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The Bride Of Macrovision
Marty writes: "Coming soon to a CD near you, Safeaudio, the Bride of Macrovision. Those wonderful people at Macrovision, who brought us such wonderful technological innovations as, well, macrovision copy protection on VHS tapes, is now taking a stab at the CD market with a new scheme called Safeaudio. The press release about the beta test can be seen here, which I found initially on Stereophile. It's designed to prevent copying of audio CDs to a CD-R (no technical details are given). Might as well get rid of that whole pesky fair use provision of copyright law, right? After all, according to Macrovision, "We believe that SAFEAUDIO provides an opportunity for the music industry to regain the billions of dollars lost to unauthorized casual copying." Better we all buy multiple copies of the same CD so we can keep one in the car, one at work, one at home so the music corporations can regain their rightful billions that we've stolen by making personal copies or compilation CDs for our own use."
We're not opposed to copy protection; we're opposed to big business trying to remove our rights through copy protection.
When you buy a CD you are buying the right to listen to the music on the CD. The law gives you the right to copy the music for your own use, i.e. it's legal to make a copy to keep in the car and a copy to keep at work. You can also rip the data off of the CD and make an MP3 from it, then write the data out and listen to it somewhere else. These are your rights as provided for by the 'fair use' provisions of the copyright act.
The RIAA (and the MPAA when it comes to movies) doesn't particularly like that. They'd rather have you buy a copy for home and another copy for work and another copy for the car. In fact, if they could tie a CD to a given player and make you buy a seperate copy for each one you own, they probably would. But they can't. Copyright law protects the consumer as well as the producer. So the only answer is to make it technically difficult to make a copy.
Seems awfully convenient, doesn't it? Coupled with the DMCA, it becomes illegal (since you've got to circumvent copy protection) to make a legal, fair-use copy of something you've got the rights to. But then, I'm just a greedy music pirate that cares nothing for the poor starving record companies.
-kaosmunkee
"Keep your rights out of the way of my profits!" -- R. Iaa, Record Company Executive
Also not a lawyer. But I'm in the content creation side of the biz and I make it my business to know something about copyright. Fair use is generally the side of copyright that covers the protection of the greater good. The state of the art. It allows you to use works to create transformative works (the biggest example is parody) it also allows you to use snippets (or possibly complete works) for educational use (videos in classrooms) or for review/comment purposes (either to say it's a good/bad piece of work, here's a snippet to sho you why, or to say that the views expressed in it are good or bad.
/. definition of fair use have been making backup copies (applies definitely to sofware, I don't know so much with traditional media things) and space/time shifting. Space and time shifting are definitely valid points. OK. There it is and yes, legally what the copy protection schemes + the DMCA are doing effectively ends the comsumers rights of fair use.
The other things that have fallen into the
Only $43.45? CDs will be that price in two years anyway.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I've done a lot of research on copyright laws, and I've decided that if the Content Control Industries are going to throw around their propaganda ("The best strategy is to contact the publisher to find out if a license is available for your specific needs. The rule of thumb is to assume that 'fair use' does not apply." -- The SPA ) then I can throw around my propaganda:
That's not exactly what the law states, but that's a lot closer than "fair use does not exist. Buy a license."
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Don't you see, though?
The artists won't make money by performing *music*, but they'll be able to make it up by consulting and tech support revenue.
This way, they'll be able to make gobs of money, just like open source software, right?
How else other than through the slale of records is an artist supposed to create his music?
I'm not sure what you're asking, but i think you mean "How else other than through the sale of records is an artist to support themselves?" It's called "Go on tour." You know how much artists royalties amount to from a song on a CD? 8.5 CENTS. They get much more from sales of tickets & band merchandise at concerts.
How much do you think it costs to purchase instruments and rent a recording studio? Don't know? Let me tell you then it's quite a bit!
And the price is dropping every day because microphone prices and digital mastering equipment prices are dropping through the floor. More and more people have access to high-quality recording equipment. Get a few good microphones, some good recording equipment, and some space away from ambient noise, and you have a decent recording area.
Would you like the work of your inspiration to be copied without regard to your rights as the creator?
Finally making a good point. What about the will of the artists? The will of the artists went out the window once they signed their recording contract.
I think you're missing the fact that there are a couple of different camps on this issue. There's blatant piracy, and then there's this issue of FAIR USE. Blatant piracy is obviously wrong, but telling me I can't make a copy of a CD I purchased to take to work with me so I don't have to carry a whole pile of CD's with me is wrong
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Why would you want to shut down a service that doesn't scale?
If I had a dime for every MP3 I tried to download over my college 100Mbit line and got either queued for hours or suddenly 50 copies of the same song in the middle of the night, I'd be buying a copy of everything I own for the bathroom too.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Many DVD players do not have passthroughs.
Err.... Ok. Then how does one handle cable in? (Again, showing my ignorance.) At home, my setup is:
Cable in -> Cable box -> VCR -> Game system(s) -> TV
Where would I plug a DVD into that?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I think that the degree of hyperfocus on compliance with the apalling DMCA, along with the resulting development of new protection schemes, is very likely to (eventually) produce a substantial legislative lashback. Sooner or later, somebody in office is going to recall the existence of provisions for fair use, dust them off, and hold them up for the MPAA and the RIAA; this will very likely emerge from consumer anger with emerging technologies.
The point is, this comically Orwellian crackdown on the replication/distribution of copyrighted works (even in legally permissible ways, in many circumstances) may actually prove to be valuable in the long run, as infuriating as it is at the moment. These kinds of circumstances remind people that they do have rights. Historically, individual rights tend to prevail (in the Western hemisphere, at any rate), and these rights reassert themselves when attacked.
So. Um. That's all I've got...
http://www.farmerbob.org
Yeah, they probally did say that. Have you noticed color TV progams can be seen on Black in White TV's (granted, not in color) and vice versa?
Had there not been compatibility color TV would have been a hard sell.
Yes, its obvious to most slashdot readers that there are numerous ways to get around this... but this isn't really targeting the tech-heads, they are going after the casual user with this, and it might just work for that.
The casual user doesn't have to know how to do this, all they have to do is download the latest rip off the net. There will be enough people with technical expertise out there providing rips that the casual moocher just has to know how to use the napster du jour.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Many people have MP3 players in the car. They want to be able to use this instead of CDs. Fair use determines that you can do this.
Plus, as a pianist, I often like to rip solos from CDs and slow them down with an audio editor so I can pick out the notes by ear. This, again, is fair use.
The point is that the recording industry is ignoring what the law says vis a vis Fair Use and yelling a big "Fuck you!" to the world at large. Even if you don't see the immediate need for a stance, there's a principle to be defended.
I rip CD. I burn the .wavs unchanged to a CD. How in fucks name is ANYTHING going to change that?!
The big question that must be answered here is the following. Fair use provisions allow consumers to make copies for their own use in different formats, etc. Is it then legal, or illegal for distributors to add some measure to prevent this fair use?
As I see it, fair use is something that applies to the consumer. I.E. a freedom from prosecution connected with copying media for personal use. There was no restriction placed on the record companies, except to keep them from sueing end-users.
Somehow, I don't think the record companies will be found guilty. After all, they are not coercing people to buy their product, and are not applying things retroactively. I'd like to be wrong about this, but who knows.
The way to fight this is to find out when the first such CD will be released, and organize a protest. If a lot of people go out and buy the CD, try to make a copy for person use, and then return it the next day, that might do something.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
The point I'm trying to make is that if this new copy protection works the same way, then it will only work on brand new hardware... so just hold on to those older devices.
Of course, they could try to release cd's that only work on macrovision-enabled cd-players, but I don't think that would go over too well("You mean I have to buy a new cd player to listen to the latest Britney Spears P.O.S? Fook that! I'll get it off the net!")
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
It's only a matter of time until CD manufacturers embed a UID scheme into players so a CD will be linked to a specific player (Divx style) so the used CD market will be defeated.
You can bet the RIAA has been taking notes on the region coding scheme DVDs employ.
Likewise with me. I've got an RCA DVD player both my old crappy emerson VCR and my new Panasonic VCR work fine unless I try to record.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Given current trends of extending copyright (at least in the United States), the copyrights will expire about the same time the Sun burns out. I imagine that then, the ability to make copies of digital music will be a secondary concern to anything living.
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
I take _all_ my CD's back and forth to work. All 200 or so of them.
... the point is we're allowed to, and there's enough reason for us to want to that our right to shouldn't be destroyed because the industry is afraid of piracy.
I also scratch a fair number of CDs taking them out of the wacky book I have to use to carry that many CDs. Making backup copies of the CDs would avoid that problem. I'm just too lazy to do it, honestly.
And then there's the making of your own 'mix' CDs, home-grown "best of" type compilations, etc. There's even (gasp, I know) making a nice little mix CD for a friend of bands s/he might like (Is that illegal, or fair use...? The world may never know).
The point isn't even why
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
What I want to know is how this will affect people who legitimately copy CDs, not just for backups, but for example, TDK makes AudioCD Recordables and when you buy those, you're also paying a royalty to the RIAA, just like with Cassette tapes, therefore its 100% legal to copy. People wont be happy when they pay and extra $.50 for the legal Audio-CDR and then find it scrambled!
And you can't physically take the CD from one place to another? Too much effort? Once again, the argument of convenience simply doesn't work. You can't transfer the argument for "backup" copies to any other physical material -- I don't ask for a copy of my television when I purchase it, so I can see it somewhere else. Or a copy of my car.
Let's face it. If you use superficial arguments to argue for copy rights for consumers, you get disregarded.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
CD players just dumbly play what's on the disc. I could see some form of encryption using a weak serial-number-for-a-key system or something along those lines, but a CD player will see the data the exact same way on either a pressed or burned CD and simply won't care. If you do a simple raw copy, you're all set. Simple as that. Nero is great for this, as is Adaptec and I hear CloneCD, and on the *nix side a plain old dd to iso image should suffice.
If this technology works by screwing with the bytes so that they can't be normally read and relies on the player not to choke, then instead you can do the opposite - using a cd proggy that just reads and records, errors and all, faithfully, so that the copy looks identical to the way that the CD player sees it to begin with. I know Nero can do this, but that's as far as my limited knowledge reaches. This is essentially the digital equivalent of the good-old line-out to line-in hack. Or, you could do just that, you'd probably sacrifice quality but with the right equipment you just might be able to pull off a static-free, near-perfect copy using spdif on seperate sound cards, while playing the original CD digitally (win2k can do this with any drive that supports DAE.) I personally have both a SB Live! MP3+ and a Aureal SQ2500 (I happened to win the SB in a random drawing contest, the aureal card was my choice at first. I'm still undecided, I now use the SB for multimedia and the Aureal for games.) and I think I can get the Aureal to output in digital to the SPDIF input on the SB Live! barring issues with clock synchronization (though it may just be a resampling issue, which would mean a few CPU cycles but near-perfect quality.) Someday, when I feel gutsy and crazy enough to splice together an audio cable and a 9mm headphone plug, I'm going to try this.
