforts obsolete.
Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task.
Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the
entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers.
We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are *prepared* to end
scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil
unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of
plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the
industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and
video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced
by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and
thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models
and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when
their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication
ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would
send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that
the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain
our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of
positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them
whirling like so many autumn leaves.
This may be a longer discussion than you wanted, Ron, but as you can
see, I think there are a lot of things wrong with how copy protection
techologies are being foisted on an unsuspecting public. I'd like to
hear from you a similar discussion. Being devil's advocate for a
moment, why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the
balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free
markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and
the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be
able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse. I await
your response.
John Gilmore
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Try telling that to the people who buy "consumer" Minidisc recorders, record their own music, then try to make a digital copy of it to another MD unit.
:) (on another note, it has been said that any other industry that had racketeering going on like the music industry would find the people involved spending lots of time turning big rocks into small rocks. But that's beside the point.)
Guess what? They can't. The unit assumes that anything recorded is "copyrighted" and thus, refuses to copy it. Or, for even more fun, try to find a consumer MD unit that even has a digital input.
The problem is, these companies wish to have things their way, at any expense to society or the consumer. Economic principle states that if one is selling things at monopoly rate (e.g. - RIAA and members), one is harming society due to the cost of the material not being equal to the cost that went into it. Or close. It's been a while since I had that class.
Regardless, the final point with me, and this has been brought up lots and lots of times by others, is that I resent being treated like a criminal from day one. To me what DataPlay (and other proprietary media companies) is doing is just like me going and buying a set of tools. When I go to buy these tools, I am told that since some people use tools for bad things, there is going to be someone who goes everywhere with me from now on, whenever I have the tools that I'm buying, and keeps an eye on me to make sure I use the tools nicely. And, since I want these tools, it's only fair that I pay for that person to come along and keep an eye on me (this is like the additional fee that gets included in the cost of the music due to the proprietary "DRM" people that want their cut).
That, sir, is the problem.
Personally, I would rather save that 10 bucks and spend a bigger chunk of money on something that doesn't have copyprotection and lets me rewrite (Compact flash, Iomega Clik, heck...CD-RW even).
Steve
One minor problem - If the crippled disks are sold at such a price loss, what's to stop people from finding a way to use them as unencrypted storage? If people will practically drive NetPliance insane for a 80%(approx) price break, what will they do to make their 1000% cheaper disks work with regular players?
Oh, I forgot - The DMCA. [Grin!]
Here's to using personal greed to fight corporate greed!
Probably because it is just as techinically impossible as protecting "their" data, and there is no market for trying to pretend otherwise.
Face it, the problem with both is that the data is useless unless an untrusted individual can read it. The big evil company can then copy it, and so can the little evil music pirate.
My machine must be broken, I tried "save as" on several corporate web pages and it worked. Gee, those poor souls, they are out of business!
Actually, it would be more like "new high tech locks twart theives!". What everyone's problem is, is that you need a new-fangled key to open the lock. If you loose your key, you can't get a new one because it is assumed that you are a thief. And even if you could get a new one, in 10 years your new lock will be obsolete and new-fangled keys wont even be made anymore. We don't really want to be forced into buying a new house. And I bet the DMCA makes it illegal to go through a window to get in.
> Is DataPlay the next big thing, or
> something to avoid?
Moving the conversation from SDMI, which is just a technology good for keeping honest people honest...
In general, people should be somewhat leery of rotating drives for digital content storage.
Rotating drives simply consume too much power for battery-powered apps-- you have to drive a motor and a laser. I picked up a Dataplay datasheet at CES and power dissipation figures were curiously absent.
Furthermore, to make a Dataplay-ready device, I have to assume that manufacturers will have to incorporate a proprietary drive slot, adding to the cost. Ergo, to reap the cost/MB benefits of a Dataplay disk, a consumer has to swallow the hidden cost of the special drive. Consumers like cheap, though. Sure, flash memory may be costly, but the slot costs practically nothing thanks to the existence of standards bodies like the CompactFlash Association.
In short, Dataplay (and Iomega's HipPocketWhateverzip, by extension) are gonna get creamed if the following comes to pass-- The introduction of a low-cost, high-capacity, solid-state technology that uses standard flash slots (CompactFlash, SmartMedia, etc.)
Based on what any self-respecting tech-head reads in the trades, this isn't too far off, right? For example, process shrinks (0.13-micron and below?) are making it possible to produce chips with higher densities and at higher volumes. The first chips to be run on such processes will be memories, since companies will test out a process with a memory product first before qualifying it to make other products.