I have to wonder what effect my SMP setup would have... Maybe I should boot into Linux instead and patch the kernel for low latency...
I do know one thing - if it does work, there wouldn't be an audible difference on all but the best audio systems provided sampling rates stay up. Maybe this would be better done on two seperate computers considering latency and multithreading, perhaps the recorder is best run under DOS or single-user Linux mode. Well, we'll see.
Why do I need to carry a bunch of CDs with me? Because I never know what I'll want to listen to. I might start out the day listening to Tori Amos, and then by the end of the day decide that I'm really in a Metallica mood or maybe a Stevie Ray Vaughn mood. I have no idea when I leave the house what kind of music I'm going to want to listen to on the drive home. Just to et a good representation of my 1000+ CD collection requires me to carry about 80 or so CDs around with me. That's about $1600 just sitting around in my car while I'm at work -- so I bring it in -- then it's $1600 laying on my desk at work. Then, invaribaly, I need one of the CDs laying around at home.
So, I coded every CD I own into MP3. That resides on a server at my house with a broadband connection. I can get my music from anywhere that has a broadband connection. Not only that, I can carry around the same 80 CDs (using the AIWA mp3 player in the car or the Rio Volt elsewhere), but have almost my complete collection at my fingertips, and if it's stolen a few hours of my time and $20 will replace it. The actual real CDs are safe (enough) at home.
And, as far as the pricing goes, I'm tired of the bullying tactics of the RIAA and the big four. I was mad when they started their crusade against the Diamond Rio and mp3s in general. I got madder when they started in on Napster (where I get music they don't want to sell me -- at any price). I finally got pissed when it was revealed they were price fixing (no really!) and only got a slap on the wrist for it.
It does not cost $20 to manufacture, ship, sell a CD and compensate the artist. Sell me a CD at a reasonable price, and allow me to get my music in the format I want it (more for the CD, less for the mp3 on line), AND uncrippled, so I can do what I want with it. As of now, I'm not buying any CDs. I haven't in over a year, and I'm getting to the point where I don't miss it. I used to be one of the big four's biggest customers, now I am not a customer at all -- and will not be until they get off their high horse.
The MPAA should watch out too, because right now I'm about half satisfied with them. I think $15-20 is fair for a DVD, it costs that much to go see the movie at the theatre -- and even though I don't approve, I understand region incoding. However, the DeCSS thing is really leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Plus, I wonder if I wouldn't spend more money on DVDs if they weren't just a bit cheaper.
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gee. as long as macrovision is doing it there's no reason to worry.
you guys do realize how weak SafeDisc is for PC CD-ROM game protection right? and if SafeAudio has to be compatible with all audio readers produced after a certain point in time - then they can't even change the encryption. just hold onto your old cd players and wait for gamecopyworld to post a link to SafeAudio automated cracking.
and just where does macrovision get its 'billions of dollars' estimates? it's like the same marketoid bullet point quote under all of their products. gotta love unqualified marketing crap.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I have some disks that are 'out of print', and cannot be replaced at any costs.
I keep CD-R duplicates in the car, from originals I own, partly for convenience, but mostly so if the CDs in the car get scratched, stolen, torched, etc, I am out a few bucks in CD-R media instead of a few hundred in original CDs.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
From my understanding, fair use includes the ability to produce 1 archive copy for backup purposes. Copyright lawyers I've asked in the past defined it that way. Other than that, fair use is pretty much private home viewing/listening...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Agreed. Plus, lots of recordings themselves are deliberately lo-fi, in the age of using samples and bits from previous recordings a la Beck, Portishead, most hip-hop, etc. (Everclear has a song out called "AM Radio", for example, based entirely around an old scratchy vinyl sample of the old R&B song "Mr. Big Stuff".)
Since some of the audio quality has been extrapolated for artistic purposes before the work even enters the chain, it makes less of a difference in the final compressed MP3 file. I wholeheartedly agree with the poster above; I also feel that the way music is increasingly being made augments this process...
__
props to all dead homiez
Duuh-obvious. CD to Line out to line in to CDR for the first copy, that cleans the MV then it's free-for-all from then on. (Oh and a 192+kbps MP3 for good measure while we're at it)
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video1 in.
-- nolesrule
The unfortunate thing is that we have no right to make a copy onto CD. do a goole search on Fair use and you will see the same thing I did, Tape is the only media alowed.
I think that this should be amendid though considering CDs are such a versitile media.
-shut up
I really don't think that it will be anything special that is implemented on the CD, in hardware, or software. Their new antipiracy protocol goes like this:
you go into the store, and buy a cd, the clerk takes your money and hands you your cd in a bag (why the hell do they always insist on putting single items in bags anyway?) As you walk away, she will sneak up behind you and clamp a chain around your ankle. When you ask her why she did that, she will reply:
"this is our way of making sure that you won't pirate the songs on that cd." you will then notice that the chain is attached to a 7 foot tall 300 lb body builder named Crusher wearing a t-shirt that says "piracy" with a big red X over it. The clerk goes on to explain that he will follow you around forever and will umm encourage you to not make illegal copies of music.
Once the technology is perfected, the RIAA will probably just embed hypnotic suggestions in all their music therebye forcing us to give them all of our money in return for getting hypnotized to give them more money.
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
You'd do exactly what I have to do: crawl behind your TV, unplug your game system, and plug your DVD in to watch a movie. The switch back when you want to watch TV/VCR/play game etc.
Sucks, doesn't it. But hey, fuck you, you only paid for the DVD, why should you be able to use it with any degree of convenience?
I'm going on a hunger strike right now.
Well, far be it from me to argue on the side of RIAA et al. (fuck them and their children in the ass) but I'll play the devil's advocate here.
This is intended to stop mass piracy. E.g. people making black-market copies of CDs and selling them en masse (like software pirates). Pirate sells disc for $5, makes huge profit, buyer gets perfect digital copy (presumably they'd print up labels and inserts too), musician gets zero (which is just slightly less than they get in the normal scenario after the record company fucks them). Just like software makers, they don't care if individual consumers' lives are made more complicated as long as they can zap the big counterfiters in places like SE Asia and central/south america (see the machine-locking of windows licenses on recent machines from places like Dell).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I've got a VCR and Projection TV with Line Quadrupler at home, never had any problems in that regard. Of course, it was professionally installed, but I've moved other VCRs to it in the past, never had to disable anything. As for the specific settings on the line quadrupler, I cannot comment. It's possible that the installer had to tweak something, but it's not on the frontend at least.
they already tried (and with some people, succeeded) in charging more for the audio discs as a 'copy tax' and since cdr's are so cheap, they disallow them in those consumer machines.
imagine how pissed off Joe Bestbuy will be when he comes home with the shiny new philips 'make my own music mix' stereo component and finds that the music mafia has put yet another obstacle in his way. he's already paid for the right to copy his discs in the price of the silver cd, paid the copy tax in the 'audio disc' blank he was forced to buy, and now his whole setup is now inoperable.
yeah, that will endear Joe to the music industry. uhuh.
before he copied only for personal use. now he's pissed off and will copy FOR SPITE at any occasion.
you want a war? you got it.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
That's true - I forgot the DMCA. Under the DMCA they could "encrypt" the CD with XOR and you'd be up for fines/jailtime just for noticing it. Never mind 9 times in 10 you'd be doing this for reasons of interoperability - i.e. trying to legally play media you bought in a system you own - since 'interoperability' is ignored just like 'fair use' and 'due process'.
The RIAA, MPAA, lawyers and government are all undead zombie demons from the Dimension of Pain. As though you needed more proof of this.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
By the way, anyone know where to find non-Region/chipped players, or has the MPAA sued the stuffing out of anyone offering them?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
You must not be old enough to have had the experience of a CD "going bad" on you. They do scratch, break, etc. I always make copies of anything that I might miss if something happened to it. Lets see, do I give the kids (3 and 5) a twenty dollar computer game disk to play with or a copy I made for 15 cents? So the answer to your question is TWO!
At least with VCR's the Macrovision signal is supposed to be out of range of the TV's display circuitry, but in range of the VCR's recording circuitry, so, in theory, you don't get signal degredation.
In theory.
In practice, I've heard of TVs being made with the same AGC's as VCRs - and thus they react the same way as a VCR when fed a macroed signal. And I don't just mean light-dark and slight picture distortion.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I take orginal CDs and immediately copy them. The originals go in a CD rack, never to be disturbed unless the duplicate gets damaged. Perfectly good way to protect my investment.
I recently bought a stereo VCR (I was using a cheaper Mono one before), specifically so that I could watch it through my TV-Tuner card (19" monitor, computer output through my stereo, as opposed to a little 15" TV). But Macrovision screws up the signal. Perfectly legal use, screwed by Macrovision. (Also the same reason I can't plug a DVD player into anything I own without Macrovision kicking in.)
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
I ended up finding an old radioshack RCA-to-CATV converter at a garage sail for a couple of bucks.. they can still be bought new for around $40. Just make sure you keep buying things to be able to use their technology properly, it keeps the economy going.
Apparently Macrovision puts 'bursts' between the visible frames that are beyond the 'legal' NTSC signal. The autogain circuitry in the VCR gets tricked by this signal, hence the dimming down to black effect.
air and light and time and space
I don't think that the high-frequency tone was to prevent copying. after all they made their last LP in want 1972? where there that many cassette tapes then? Plus in Gorge Martin's autobiography he says that the 20+kHz sound was Paul's idea, "music for dogs", plus you will not that the sound is only in a few songs, and only on sarget pepers IMHR (Good morning, and the end of "a day in the life") Note something like an industry wide copyprotection scheme.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
This looks to be a clever exploit on the way CD readers work. References: http://www.ttrtech.com/tech.htm http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cdau dio2/95x7.htm
Apparently, CD readers are capable of reading the data from audio cd's in two different modes: a generic-data-style read and an audio-data-style read. The audio-data-style read is meant to be directly converted to analog music via D/A converters in the unit. The difference is that the generic-data-style read imposes some data-integrity checks which, if fail, cause the reader to report a read error or return erroneous data. The audio-data-style read can ignore these errors to avoid interrupting the music.
This exploit appears to intentionally insert bits into the EFM stream so that a general-data-style read will fail or produce erroneous data. Since all CD copying techniques must use this type of access, they will fail as well. Normal consumer CD audio players will correct or ignore the errors with no impact on the music. High-end audiophile CD players that allow for custom DSP and D/A algorithms and use a generic-data-style read could suffer as well.
If a CD reader unit could be hacked to capture the data immediately after the error correction and before the D/A converter, then this technique could in theory be defeated.
and the free music bands will make their money selling T-shirts and concert tickets
Most acts have to do this anyway. The RIAA talks a big talk about protecting the artists, but for some reason they don't seem real keen on paying them much in the way of royalties. Touring is where the artists actually have a chance of seeing some money - Ticketmaster at least leaves some flesh on the bone.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Can I assume that you don't have small children running about?
There was a high-frequency tone put on the end of Sgt Pepper's, as a joke from John Lennon. He wanted dogs to have something to listen to on a Beatles Album. Documented in George Martin's "The Making of Sgt. Pepper." Other than that, I seriously doubt there was any other such attempt. I taped many Beatles albums when they were on vinyl, as well as CD. Never heard any such thing.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I, too, am among the ranks of consumers who must deal with the poor-quality which results from the Macrovision signal embedded in VHS/DVD videos. Why buy a tape that you know you'll take home & the top of the screen will curl, etc? What good does Macrovision actually serve, when you can just order a movie on pay-per-view and tape it? Isn't it about time the industry saw fit to do away with this ridiculous scheme that is costing them money for no real benefit? The ONLY reason they can get away with it is general public ignorance.
Let me cross over a bit into the Napster/RIAA battle and ask, how can we claim to have a government for the people, by the people, when abuses such as these are tolerated? The big companies are making the laws and through the courts, shutting down what the people actually WANT. Last I heard, Napster had 60 million users. Last I heard, that was roughly 25% of the US population, more than generally votes even in a presidential election. Can it not be said that Napster represents the will of the people more than the mean old RIAA or MPAA???
So, I believe what we must do is fight this on their own, legal, turf. We must begin a class-action suit by anyone who has bought a VHS tape over the years and been unable to enjoy quality viewing due to Macrovision. As a consumer, you expect a certain level of quality in the products you buy. Macrovision has not only been interfering with this, but they've been making money off it. Money that in the end, comes from our pockets. Sue them, sue the bastards! Can you just imagine a class-action civil-rights suit brought by the 60 million users of Napster against the RIAA??? Now, I don't wish to deny anyone, even the RIAA/MPAA, what is rightfully theirs. The unfortunate fact, however, is that lately they seem to think EVERYTHING is rightfully theirs. Let's teach them a lesson!
Failing that, would someone kindly approach the headquarters of Macrovision with a HERF gun? I think it only fair we return the favor of degraded quality on magnetic media.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
VHS is an analog format.
VHS is an analog but time-quantized format. The signal follows a specific machine-readable cycle (the refresh rate). Which gives the MPAA something to fuck with.
Now, analog audio is not like that. It doesn't have a 'sync', nor a specific period in which it is not audible. The signal is not delivered to the speakers in frames. It is 'all content'. Which means that if the RIAA wants to mess with it, they'll mess with the content. (They might be desperate enough to do that, but I wonder if consumers are desperate enough to buy it...) Now, digital audio, that's a different story.
dufke
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Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
Since this idea is so easy to circumvent, I sure hope they don't get rid of the CDR tax ideas they've implemented.
I can't wait to pay tax for CD's I haven't illegally copied, and not be able to copy CD's I have a right to copy.
I'm sorry, did that sound sarcastic?
Ace
Makes me want to sink my movie buying dollars back into VHS.
I mean, that's where all this Macrovision headache started in the first place; in your VCR! It just migrated into the DVD player from the VCR, and at least some brands of DVD have the option to turn off the Macrovision.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
They really want to take away your rights to use music you purchased legally.
...), and they are still now saying that it is illegal to copy music onto said media.
What I don't understand is this: they charge extra for common types of blank media (audio cassettes, 'music' CDRs,
RIAA members: If you don't want to let consumers copy anything onto this media, then why the fsck are you charging them extra for the media because they might copy some of your music onto it?
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Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Of course I make copies of CDs. All the time.
I have a 12 disk cd changer in the trunk, which is a relatively high risk of being stolen. There's no way I want to lose 12 CD's along with the hardware. Insurance doesn't cover CD's, either.
Especially since some of those CD's are out of print and are irreplacable. And many other CD's have only a few good tracks. And most music CD's only have about 45 minutes of music, even though I can record at least 70 minutes onto a CDR.
There are lots and lots of excellent, completely legal reasons to make CDR copies and compilations of music CDs. If they take away my ability to do that, I will either work (hack) around it, or refuse to buy such CDs. Prediction: If this catches on, the market for used, unprotected CD's will explode.
Hmmm. I wonder if the music world will eventually split into a "closed", copy-protected, mass-marketed, Limp Britney Eminem Metallica Bizcuit Big Record Company world, vs. an open, non-copy-protected, listener-supported, word-of-mouth marketing Internet music world. I just hope the bands I listen to end up on the good side. (U2 is the only "popular" band I really like, so I might be lucky).
Maybe someday we'll see "open music" and "free music" like open source and free software - and the free music bands will make their money selling T-shirts and concert tickets.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
This copy-protection is really simple, but yet effective. Simply the TOC (The initial few bytes that contain the offsets of the tracks on the cd, and thus the position of the songs on the disc) is manipulated in a way that confuses CD-ROM drives, so they think the CD is invalid and refuse to read data.
Most cd-players ignore the manipulated bytes and can play the CD without major problems. There are some exceptions: on some players the music plays, but the time of the songs doesn't display correctly or jumps back and ahead... Very old players refuse to play such CDs...
But it isn't very difficult to read in such CD digitally: if you have a cd-player which has digital-out, you can simply plug that into your soundcard's digital-in, and read in the cd without any quality-losses...If you burn the digital data back to a cd-r, you will have a perfect digital copy, without any quality-losses, but with removed copy-protection!
After the CD was on the market, BMG announced that they won't realease any new albums with that copy-protection until it really has matured... Well, since Macrovision tries to sell it to the big players now, it maybe has...
So we tech-people won't have much trouble, but the usual user is fucked...
What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
Unfortunatly there isn't a *nix version of this app.
Ever tried CdrDao?
you can copy it. Yes, i know, someone's going to scoff at my because its not the original digital copy. By remember, audio, and more importantly sound, is an analog medium. Vibrating strings are not binary. So like i said, if you can listen to it, you can copy it. Any until that changes, none of these schemes will succeed. Besides, people wanna be able to play CD's on the same old cd players, right?
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
Well, then we can just make a perfect digital copy and you'll happily decrypt that!
SSL Certificate
Have a look at media ownership some time. The fact of the matter is that NBC are hardly going to cover copyright term extension concerns when they're owned by Disney, are they?
2) Flip to pages with ads
3) Look for "cable filter"
4) Call # / Visit website, pay $20
5) Wait for UPS to deliver.
hum dee dum dum.
Filters are easy to make, check the net for schematics if you want to build your own (about $5 for parts)
I can't see that this will be any harder to "decrypt".
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I wouldn't buy the CD's if I didn't have my mp3's anyway. Besides, all you need is a good beat, and a lopsided washingmachine can get that.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
While I know nothing of Canadian law, under US law, it would require that the producers make it easy to exercise your right to a fair use copy. The precedent is the ill-concieved Marijuana Stamp Act. When first passed (in the 20s-30s IIRC), it simply said that to posess marijuana, you had to have a tax stamp from the government (similar to that on cigarette packets). Problem was, the government never actually made any of these stamps, so the law was struck down in the '70s on the basis that while it allowed an action given the proper permit, that permit was impossible to obtain.
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
Macrovision has done it once before; VHS is an analog format. Therefore they can do it again.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Once you know about the nature of the copy "scrambling" signal, you can usually scrub it out (because it HAD to be largely undetectable to begin with to be usable in this sort of context...)- and there seems to be a large number of Macrovision strippers on the market.
What makes you think that anything that would be largely inaudible to the human ear would be any different?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sure, I'm sure that this will be impossible to break.
But let me first register DeSafeAudio.org, I'm pretty sure this will become popular in a couple months.
GFK's
The article here may be slightly more informative in regards to the actual details of the workings of SafeAudio. Also, there were originally four different test versions of SafeAudio, as mentioned briefly in the transcript of a conference Macrovision had at Q3 2000.
Interestingly, a Greek company, MLS LaserLock, is also developing a copy-protection scheme called "AudioLock" according to this document. The possible infringement of LaserLock's trademark that may have occured here may explain the name change of Macrovision's product from AudioLock to SafeAudio.
--
For those who want to remain 100% legal, it will still by OK to download an mp3 of a cd you own. So it only takes ONE person with the know-how, and its back into the fair use domain.
SSL Certificate
Sen. Hatch's office has links to a number of letters and opinions regarding his true stance on the issue of digital media copying. I don't doubt he will bring this issue back up, and as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee the old media companies will be in the hot seat for what they have done.
So he was just negligent and stupid rather than malicious?
I mean, he's an elected representative, he asked for the job, he gets paid well. He should do the job that he's paid for and read legislation and understand its implications before he votes for it.
When I was taught to handle a gun, I was told to always treat it as if it was loaded. Legislation is in many ways more dangerous than a gun and should be treated with the approprate respect, not just rubber stamped.
The man is a buffoon. I do hope you're not being an apologist for him. Unfortunately, he's probably in a republican safe seat and will be back in next time.
Rich
(Not that it's much better in the UK. Maggie Thatcher (ex PM) signed over a huge chunk of the UK's sovereignty to Europe without even reading the relevant treaty. She later claimed she regretted it. Well, too fucking late, bitch)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with them doing this. It's their business, and their technologies, they can do whatever they want with it. Sure I think it's misguided and a waste of effort on the part of both Macrovision and the music industry, but it's their businesses.
Don't make it sound like they're killing puppies, they're just trying to make a buck... it's what a business generally does.
I would just hope that people would refuse to buy CDs with the copyprotection. That's how to fight this crap.
I feel the same way about Microsoft's new protection schemes with their software. My legit copy of FrontPage 2000 refused to let me install it on my home computer one day, following a fresh install on a new hard drive. I had to call Microsoft and get them to unlock it for me, something that they'll only do a maximum of ten times. I'm a power user, I upgrade a LOT, and am always re-partitioning to play with some new Linux distribution, etc.