All things considered, I fall into the "avoid" camp, myself. From a silicon and hardware perspective, there are just too many nifty advancements on the horizon. I'd love to hear what Slashdotters might have to offer from a hardware and design perspective.
Regardless of the sotrage medium, at some point the sound of the music has to be released into the air so my ears can hear it.
.wav on napster, or streamed it through shoutcast, the RIAA would be able to trace this specific file back to you, and sue you for the "millions" of lost profits.
While it's true that the keys can expire, so that the music would not be playable if you recorded the wav back onto one of these devices, a corallary use would be to track you down. For instance, if you shared this
While this isn't terribly efficient of the RIAA in getting cash, it will be effective in slowing down the average joe once they see 200 arrests of those evil mp3 sharers.
And one point: I totally agree with the RIAA that duplicates of these songs should not be given away for free. That's wrong, no matter how the RIAA is treating the artists. I completely disagree with the idea of buying a "license" of my music, however, and the concept of expiring music really ticks me off.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I have no use for a device with content control. In a market with competition a variant of such a device without the content control will soon emerge or the invention will simply vaporize (like most storage related inventions seem to do). I read slashdot regularly and anouncements of the next generation storage devices (holographic storage, new and improved optical storage, better harddrive) are about as frequent as discussion on Gnu licenses issues. So, my guess is that this will failed(provided it ever evolves into a product which I doubt). BTW. 500 Mb isn't even close to the actual size of my mp3 collection, I need something larger.
Nothing to worry about. A good chunk of the copyrighted Mp3's out there don't even have that bit set. Hell, even the Rio does copy protection like that. If ther'es a copyrighted bit set on the ID3 Tag, and yes, it's there, the software won't copy the file over(or atleast in the Windows version.) and personally, I don't see any difference. 10 bucks for 500 Megs? Rewriteable and portable? Sign my ass up for that. And pray to god they make the tech for this an open spec.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Gee. It's as if we hadn't had those for awhile already... Minidiscs do exactly that. And they're edging more toward $2.50 per cart. There's a bunch of players that are happy to pretend they're a Rio, too, so you can just write MP3 files's to them, and they're internally converted.
-Andrew
Well, if you judge MP3 players as ONLY being the solid-state type, then you are accurate. But, the new trend in MP3 portable is CD-R based.
Both Rio and Pine have models out now, and TDK is releasing one soon. Here's a little on my experience with my new RioVolt (sweet)...
Battery life is 10-15 hours with MP3 disks (the CD spins up and buffers 2 megs, then stops), and each CD holds somewhere around 10 hours of music in 160kbps MP3 format. I can organize by directory and have the machine spin through a specific directory only, or the whole 100+ song CD.
The devices are costing 150-200 USD, and the CDRs are the usual 75 cents or so in bulk. So, to use your example of 50-60 CDs worth of music: about 5 bucks in media, on 5 or 6 disks. Admittedly, a CDR is a bit bulkier than an MD, and this MDLP sounds pretty snazzy, but MD has such a history of being overpriced, I wonder if it will catch on.
Illegitimi non carborundum
Have a look at Schlock Mercenary. There you'll learn how to treat them. The server already has problems, so be nice... *g*
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Well, the industry already has a big profit margin on CDs. Given that the cost of pressing a CD is minuscule (a few pennies) and the final cost is about $15 which gives something like a 1000% markup, what would the new album cost if it was $10 just for the media? If they were to maintain their markup it would be quite expensive.
...and you know it :-)
:-)
The ink in the cartridge is a limited resource - it runs out, and there's nothing you can do about it. Once it does, and it's physically not there any more, you have to buy more.
The data on the disk (or in the flash RAM, or wherever) is unlimited - no matter how many times I read it, it'll still be there (barring the physical destruction of the medium in/on which it resides). The only way for it to "run out" is for the manufacturer to make it run out; that's an artificial restriction.
Stop trying to play devil's advocate
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Can somebody start a company which will provide publishing and distribution services for artists and still opt to ignore the RIAA and DMCA?
An Interesting question comes to my mind.
Can the key be "revoked" in this system by the copyright holder at any time under this proposed system?
Imagine if you will, a MS secure content channel that checks with the content owner or other Central Body ( i.e. RIAA, Government, Congressional Wives Against Sound... ) and allows the key to be revoked or corrupted.
Someone decides band X is bad, book Y is immoral, or movie Z is subversive then the system could refuse to allow play and that's the best case what if the system some how corrupts the key or data.
Poof instant Media Ban/Book Burning.
Talk about an invention that could set back all the progress of the Printing Press in just a few years.
Hmmm.
"Why would anyone want a long sharp pointy stick anyway?"