My solution? Simple, I pirate it from work where we have licensing program copies that don't feature the lock-out mechanism. Thanks for making me a pirate, Microsoft!
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Well let's see: my son uses my CD's as hockey pucks from time to time. For that matter, so do I. When I had LP's as my only source of music, my first act was typically to pop the LP onto the player, pop a tape into the recorder, and dupe the LP so I could listen to it in the car. I then put the LP away and didn't get it out again until the tape quality deteriorated to the unacceptable.
I frequently do the same things with CD's, except this time I get a clean copy. For example, the recent Rush live album Different Strings contains a previously unreleased 1978 performance that will not be on future compilations. I'd like to dupe that so I can always have a copy. It would be a shame if it were scratched or destroyed in normal use. The point is, we are allowed to make copies for personal use and not only is this technology infringing on our rights as consumers, it is also fucking up our equipment, and forcing us to by converters just to use them the way we want. I think the best way to fight it is to make sure everyone knows it's there, that it fucks up the sound, and it forces them to go back time after time to buy the same thing they already own just to be able to listen to it. After all, once SoundSafe players become the standard, they will drop support for regular CD's and make you buy your whole collection again. Or does anyone else remember the switch to CD in the late 80's?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Market forces already do the work of a boycott. To illustrate this, take a look at Divx's failure. This is really the scheme that the media companies would prefer to use but people found it very unpalatable because it provided no real benefits and had all of the draconian drawbacks.
Just wait, they'll come up with some reason to get people to buy into these new technologies.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Here is the relevant law:
Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified in that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.More information available here.
Ceci n'est pas un post
It's possible to create CDs that use polymers that degrade after they are exposed to laser light. It would be too expensive to make the whole CD out of this stuff, but the first part of the CD is all you need and it adds a few cents to the production cost.
I don't think this is what they are doing - but I've seen a company or two try to implement software copy protection this way. It allows the install program the ability to determine if the CD has been installed before. And as far as I know this is compatible with most CD players.
Assuming you were able to corrupt the right bits of a music CD, then it wouldn't play anymore.
Pretty nifty idea, but I worry that a customer's computer might crash or lose power during install and then they wouldn't be able to install again.
-- Virtual Windows Project
The broadcast compatibility between Color and B/W didn't stop my grandmother from telling me (as a 3 yr old) that I could only watch the programs that had the (C) in the listing (indicating a color broadcast), otherwise I would ruin her new color TV. Maybe she was one of the original "Sweathogs".
cat
It doesn't make it illegal to make a copy of the CD's, but it at the same time doesn't say that the producer has to make it easy for you to make a copy.
Very true, but if I crack their protection scheme in the name of making a copy of a friend's CD for personal use, which the law here allows, does that mean I can tell the rest of the country how they can do the same thing? Source code? T-shirts? Songs and poetry? Hmmm. Shades of DeCSS?
Btw, Macrovision is a lame technology and it does not too much scare me that they are interested in doing something similar to audio. Macrovision is a cheesy OOB hack that a recorder must acknowledge. In a nutshell the original recording is "encoded" with this OOB data and when a hardware device picks up this data it screws with the signal to degrade the quality. The bypass units are simple filters.
That's the obvious tact. A more costly tactic is to purchase a Safeaudio CD, take it home, and when you find out it won't play return it for an exchange. They'll give you another one which also won't work. Pretty soon, all of the stores inventory will have been opened and can no longer be sold as "new". Almost certainly, all of the opened CD's will get shipped back to the RIAA member who published all the defective CD's in the first place.
While some CD players will play the "Safeaudio" CD's, I can almost guarantee that some of them won't. New Mac's for example have digital USB speakers. There is no way for new Mac's to play CD's except by ripping the audio off of them. It is perfectly legitimate for the people who own these systems to buy the "protected" CD's and return them as defective.
I'm sure some troll is going to respond saying how immoral it is to intentionally buy CD's you know you are going to return. To that I respond, is it moral to knowingly sell defective products to your customers? Because that's what these CD's are. Plain and simple. They are defective products which do not meet the Redbook CD audio standards. I wonder if they will even be allowed to use the "CD" logo on them?
Now, we just need to find out where they are going to release these CD's first. If their initial public tests results in significant losses due to returns, that will get the program scrapped early.
It seems from their description, this is intended for CD-ROM interactive programs, not for audio compact discs.
This makes much more sense because of the requirements this would impose on equipment manufacturers, and how it would deprecate any previous equipment purchased by consumers.
"The digital signature is added to the Glass mastering using a Laser Beam Recorder (LBR)." This smacks of the old-fashioned burn-a-laser-hole-in-the-floppy-disk routine of the 1980s...
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Along with the things other people have noted, isn't it nice to be able to take the songs you like off of different CDs and make themed discs?
What about "repairing" a damaged disc by making a new, more readable copy?
I've done both of these things before.
Quoth the poster:
and we're all going to have servers on our desktop, right?
Nah. My server'll be in the closet somewhere near the demarc.
The point, I think, isn't children contaminated by their uncle or aunt, but the fact that after paying for the right to copy, we arn't allowed to copy. Forget the fact that the Home Recording Act allows it, the copyright act allows it, and so forth.
Corporations are forgetting one very important fact: We are citizens, and they are legal fictions. At any point, with enough people, their "rights" could suddenly change for the worse. Orrin Hatch very pointedly told them "Remember fair use, or we (congress) will be forced to remind you".
Corporate profits are great. Just how much of our freedoms are we expected to give to their profits?
DON'T get me started.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
...in perfect harmony...
I don't buy their music anyway. I do buy CD's. I buy lots of them. But it's pretty much independent labels now.
Think about it. RIAA member companies churn out infectios memes (about 2 per 14 track cd) and the other 12 tracks are crap. I'm not going to waste my money on atoms carrying 1/7 good songs...and even then, they're only "good" because they figured out the formula for effectively marketing a song.
I go to indie rock shows now. They cost less than the cost of a CD to get in, you see 3 bands, and you rock out way more than you could to ANY cd. There's no substitute for live rock'n'roll. Never will be.
And I buy their CD's. They're my friends, and I want to support them. But they haven't sold their soul to the RIAA yet, and I'm not about to either. It takes them so long to put out a cd that they actually have 14 good songs on them....unlike the big label bands who are contractually obligated to produce x songs per year...regardless of quality.
All I want from the RIAA bands is a song or 2. Usually not the ones they put out on singles. I really don't consider it theft if it isn't offered in the legitimate market. You can't steal a product they don't make. If they made it, I'd buy it. But they're forcing me to use gnutella to get access to it, because they won't give me the opportumity to buy it.
Well...not without paying for a bunch of filler crap. And it's not just me that feels this way. I got that meme from Courtney Love.
So that's why their copy protection doesn't concern me. I'm just not going to come across it. I've found better music than they sell on their SDMI/protected/unconstitutional violation of fair use media anyway. Hang out on your local scene. Liberate yourself from the RIAA's marketroids.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Portable CD players on the market now are being advertized as CDR compatible; this is a feature that is in demand.
Selling a CD player with such a hinderance would be like selling read only floppy drives. Not only would no person buy such a device, but no company would make it or let alone pay license fees so that their customers would hate them.
This is very different from Macrovision. We have always had the ability to record and copy music, and people will not give up that freedom.
DAT is dead.
why no one points out that the music industry has been fleecing the consumers for years by OVER CHARGING us for cd's in the first place...
when are we going to get a break on the price!!!!!
moo.
i believe you for about as much as i believe that britney spears is jesus reborn.
even if you weren't so full of shit that your eyes turned brown, your post is equivalent to some moronic tech support guy going "it works for me" without researching the problem at all, with the exception that it tries to inflate your pathetic ego by mentioning that you have a "Line Quadruler".
the fact of the matter is that macrovision doesn't affect every projection TV, but it does affect quite a number of them, as it does quite a number of image preprocessors.
As for the specific size of your penis, I cannot comment, as I don't have access to a scanning electron microscope.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Yes, you have the right to make copies for personal use.
No, you do not have a guaranteed right to have it made easy for you to do so. Stop bitching.
The Betamax case (Sony v. Universal City) says nothing about voluntarily adopted copy protection schemes such as Macrovision and Safemedia. Indeed, they could be seen as a direct consequence of the Betamax decision. And they are infinitely preferable to legislatively adopted copy-protection schemes such as the DMCA.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
And this is going to work exactly *how* if I rip a CD, decode the MP3 into a .wav file, and burn an audio CD with it? Or even, God Forbid, download the MP3 from the Internet? Do any of these people think for more than a few seconds about these things?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Also, the point has been raised here a number of times, but each time we buy a CD aren't we (as consumers) paying for (a) a license for the content and (b) a particular physical copy. I don't know that anyone has ever litigated (or explained) why my second or replacement CD costs as much as the first. Again this would seem to be ripe for a test case.
On the other hand, for scratches, there are some really good repair kits out there - I use DiscRx - it works as long as the label side is not scratched. Though in that case, a backup copy would still be good.
Fnord,
Garath
then came mp3. it taught us that content was usually more important than raw audiophile quality. at least as long as the audio was listenable; which with good mp3 encoders, it is.
Blasphemy! I WANT my huge expensive stereo system so I can listen to Celine Dion!
Or not.
there is no standard on earth, imaginable or real that can prevent an analog copy (since you have to be able to LISTEN to it at some point) from working.
Quit saying that! They'll only take it as a challenge. Surgical implants, anyone?
Then again, they'll do surgical implants just as well as every other technological solution they've proposed. It'll sound odd, cause headaches, and run on Windows CE. You'll spend hours trying to update the firmware on your cochlear implants so you can hear the latest Alanis song on the radio (without the implants it sounds like modem noise - wait, this is Alanis we're talking about, how would you know if the implants were working?), to no avail, before you finally give up and go to the Ani DiFranco concert instead.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I was under the impression that you could simply stick a CD reader on one IDE cable and a writer on another, and then do a pretty much direct copy between one and the other without having to actually read (parse?) what's on the disc and make sense of it. Surely this would work regardless of what the CD is like, so long as you make sure you just copy what's there exactly...
This might stop CD -> Hard Drive -> CDR, but if I understand how all this works (which I probably don't) then a direct copy doesn't actually have to make sense of the CD at all. If an ordinary player can read it, surely it can also read an exact (down to the pits and troughs) copy? Or have I misunderstood?
The congressman (or MP here in Canada) will *never* draft laws protecting said INDIVIDUALS because said INDIVIDUALS do not have the $$$ or the manpower to form the requisite lobby. end of story.
Holy cow, Slashdotters, admit it already. What bugs you about copy protection is the fact that it's going to make it harder for you to copy your friend's CD. Period. Is it a pain in the butt that it'll make it harder to copy your own discs? Of course. But that's not why you own a CD burner. You download MP3's like a fiend and burn them straight to CDR. Fair use is one thing, but let's face it: if you don't like the RIAA's policies about the use of their music, then don't listen to their music. Don't forget, the only reason you like their music is because it's always on the radio, which is because the RIAA is in collusion with the radio stations and the record stores. Notice how you usually can't buy independently-labelled CDs at Sam Goody?
There is nothing the RIAA can do to stop you from trading pirated or legal tracks from non-RIAA artists, because those artists aren't under the RIAA's "jurisdiction."
My point is, we tend to whine and complain everytime the RIAA takes some draconian measure to stop us from obtaining their music for free, that we would have otherwise purchased. They're not making it so we can't obtain music in general for free... they're making it so we can't obtain their music for free. The RIAA isn't going away, so neither is collusion in the music industry. It's time to admit that the big bad RIAA legally owns the music you like, and if you want it you're gonna have to pay for it. Me, I'll stick to independent bands for now.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
I think we really need this. After all, if corporate America didn't protect us from ourselves, what would happen? I'm so glad that there are big, unregulated monopolies out there that are willing to take my rights away, and worry abou them, so I don't have to! What would we do without them? Don't forget to call your Congressman and tell him how great an idea this is!...before you flame...it's sarcasm, this idea sucks
No it's not. The record companies know it and I know it; surely you can figure it out too. This works on the kind of equipment that you buy at Circuit City, which - surprise, surprise - is not what large-scale pirates use. What, they have rooms full of monkeys changing tapes one-at-a-time and hitting "record"?
You think an outfit in China that has access to genius engineers with otherwise-zero earning potential is going to be held back for even a day by this? Industrial-strength piracy is just too lucrative.
Best I can figure, the recording industry mafia is upset about all the piracy but feels impotent to stop it, so they slake their thirst for revenge by fucking consumers up the ass.
And it probably works in the mafia's favor in the long run: Consumers get mad, the mafia says "we had to do it because of piracy," and then consumers say "Oh my goodness, piracy is awful," and vote for the candidate who's willing to put the most hurt on Vietnam for failure to clamp down on piracy.
An approximately similar strategy would be for the pharmaceutical companies (who are to illegal drugs what the RIAA is to pirated music: the legally-sanctioned provider of a more expensive alternative) to drive through the suburbs spraying Agent Orange in people's backyard gardens, claiming it's because of the drugs the residents "might" be growing, and then paying someone like you to post on Slashdot that it's a powerful strike against the Columbian drug cartels.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Once again, my apologies to a bloated industry which seems to be concerned only with stopping a technological revolution, at the cost of freedom, dignity, and profit.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
"Was not intended" by whom? As Orwell noted in Politics and the English Language , the passive voice tends to obfuscate.
IMO, the RIAA most certainly did intend the law to turn out as it did, and pulled a scam on the legislators.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I have a copy of that very album. Yes, you could copy off the content (which is of course first-rate), but there's just something ineffably cool about a three-sided record.
Unless I'm remembering my Red Book spec wrong, there's no reason you couldn't apply the same technique to a CD. Someone in a pressing house should give it a try.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I'm not as affected by these sort of things as some people are... that might be because I have a slower uptake on new stuff. I also keep my CDs in a huge box which generally gets carted around with me.
I wonder though... if changing the format of CDs meant that everyone had to get a new CD player to play new CDs... I dont believe that RIAA would go ahead. But dont put it past them to put it in DVD2 (ala the next big thing... not neccessarily called DVD2). Cassettes are still around. *some* new music still gets released on vinyls.
CDs being phased out soon because of SAFEAUDIO? I highly doubt it.
---
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I bought my wife a DVD for Christmas. This was to play from the DVD player in my new laptop into the TV. My TV is old and only has a coax cable input. So I routed the RCA line from my laptop into the VCR's inputs. Simple enough, eh?
Doing this caused the brightness of the movie to change randomly. It took me forever to figure out what was wrong. Macrovision was the problem! I had to go buy a $30 box ar Radio Shack to route the line direct to my TV. I had to spend more money even though I was just trying to watch a DVD I had legally obtained, using legal equipment.
Makes me want to sink my movie buying dollars back into VHS.
Um, I've done this. In fact, I've learned the bass lines and chord structures and all the words to about 50% of all the CD's I own. You can't say I haven't analyzed them in depth. I can notate them for you in excruciating detail.
That doesn't mean I don't want to be able to back them up, or re-arrange them to my tastes, or keep a copy at home safe, and one in my car. Some of them are out of print, some of them will no doubt go out of print, and some are simply really hard to find and I don't care to pay twice for them.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
All these schemes are trivially defeated by a screw driver, a pair of wire cutters and some solder.
Your CD player won't let you record a copy? Will it let you listen? At the extreme delivery end, you open the speaker cabinet, splice onto the speaker wires, hook up some potentiometers for volume control and sample the stream at 44kHz.
Your VCR won't let you copy? Will it let you watch? Same crap. Instead of an audio card, you need a video card. Big deal.
I have never seen such a lame-ass ineffectual attempt to "protect" alleged intellectual property. DeCSS, DMCA. The media "powers that be" are trying to fight a "traditional" war in a wired world filler with a bazillion guerillas. Their customers are their enemy. It makes real hard to do business.
The media corporations are desperatly trying to retain their profitability as exemplified by the old adage "The power of the press (or any "broadcast" medium,) belongs to those who own one". Mostly its the power to advertize.
And they are trying to retain ownership over ephemera. There is nothing as incredibly valueless as last month's "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "All Your Bases Arew Belong To Us." Just ask the content creator how valuable it was.
The broadcasters don't want to pay the content creators and they don't want the consumer to know how badly he's been ripped off.
And as long as the content pimps control the means of production, content creators have to apply lips to orifice and bend over the L-shaped table for the opportunity to try to get something "out there."
Maybe... If you fit into their nice, bland, unimaginative, unoriginal categories. (Have you noticed that there are tens of thousands of musicians out there, enough to support instrument makers, magazines, live bands in venues all over the world, but Tower Records doesn't stock their CDs? That's because They didn't have this month's "sound." Because they didn't apply lips and won't bend over the table. And your ears go thirsty because you don't control the pipe.)
But on the internet, there are search engines and alternatives to all those voices crying out in the wilderness and charging dinars for the bland, safe, unimaginative din.
Eventually, we will win. If only because we'll run out of money ("No money? Get lost. This ain't no charity.") and we'll always be able to masturbate for free.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, if they can succeed where every other highly intelligent music industry shill has failed, well bully for them.
If I were a music industry executive, I'd be questioning them REALLY closely about how they are different than every other worthless protection scheme out there...
(Come to think of it, this may be something for consumer music CD recorders. If it is, then it affects me not at all.)
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Dear Mr Chuang,
I feel I must write to express my disappointment with Macrovision's latest venture into copy protecting media, SAFEAUDIO.
As one who enjoys a exceedingly wide range of music, I strongly believe this will do nothing more than hurt the market it is designed to protect.
The following quote, taken directly from your press release at http://www.macrovision.com/press_rel_2_27_01.html is particularly worrying: "We believe that SAFEAUDIO provides an opportunity for the music industry to regain the billions of dollars lost to unauthorized casual copying."
If I understand the press release correctly, what this means is that I will be unable to copy SAFEAUDIO from one medium to another.
I purchase quite a lot of music on CD to listen to at home and have a MiniDisc player in my car. I travel quite a lot and like to listen to music while I do so. Under existing copyright laws I am permitted to record a CD to MD for my own personal usage, and indeed I pay a tax on every blank MiniDisc that I purchase just for this privilege.
Can you please assure me that I will be able to continue to do this in the future, even with SAFEAUDIO protected media?
Thankyou,
--
Kai Howells
IT Specialist.
Verbing Weirds Language.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Since you wanted a lawyer point of view on "fair use" here we go:
Fair use is, in US law, a defense to copyright infringement. It is a theory developed by the courts to limit the scope of copyright legislation.
The only fair use recognized directly by legislation is:
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - (...)"
The main reason for copyright is to promote creativity according to the constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"The judicial doctrine of fair use is usually limited by the commercial aspect of a copy or usage. Make any commercial copy and it is probably not fair use (except for Sec 107)
So the biggest problem, in the USA at least, is that you have no right to fair use. You can only invoke fair use as a defense to a copyright infringement suit. (sorry folks!)
Some country, like Canada (where i come from), have a more robust fair use doctrine. The Copyright Act in canada specify that you have the right to make a private copy for your personal use. (sec 80 of the copyright act):
"80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording."
This is almost what "fair use" is.
Some cyberlaw experts, such as Pr Lessig, are in favor of a more robust fair use in order to protect you from the RIAA (see for example the brief of the law professors in the Napster trial : http://dl.napster.com/amicus_law.pdf)
Hope this helps you !
On a more personnal note I think the Slashdot community is right; fair use should be extended to protect certain private copy of recording. However, since the copyright lobby seems to have the ears of the US congress, it is very unlikely to happen in this lifetime ... but it's not Australia yet !
***** disclaimer *****
THIS IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION, do not act on behalf of the content of this comment, always consult a lawyer for legal opinion.
***** thanks **********
Having said that, there's talk about media detection capabilities in future CD or DVD players (search for Jim Taylor's DVD faq), so you can still burn them to *D-R, you just can't play them, if a song is designated (probably by a watermark) not to be played on recordable media. Of course, all you need in that case is a firmware patch.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The shame of it all is that in the end, they will bury themselves. The more restrictive the technology they use to distribute their music is, the sooner the public will lose respect for them and their copyright. They will force people like me to use unprotected, unpayed-for MP3s, because while we want to listen to (and pay for) music, we are unwilling to do so on their terms.
I mean really now - when faced with the potential options - purchase (for $20) a SuperDigitalMediaDevice which includes bizarre contracts and anti-copy provisions, or make your own for 1/10th the cost, from high quality, free, unrestricted MP3s, the legality becomes a non-issue (for most people).
And the situation gets worse when they start using proprietary formats that are unsupported in unpopular environments!
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The key word with the law is *ALLOWS*. Not being familiar with the law, but can make a reasonable stab at it from your statements. It doesn't make it illegal to make a copy of the CD's, but it at the same time doesn't say that the producer has to make it easy for you to make a copy.