I love Betamax. I enjoy changing tapes when watching Superman III. That Richard Pryor cracks me up every time... ESPECIALLY when he isn't allowed to curse.
What do you mean? I use this- http://www.minidisco.com/minispecs/maudioco3.html.
Bunch of neat features... I use it to screw up the SMCS (What mini-discs use for digital copy protection) and it filters out the signals that says "Hey this is already a digital copy, don't copy me" =]
There's a lot of other boxes that do that, but that's the one I use..
For more info about killing SMCS and other MD cracking/hacking, go here- http://www.minidisc.org/part_hacking.html
I just want to take this short little moment that I have to make a point. You wrote:
"The issue here is the failure of capitalism in its current form to deal with this form of distribution.
Yes, there are problems with this, but we should be looking at this as an opportunity, not a reason to be clinging to irrelevant paradigms."
It excites me to see that someone believes this music issue is a failure of capitalistic distribution. I totally agree. You made a reference to food scarcity. The fact is that there is not scarcity of food. The problem is with capitalism, and its current system of distribution.
What should happen is that food, medicine, and other important things get distributed like MP3s. The world would be an infinitly better place is capitalization wasn't driving the rich countries to exccess.
Everyone should see this post first.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Also, I'm not even sure that many stand-alone CD recorders check the bits.
The RIAA is proving, with their proponency of such technology as this, that they don't give a rat's ass about Fair Use...all they care about is lining their pockets and those of their attorneys, and giving what little is left over to the artists they "represent."
What I'm really curious about, though, is how they plan to implement their apparent intent... a "pay per play" model...on commercial radio. Are we going to wind up with thousands of high-power, stereo talk radio stations? IMO, that's where things will wind up if their current push is continued.
No, I won't buy into this one. Like others who have mentioned it, I remember DIVX, and how long it didn't last, and why.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Copy Protection is an inevitable part of the future. And it should be. And I hope that the law protects the protection schemes.
With that said...
Most devices and media have some form of copy protection on them to this day. You cannot have a glimmer of hope without it. And if you don't and still succeed, the VC's will insist that it be added if you want some funding. (Or the RIAA will fund it just to get Copy Protection added).
The ability to duplicate bits is not a right, but a skill. If they copy protect the bits, and I am one of 100 people who can copy the bits now, I have a marketable skill. (Gee, isn't that basically what the record companies do?) And I personally don't believe that everyone out there needs to know the "skill" of copying bits.
I do hope that the law protects them, because the CP technology is bound to be minimum as long as they have "The Law" to protect them. If they had to rely on technology alone to keep me out, they'd probably hire some guy who's tons smarter than me, and I'll wind up paying for someone else's skill.
In short, I'd rather they keep putting deadbolts on straw doors and not progress to putting a padlock on a metal chest.
No man is so defenseless as when he believes himself safe.
If you want to hit someone in the nose, aim for the back of their head.
~Jason
does anybody else remember when music was about art and expression? when it didn't matter if you got paid? I guess the quality (and i use that term as loosely as is humanly possible) of today's music is just another symptom of capitalism invading one of the few remaining sacred things in life. Frankly i don't care about getting my music for free or not but with money driving everything the prerequisites for getting a record contract have shifted dramatically from those of talent to those of profitability, and frankly that sucks.
You report, Slashdot decides
Prevueing you're poast ownly hellps iff ewe no how two spel inn teh furst plase
$10 500MB drive! It become the cheapest removable next to tape drive. If everyone remember the Sony 4mm beta tape, Sony sale more 4mm tape for data backup than video recording. If Dataplay convert it to a removable drive for computer, they have a better margin than dealing with RIAA.
I won't buy it, nobody will buy it, simply because copy is impossible with it. So it's doomed.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
- Music will be more expensive. If we assume a typical CD contains 12 tracks and costs $15, that's $1.25 per track. I doubt the cost of a key to play a track will be that cheap. Plus, the keys are only good for a certain amount of time. That $1.25 is a one-time fee allowing you to listen as many times as you want.
- More complicated and inconvenient audio systems. Right now, all one has to do is pop a disc into a player and start it up. With DataPlay, you'll have to go buy (or re-buy) a key first.
- Space-shifting will be more expensive. You take your new disc over to a friend's house only to find out you have to buy another key to play it on their system.
- You might have to hide your player. If manufacturers came up with some kind of automatic payment system to make key purchases easier, you might have to lock away your hardware to prevent a family member or friend from inadvertently charging your credit card through the roof.
- What if you accidentally put in the wrong disc and get charged for something you didn't mean to play?
- What if a record company sells the rights to a song and the receiving party has different listening terms? What if the company decides they want people to listen to certain songs (e.g. newer ones) and they stop selling keys for others?
- The record companies can track which songs you listen to, what devices you use, and when and where you use them. Get ready for a lot more spam.
- What about competition? Right now you can visit five different stores and probably see five different prices for the same CDs. Are DataPlay keys going to be sold competitively or is it going to be another monopoly?
- What about billing errors? What if charges show up for songs you've never listened to? How will you prove it?
- What happens if a song is owned by a small studio and that studio goes out of business? Will you be unable to buy anymore keys for their songs?
- The signal has to be converted to analog at some point. It won't take long for people to disassemble their crypto-speakers and hard-wire a link to a conventional recording system. It only takes one person with the right electronics to rip a studio-quality version of a song. Since there are legitimate uses for such electronics, it will be difficult to prosecute.
I think there will be many such attempts at controlling access to products. Will it ever end? Only time will tell.Also, try explaining to your little one why they can't listen to their favorite Disney soundtrack because money is tight and you can't afford a key right now.
Also, what happens if your player is stolen and you don't report it right away (maybe you got robbed when you were away on vacation)? Are you still liable for charges generated?
- Milo Hyson
i agree completly. i (know a friend) owning over 50 divx movies. this same friend had 2 mp3s chopped up with "chainsaw" in chunks and carried them around on 1.44...lol. they are SO here to stay. if it works? why is the market going to be dumb and WASTE money on things they already own. don't mp3's take out stuff from wav files we don't hear anyways? Man am "I" missing out on all that stuff i didn't hear anyways. quality doesn't mean all that much. hell, i listen to my radio and don't complain. mp3 seems better then that with no commercials. how could anyone argue that? this same friend (not me by the way) owns over 2400 mp3s (had cable for a while) and won't give them up for some other device that isin't free. if napster closes, hotline will boost back up (www.bigredh.com for hotline by the way). best anime warez i know of anyways! lol. blue_tiger9@hotmail.com
I can't WAIT for my virtual food to come out. Oh MAN am I hungry! *sniff*
>Too bad the quality is crap.
Not any more, it's been vastly improved. In my experience, when someone says "the quality is crap", what they're actually saying is "I haven't actually listened to a modern high quality MD recording - just the older stuff".
For some types of sound, 256kbps at a higher sample rate can exceed CD quality. Of course, you won't be looking at that on a consumer portable device, but the fallacy of assuming that compression is a bad thing while ignoring whether or not file sizes are restricted, annoys me. (ie, an uncompressed BMP image might require 100kb. Think of this as uncompressed CD music. A jpeg of the same image can be merely 20kb (ie MD relative to CD), yet be at a higher resolution despite the filesize, and depending on the type of image, that gain in resolution can offer more additional visual detail than the loss from the introduction of subtle compression artefacts.
This isn't a real-world issue however, because the kind and quality of sound reproduction gear you need to be able to hear the difference between a good, modern MD and a CD, is not what you'll be using anyway - the whole point of MD is portable sound, and if you've got the unit in your pocket, listening to your music through earphones, then you're imagining any loss of quality - MD delivers much better than your earphones do.
The main reason was because, although congress agreed that widespread sale of equipment solely for the purpose of copying digital audio would harm the music industry unfairly, that there should be no reason any regulations such as this should hurt the infantile home computing industry.
That would be great if you could, thanks.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
dump audio to DAT drive http://www.ncf.ca/~aa571/index.html
At the risk of sounding immodest, there are solutions to allow Napster (or other PtoP systems) to exist, folks to still make a profit, and ANONYMOITY PRESERVED (the latter is a notable lack in most of the current systems I've heard about). Take a look at my paper in http://www.cs.orst.edu/~budd/digbat.pdf Imagine the following scenairo. Your average garage band spends $200 to get a registration number and the software needed to encode their music for distribution. They put up a web page and start sharing their music. Thousands (well, manybe dozens) of people download their music and play it on their computers. Magically royalities start coming back to the garage band, in proportion to the degree to which their music is listened to. And yet there is no registration, nobody knows who is listeneing to what music (You really don't want Napster or EMI to know that you really like Britney Spears now, do you??). It can work. take a look.
It doesn't seem to matter much if the thing you stole was a copy of data or not. It is still wrong.
Is it okay to steal from a home-grown software business who can barely survive? No? But it's sure okay to use stolen Microsoft aps because they're evil.
You certainly seem like an intelligent person. So, I still cannot see why you need to use third-rate logic when attacking this issue.
I think you're just a cheap /. siccophant who is willing to throw integrity out the window and villify large music companies because you don't want to pay for your crappy corporate music.
Enjoy your stolen crap, boys.