This comes up all the time. HELLO! Nobody is forcing people to sign these contracts, if they don't want them, they can go to another non-RIAA record label, or produce something on their own. Every artist that is on a RIAA label and is "getting ripped off by the record industry" got there because they put themselves there.
--
Free Mac Mini
Copy Protection only protects ourselves from ourselves. It also protects our money from ourselves, and secures it for the profiteering record and movie industries. Macrovision is all one greedy, corrupt, megalomaniacal farce. And they must be stopped.
(This was written while listening to a ripped audio CD track, since my soundcard does not apply the equalizer settings to the Audio CD channel.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
CDs using this technology should be required to be labelled as such so I know not to buy them. I prefer to give my money to companies who don't blatantly trample all over my rights. Of course, I can't even remember the last time I bought a CD (And no, I don't use napster.) I think it was from MP3.com about a year ago...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's not going to work unless there is a clear up-front cost to consumers. The average person isn't concerned about the philosophical implications of buying into a system that prohibits fair use. They just want to go to the store and get music.
The 10% of people (max) who are concerned about these things don't have the economic power to make a difference, except by enlightening the 90% who know nothing about the DMCA.
Called a "video stabilizer". You can get one at any radio shack or at many places online. First hit in Google was this link which is exactly what you're looking for.
No, I believe that I do understand fair use. Title 17, Section 106 clearly states that the owner of a copyright has exclusive authority over what is allowed and is not allowed. One of these rights is to limit reproductions and/or recordings.
Looking right here at the CD cases I have lying around, I see the phrase "Unauthorized copying, reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance, and broadcasting prohibited." This CDs 7 years old. The contract has always been there when you go to the checkout line. You purchase a copyrighted item, you fall under the rights of the copyrighter... not your own.
So what do you suppose would happen if ABC were owned by Disney instead?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The *but* makes the difference.
Only a limited number of brands can copy them, and only with cetain media.
That is enough to say it is successful against your casual momma pirate.
> I'm intending to learn the guitar which will be more entertaining than listening to the latest pop pap.
Yep. I used to care a lot more about my audio collection, quality stereo, etc. After learning an instrument listening to recordings just wasn't as interesting.
Produce a CD with one or more Green Day songs on it and nobody will want to copy it. Almost 100% effective.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
What the fuck are you talking about?
The new macs play audio digitally; without converting the digital information to analog - but this doesn't mean you can't listen to CDs on these machines without 'ripping the audio off of them'.
Digital signal for USB speakers, analog signal for headphones/conventional speakers. No ripping required.
Well if it is I hope they know that safedisc copyprotection can in fact be copied by using an app called CloneCD. Unfortunatly there isn't a *nix version of this app. The point is that no one though safedisc protection could be copied with cdrs and it is possible.
Are you honestly saying that what's happening here is that the RIAA is trying to address the crisis of a mad consumer culture gone out of control - to help us reclaim our moorings and return to the austere sensibility of yore?
Because your argument smells like the silliest kind of apologism.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
...you're saying that there is a good chance they'll add signal BS to the audio so as to make it pretty much unencodable by most modern compression schemes. Is that a fair assesment?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ummm. Before you go calling people idiots...
Apple part number T2587LL/A Harmon Kardon SoundSticks. These are USB speakers. Which, as if to prove my point, have the caveat Older G3's with hardware-based DVDs running DVD 1.3 software will not work with Soundsticks. They require newer, software-based DVD's running DVD 2.x
Macrovision filters are now illegal in Australia, because macrovision is a "copy protection technology" and such filters are "circumvention devices" within the meaning of the amended Copyright Act.
Stupid government. Bring on the election.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
and just like before, give it 2 weeks after they begin using it mainstream, and someone will find a way around it. I still have my little Video Copy-Protection-Stopper-Box in the closet. Heck.. Get a live card and set wave out as record device and grab the tracks........ ok, so its sloppy, but it works (and any idiot can do it, which explains how i thought of it)
if you mod me down, Darth, i shall become more powerfull than you can possibly imagine.. f33r |\/|1 |\|3g4+v C4r|\/|4
They'll bust anything in hardware we Americans care to throw at them.
So I can just go over there and get h4x0r3d versions of whatever audio gear I care to use.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It most certainly is not. That's not a sale. Only in the case of external legal baggage (for instance, coventants on real estate) can such a thing happen. Generally, in other cases, they must provide you with something on an ongoing basis, in exchange for which you must adhere to a commitment you have made (such as not to duplicate the CD). Beyond that, they can refuse to do business with you in the future (this is how vendor/distributor/retailer policy relationships are enforced), but they cannot arbitrarily constrain what you do with something you own. This is why software companies try to pretend that the software is licensed and not sold.
How about if you sell me an apple on the condition that I not eat it. I will eat it in front of you while you search for redress. Good luck.
If they want to control what people do with them, then they are free to lease CDs.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Yeah I know that, I was being Facetious. Even with a great markup, theyre still highly overpriced. They were even under investigation a few years ago for having a monopoly. Why they were found innocent, I don't know but...whatever
This must be stopped.
Jeez yeah, I don't know where we'd be supposed to get 0.15c pieces from
Rich
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
If the copy-protection scheme is to succeed, it must be as undetectable as possible by the end user. I don't mean that he won't realize he's using a copy-protected format, but that his ears won't be able to tell the difference between a copy-protected one and a non-protected one.
VHS macrovision is popular precisely because it's undetectable in how it alters visual quality. You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
We're almost at the stage where digital watermarks are completely seamless. Ten years ago, inititives like this would've been scoffed at. Now, they're becoming reality.
Read the rest of this comment...
The reason the the music industry thinks they can do whatever the hell they want with the notion of copy protection (not copyright protection) is brought to light by a Dennis Miller line:
"The only reason Steely Dan's latest album is selling so well is that the 50 year olds who buy it don't know how to download it for free."
They seem to think that the public, if given enough hassles, will simply stop attempting to convienence themselves by copying music for their own use. They assume we are crooks. What will bite them in the ass is that consumer drive is more powerful than law (eventually) and their copy-protection will not hold (A million monkeys at a million typewriters... it's along those lines). I am very willing to pay for music if I believe my money is going to good use. But I am not interested in buying multiple copies of something just to convience myself.
I share mp3's, but with my friends only. I don't run a public FTP server. Those who I give access to are those who have an account on my system. This is the same idea as giving a CD to a friend (we've heard this argument before).
We are not all 50 year olds. We will be eventually and we will not be the same as the current crop of 50 year olds. Hilary Rosen had better wake up and realize digital music is what people want.
Woz
Digital recordings may sound better longer, but I'm starting to miss the days when I owned the property I paid for. Just wait untill the all digital book is commen. You won't be able to read the constitution with out paying a fee. Now that's the "free" market at it's best.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Could somebody please mirror the crack for SafeAudio?? :)
And how much do you think the artist actually makes from "the slale of records?" Squat. Ask just about any artist. The only ones that make any real money at all from the sale of their records are the ones that have been around long enough to have a good position to negotiate, or have actually started their own labels. The rest of them make what little money they actually see from touring. Have you bothered to look into what the artists have to say about the whole thing? The only people winning here are the Record companies and I for one don't see "copy protection" as enough of a value add to warrant the replacement of my equipment so I can hear the "new, improved format." Next time, get your facts straight.
Folks have been talking about this since at least May 2000 (thanks to Google for quick search results):
_ eu r.html
http://www.prostudio.com/studiosound/may00/comm
So this isn't really _new_ news. On the other hand, the fact that it's being tested probably is.
The real story here is something we've known all along. The big companies see a huge loss of income from the teching up of the people. As we get access to cd burners, computers with broadband, etc... they see their traditional revenue streams eventually drying up. They're grasping for straws.
It sucks, really. They couldn't make it illegal to copy content for fair use, so instead they just standardize it out of existence. Since they're all in bed together anyway, we all stand to lose in the end.
They won't be happy until the only way you can hear music is a streaming connection, for which you will pay by the second....
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
Whatever form of copy protection gets proposed slashdot editors are always first to get their panties in a knot. No thought is given to the implication of the piracy of media content or intellectual property. How else other than through the slale of records is an artist supposed to create his music? How much do you think it costs to purchase instruments and rent a recording studio? Don't know? Let me tell you then it's quite a bit! Even if they could scrap through to buy a battered guitar or drums what about feeding their wives and kids? Would you like the work of your inspiration to be copied without regard to your rights as the creator? Think about it. The so called community gets very upset at every hint of violating the GLP license but if someone else tries to protect THEIR own intellectual property then all of a sudden it's not right and it's restricting freedom? Yeah, right I'm with you all the way on this one!
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
MP3 is more than good enough for bootlegs, where the sound quality is often really bad to begin with. Many of my most treasured recordings are either surreptitious cassette recordings with body mics or soundboard cassettes; all have been duped many times before I ever got them, and some are 15-20 years old.
Brittney Spears isn't any more tolerable because she's in 44Khz Stereo with a 100:1 S/N ratio, and my Replacements bootlegs aren't any less enjoyable because they've got audible tape hiss, crap edits and a tonal range of about 8Khz..
--
Having ren-ren-ren-ren-ren-ren-rented VHS tapes pro-pro-pro-pro-protected by Mac-mac-mac-mac-mac-macrovision, I shud-ud-ud-ud-ud-ud-ud-udder to think what their aud-aud-aud-aud-aud-audio protection will sou-sou-sou-sou-sou-sound li-li-li-li-li-li-like.
Um, I've done this. In fact, I've learned the bass lines and chord structures and all the words to about 50% of all the CD's I own. You can't say I haven't analyzed them in depth. I can notate them for you in excruciating detail.
Cool. But that's not quite what I meant... when you memorize words, bass lines, and chords, do you analyze them for meaning? And once you've analyzed them, do you go back and do it over? It's a very interesting mental exercise and it can increase the value of a CD tenfold. If you enjoy it enough, you'll care for your CDs. If your CDs are stolen, that's your PHYSICAL property being stolen... the physical object you paid $15 for. Buy another one, them's the breaks; or get insurance. If you just want to rearrange things, that's the everything-all-the-time problem come back to haunt you. Why can't we just be happy with what we have?
At any rate, they let you feel like it is perfectly legal. I recall a few years ago a story about Sony in Japan buying back a lot of Playstation games from retailers because they were selling them too cheaply. To avoid "confusing" consumers about the price of games. Same thing in reverse I guess.
They apparently don't trust the movie industry, either. In order to produce a commercial DVD disc, you have to use a Macrovision authorized manufacturer who will then collect fees for enabling the bit on the DVD disc that puts the player into Macrovision encoding mode. They seem to try damn hard to make sure they always get paid every last dime they're owed for their technology.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Im sure within a couple weeks some renegade hacker will have the death penalty for submitting a patch for cdda2wav.
Fight or lose, the right to choose. -Oi Polloi "The Right to Choose"
The Fair Use provisions of Title 17 of US copyright law do not grant you any rights to make a copy of anyone's intellectual property. They only make you immune from prosecution if you manage to actually make a copy (and use it only in a manner consistant with Fair Use).
The wait for tech support doubles every 18 months... Any likelihood they can solve your problem halves. Foosters
I'll have to look into those. I have a couple of CD's I don't like enough to buy second copies of, but are damaged enough to need a little extra help.
Thanks....
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
That should really say it all, but the folks at Macrovision are 'forward looking'. So, lets look forward to:
Macrovision 'protected' CDs going south faster and with less reason than unprotected ones.
A 15% (average) increase in the retail price of music CDs to cover the royalties going to Macrovsion for their 'protection'.
If you doubt the price increase, reread the bit about how Macrovision will control when and how the 'technology' will be 'upgraded'.In short, they are fishing for a constant revenue stream from the music distributors.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Thst's where the "4centity" comes in. A group of manufactures that define hard drive/cdrom interfaces like the nasty CRPM. The manufacturers think it's a great idea because then they will sell a lot more devices if content is readily available for you to purchase (a self-feeding vicious loop). You will need to buy more of these copy - protected devices because you won't be able to copy from one from another. And forget about that basement operation that provides a way around it. Because of the DMCA circumventing something like that is a federal felony now, with criminal prosecution - even for "fair use" (like DeCSS). Too bad congress is bunch of freakin' whores in this area.
So you can see, the crack sniffing music business has all of its bases covered.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I still don't understand how this will stop ripping from the ATAPI drive digitally? How do they stop a perfect copy? A CD is a CD is a CD. There is nothing to stop that. The only devices that will be affected will be CD->(Digital2Analog)->(Analog2Digital)->CDR. Stupid.
The internet is a vastly superior medium for content distribution. I sometimes like to listen to Blue Grass music.
There are exactly 0(zero, zip, nada, none, nicth, nul,) stations in my area that broadcast Blue Grass. Not popular enough. You'll never attack the advertizing revenue you need to pay yourself, pay the rent and pay for that license.
I log into http://www.OzarkMountainAirwaves.com/ and listen all I want. They "narrowcast" 24/7/52 over the net.
You can tell the power that be to screw their high price of entry (millions for a broadcast licence,) when you can use a T1 or T3 switch and you're in business shoving packets that YOU like all over the planet.
Freedom of choice!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why do people demand that they be able to make multiple copies of music CDs to store in different places?
Fundamentally? Because it is their right to do so.
Oh, there are plenty of good practical reasons why you would want to do this (you've already been given plenty to think about.) But when it all comes down to it, the simple fact of the matter is that making personal copies for your own personal use is covered by fair use of the material. End of story.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
It would seem to me that the best in raw CD reading and writing (I'm mostly unfamiliar here, but DiskJuggler and CDRWin come to mind for Windows, and CDParanoia for *nix) could still digitally reproduce these CD's, or evolve to do so if they don't already.
More interesting will be getting a CD burning utility to remove the copy protection, instead of burning a bit-for-bit copy of the original and supposedly protected media.
Ed
I guess what is rather ironic about this is how during the battle between the at the time new VCR technology and the movie industry was the fact that the movie industry believed if the VCR was made available to the public, it would decimate the industry. Though it was not immediately seen, the industry now enjoys royalties from all the prerecorded tapes and blank tapes that are sold. Now, recording something off TV is a very normal thing to do and I don't know of anybody that thinks of it as being wrong. Want to watch a movie when your not home? Tape it, no one thinks about it from a legal aspect. We are now in a similar state with the music industry. I think it is too soon to say how P2P will effect the future of the industry. Prehaps in the end a similar outcome as with the VCR will result and the industry will come out ahead and also the consumer. However just like before, the industry is crying foul too early IMHO.
I guess the music industry does not care about this "word-of-mouth" promotion of their overpriced products.
Asikaa
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
$43.45 is a lot of money for one CD. In Pennsylvania, sales tax is 7%. That CD would cost you 46 dollars and 49.15 cents after tax!
This must be stopped.
For more information, click here.
--
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: Screw you, Dave!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Might as well get rid of that whole pesky fair use provision of copyright law, right?
Not neccessarily so, see most corporations will always want a scapegoat to fall back unto should their corporation lose funds somewhere down the line (overpaid exec's, bad artists, etc.), which is where claiming the loss of millions is stemming from others pirating music.
Now, according to that press release there isn't much said on what steps the program takes to ensure nothing is used, so who's to say this even works for one, and who's to say someone won't circumvent it down the line. Personally I feel those in the industry could, and can create an industry standard which wouldn't allow this to happen, but won't, because once again, they can't come back later and cry losses, thereby creating stinkers (legal mumbo jumbo) in order to create disinformation abroad to hide the fact that sometimes their losses aren't always those pirating, etc. (e.g. Record execs vs. Napster)
The complete press release once again seems to focus on a product and all its greatness with no real detail other than supporting paragraphs referencing how great this product is. How does it work though, is it an encryption based program, steganographic based product? What about some of these CD's with enhanced videos on them, these cannot be copied, and yet they didn't need any special program such as Safecopy to make them, why not use these schemes? Well more power to Macrovision for blindly capitalizing on an idea.
Fidel Castro -- My kind of hacker
In other words: the industry is aware of the problems, and is trying to make the Macrovision inconvenience as little as possible. If it's a pain for you, well, it's not their fault your television predates VCRs and practically needs to be retrofitted to watch tapes in the first place.
All good points. I like your comment.
I'll start out by saying that I have a very wide variety of musical tastes, and a large collection of CDs. Not as large as yours, but large enough. It's not uncommon for me to listen to a classical CD, then a punk CD, switch to jazz, and then move into rock mode.
Our "must have everything now" culture (see the Slashdot story about web in the car) makes us indecisive... but demanding. We don't know what we want, but we want it now! So it just seems to be not acceptable to people to leave 99% of thier collection at home and just choose 1 or 2 special CDs for the day to listen to, to enjoy, to analize, and to listen to from front to back to figure out why it's a good or bad CD. People buy CDs and then listen to only one track! If you really listen, there's alot more to those other tracks then you may realize... all the CDs I have had at least a dollar per song enjoyment from after listening to the CD all the way through a few times! And I continue to buy select CDs at the current high prices, knowing that I will spend quality time with those CDs to learn everything about them.
So my suggestion is take some time and care about what you are buying! Don't demand everything all of the time... then the need to make copies of your entire collection won't seem like such a big deal.
Let's just say for a minute that this protection scheme really works. Let's say it doesn't break compatibility with regular cd players. Let's say we somehow can't raw read it even with something hardcore like blindread. There is a simple way around these sort of protection schemes, and its name is VAC.
VAC (Virtual Audio Cable) is based off the idea (mentioned in a few other posts) of looping physical cables from your soundcard's output to it's input to record the audio. VAC creates a wave i/o device (or multiple i/o devices, but only one is needed for this sort of thing) that can be selected as your wave out device, and also as your wave in device in a recording program (soundforge, wavelab, hell even microsoft sound record would work). To the player you are simply listening to your cd, but in reality the signal is recorded without ever leaving the digital domain, and you now have a perfect copy.
The only downside to this is that you must do it all in real time. But of course once you've done it, then its a regular unprotected file, so do with it what you will. Also note that this works for recording real audio and other streams that are not supposed to be able to be recorded.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Now go rip the same cd twice & diff the wavs... it is *very* unusual to get the same result twice...
(Not that the difference if audible, but many people can't tell the difference between cd & mp3 on chead to mid-priced equipment anyway...)
who almost stopped me from copying this DVD to VHS.. mmmm.. Blues Brother Collectors Edition :)
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--
Insert Witty Sig Here
You possibly need another RF cable, and the "TV/AV" button. I have a DVD and VCR plugged into a SCART auto-switcher, which plugs into the TV. When I put in a DVD or video, the switcher selects the correct line and the tele switches to AV instead of 1 or 2 or whatever. This is very good. If I then decide I want to watch tele for a bit while the DVD is playing, I press "TV/DVD" or "TV/AV" on one of the many remote controls - which tells the tele to ignore the SCART auto-select magic and switch back to the normal channels.
It's also the music recording industry's right to produce a physical piece of plastic, which they sell to you. It's the music industry's right to say what can and can't be done with the object that they've sold to you if you consider a sale of this type to be contractual...
Now take a look at how MP3 does its compression - psycho-acoustic masking, etc. etc. And look at how the ear listens. Probably a slightly different process (!).
So I imagine a distortion could be made to audio, in the analogue domain, that wasn't very hearable by humans, but totally screws the MP3 assumptions and results in a very very (audibly) lossy compression.
I'm not saying it's a fact, but it could be done. Then all the MP3 codecs would need to be re-worked to take that into account - but you could start a running battle that at least takes some of the ease out of it for the average joe.
Quite likely this tech would be similar to the nibble-count sync/code type copy protection
;^)
schemes that were used in the mid to late '80s for disk copy protection or more recently the
media distribution format that microsoft used in the mid '90s to cram more sectors on a disk.
I imagine it'll be as successful as these schemes turned out to be... not!
If I was a betting person, I'd be guessing some combo of a bit pattern in the track lead-in
area and a deliberate CIRC error. Disk copiers will correct the CIRC error and the data
on the disc will not match the original data. Carefully timed errors in conjunction with
bit hiding in the lead-in area could make life difficult for current generation cd-bit
rippers, by changing the form or mode of the sector where consumer devices don't care...
Other candidates are the radial track wobble, extra-bit stuffing, or PQ subcode errors, but
these might break current players too much...
The more things change, they more they remain the same...
then live with it and don't complain.
Well, If this is anything like Macrovision, you need to get all that hardware compliant.. I can see getting the major manufacturer to get together and install limitations on those home CD recorders (non-pc based), but won't this limitation have to be hardware installed on all those no-name burners as well?
Macrovision sucks bad by the way. When I first tried to run a signal from a DVD to my TV, I had to go through my VCR (really old TV, no RCA inputs).. The Macrovision signal would f*ck with the signal level coming through the VCR, and it didn't matter that I wasn't trying to *copy* the DVD, it wouldn't let me watch it. What sort of complications would this introduce to audio CD's, and *WHY* would people purchase new hardware that is less reliable? Shiny new packaging?
air and light and time and space
Umm...not to be a jerk, but PA sales tax was only 6% last I checked :) That 1% saves you about 44 cents...
Cheers
---------------
Yes! That guy!
If the DVD player is in a computer there is probably a way to disable macrovision in software. Look for macrovision hacks on google
When will they ever learn that you can't copy protect anything, no matter what, it will be broken. It's just a natural thing. D*mn millionaires, they just won't give up and live their lives, what are they trying to accomplish? One person can live on a million dollars for many years and still be happy(atleast 10 years). A waste of time. We need to stop with the copy-protection that is only in the interest of the rich and worry about getting rid of these darn'd lawyers and other scum of the earth, they can find something better to do.
Question everything.
Unless encryption is built into every speaker, it is still possible to sample audio signals at the speaker input. End of story.
I haven't bought a music CD in over a year, maybe two, a new one in maybe three. I have one (1) DVD (The Matrix, I had to try out the player after all). I just find it impossible to do so, the thought of contributing money to these Jabba-the-Hut like entities just gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
But am I bitter? No. There's music on the radio and the stuff I used to listen to sounds as good today as it ever did. I'm intending to learn the guitar which will be more entertaining than listening to the latest pop pap. Movies come on TV sooner or later and a trip to the theatre isn't as simple when you have a small child anyway.
but the reason I say thank you is that I am on the verge of being debt free and owning the house I live in. The abuse that these companies have dealt out has given me a Pavlovian response against consumerism. I still like nice things, still want goods and services but there's no longer the overpowering compulsion to acquire things that there once was. I am regaining control of my finances.
So yes, I say thank you RIAA and MPAA. May you rot in the grave you've dug for yourself. Bring the music back to the people where it belongs.
Rich
...that I'd like to pick. There is no such thing as "fair use rights." "Fair use rights," as a phrase, is all spin. According to copyright law, the holder of the copyright has exclusive rights to make copies - you don't. When the courts realized that there are certain times that you can make copies that don't obviate anyone's need to buy, they allowed it as a defense. Fair use is a defense, not a right.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
This just goes to show that the RIAA is always lying through their teeth when they way "We aren't concerned about casual copying. We are just trying to stop mass piracy."
.1% of all music copying (legal or illegal) is cdda->cdda (as opposed to MP3 or other file formats, possibly on a CD), they really have no justification for doing this, other than to screw their customers.
They really want to take away your rights to use music you purchased legally.
I can see the case for macrovision, at least on rental videos: When you only pay $2.50 to rent a video for 3 days (or whatever), you shouldn't be allowed to copy it, even for personal use. But trying to apply the same logic to CDs that you buy is just wrong.
Since maybe
I don't buy CD's anymore anyhow.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
FC Closer
The Beatles attempted copy control on their albums? This is the first I've heard of any such thing. Those guys were richer and more popular than God, and they attempted copy control? Do you have a reference for this? Was it at the band's request, or did the publishing house try it behind their back?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Grammar check:
"I think I have had at least one dollar per song's worth of enjoyment out of ever CD I own... after listening to the CD all the way through a few times."
Is nothing safe from the grasp of Macrovision? Well, DeCSS has already been created; that's one example of a medium they neglected to taint.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yet another troll technology that will probably be a lame attempt to protect those with money like *cough* DeCSS *cough*. Oops, I meant, tried to protect the rich...
It's also the music recording industry's right to produce a physical piece of plastic, which they sell to you. It's the music industry's right to say what can and can't be done with the object that they've sold to you if you consider a sale of this type to be contractual...
If you sign contracts when you buy CDs that prevent you from copying them to tape, making MP3s out of them, or listening to them in your car, that's your business. Speaking for myself, I can attest that I have never signed such a contract. The use of the CDs is governed by the same laws that establish the use of any other copyrighted material, be it a CD, a magazine article, a movie, or a book. If you don't know what "fair use" is (and it sounds like you don't), a Google search should promptly rectify that.
Realize that fair use will not go away simply because the RIAA despises it. It is the law of the land. The RIAA has a vision of an authoritarian police state where people are required to register their CD purchases with the government, where armed RIAA agents can come into your house at any time to personally verify your CD collection against what you have registered, and where technologies such as CD-R media and recording devices are banned outright.
You can espouse this police state if you wish, but I must inform you that those of us who value our freedoms will not allow it to come to fruition.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Like a vast majority of Slashdotters, I am not a lawyer. We also throw around the phrase "fair use" a whole lot. Could someone that really is a lawyer (or close) give the legal difinition of "fair use", please?
Marty, the story submitter, claims that Macrovision, as well as this new system, SafeAudio, are crushing our rights to copy stuff that we paid for and own. Are companies really required to give you a "plaintext" version of the music/video you buy so that you can make personal copies? I wouldn't think so.
Then you can get into the whole discussion about how companies are allowed to encode content, but people are not allowed to decode it because of the DMCA.
I own an old Apex 600a DVD player so Macrovision doesn't concern me much.
-B
I have seen other "copy protected" CDDAs and CDROMS. Most of those were impossible to copy with "standard" CD recording software. However, lately, most CD recorders give you the option to do a "raw" read / write, no checksums are done by the recorder itself. More and more CD copying programs are emerging that support this feature. If they want to remain compatible with the current base of installed players, they can't make these copyprotections work against raw data copies. There are no technical specs of this copyprotection scheme available, my guess is that it's just another program that puts bad bits in the stream to make checksums go wrong and you can actually still copy the disk if you use a modern burner and software that both support raw data.
and I wonder if it will change the size of the CD any..... lets say 3 songs per CD.... Now, that would be a lot of fun to carry around. People might start giving up CDS and , moving to all music in a digital format.. though I highly doubt it. Mabey that would be the better way.
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The first one has been tried - just screw with the error correction info on the CD. That way, "dumb" audio CD players are OK, but CD ROM drives do extra error correction and "correct" the signal wrongly, screwing up the rip. Nice try, but it didn't work reliably with audio CD players, and ISTR you could bypass the problem with raw reads on a CD ROM drive anyway. Oops. Can't remember who tried that one, but it didn't get very far - CDs kept being returned "It doesn't play in my CD player!" etc...
CD->CDr copying would be much the same, I imagine: properly designed, it should just be ripping straight from one drive onto the other. No chance there, then.
OK, so are they trying to stop people copying to tape by screwing with the signal? That's been tried before as well: the Beatles were among the first, adding a high-frequency tone to their LPs to interfere with the bias signal on a tape deck. That one didn't get anywhere either: again, it broke on some players, and was trivial to circumvent (low-pass or notch filter, anyone?).
So: They claim to have some magic bullet anti-piracy solution which blocks copying. No indication what sort of copying, or how it blocks it, just a press release... Why do I get the feeling it's not going to get very far?!
I ended up returning four DVD players because I thought they were defective.
Eventually the sales person asked if I was trying to run the signal through my VCR and told me I had to buy a $70 thingy to remove Macrovision from the signal.
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kaaaameeeeeeehaaaaaameeeeeha!
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kaaaameeeeeeehaaaaaameeeeeha!
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Our "must have everything now" culture (see the Slashdot story about web in the car) makes us indecisive... but demanding. We don't know what we want, but we want it now! So it's just not acceptable for people to choose 1 or 2 special CDs for the day at work, leaving 99% of thier collection at home. We are unsatisfied by not being able to have everything all of the time.
I suggest trying this: Take one CD for the day to listen to, to enjoy, to analize, and to listen to from front to back to figure out why it's a good or bad CD. Decide why you like or dislike each track. For the ones you like, listen to them again and try to find problems with them. For the ones you don't like, listen to them again and try to see the good. You may find that your attitude about the CD changes over the day!
People buy CDs and then listen to only one track! If you really listen, there's alot more to those other tracks then you may realize. If record companies insist on making you pay more, than make that money count! Fight it if you must, but don't let the "must have it now" culture suck you in!
Suddently the need to make copies of your entire collection won't seem so great...
....then CloneCD will make you a perfect copy, pretty little watermark & all....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Yes, and while we're at it, we should boycott DVDs for the DeCSS crap and the region locks. Oh wait...
---
The new macs play audio digitally; without converting the digital information to analog - but this doesn't mean you can't listen to CDs on these machines without 'ripping the audio off of them'.
Reading the audio digitally == 'ripping the audio off of them'.
That's what a ripper does. It takes the audio off the cd in a digital format, and saves it to a disk.
What the normal method of CD playing does is to convert it to analog (headphone jacks) before letting you have it. The whole idea behind any secure format is to not allow you to access the digital media. So any method of "playing" which requires the digital data will not work.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I answered the question directly, now maybe I could have included a bit more information, but that would have involved going home and checking. Believe it or not, some people that are capable of enjoying high end equipment do not obsess over their belongings so as to remember the brand, make, serial number and all specs, even those that are otherwise skilled in technology, especially when the purchase was made a couple years earlier. You confuse being a _techie_ (i.e., someone that knows the above buzzwords and brandnames inside and out) with being skilled technically (i.e., someone that is actually capable of doing more than regurgitating words, like meaningfully advancing the art/science that they work in).
How does the fact that at least ONE unit, albeit nameless, works without any noticable loss of quality equal zero useful information? It answered his question and it is somewhat useful. If one unit works, then we know at least that the problem does not evidence itself with _all_ such units. If this information were merely worthless, it could be ignored. Your problem is that you have serious issues with the fact that maybe someone has a bit more money than you.
By the way mosch, real men will still troll without the AC, even when they've been shown to be foolish and insecure.
But how does it work. They claim you can use existing mastering equipment to create cds like this. Even more impressive, they claim:
The SAFEAUDIO Toolkit will be distributed with Macrovision's SAFECAST(TM) digital rights management technology that enables 'time lock' and 'number of usage lock' functions while providing persistent security. This feature ensures that CD replication facilities will always be using the latest release of SAFEAUDIO and by allowing Macrovision to control the timing and delivery of toolkit upgrades.
If you can lock the number of times someone plays a song, you are NOT making a cd that will play in a cd player. You need software for that, and it sounds to me like this is software for win32 pc's only. This sounds like yet another attempt to create cds that will execute a program on your computer that decrypt tracks on the cd. Even though it now has DMCA protection, all these schemes have the problem of either needing an external conduit (the net) to give the user the key, or embedding the key on the cd, which is all too easy to hack.
This is an old (and stupid) idea.
Prove me wrong?
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
All kidding aside, I'm sure the RIAA (and the MPAA) has considered this model. Look at how well it fattens the software fat-cats.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I don't know about you guys but I just use a photocopier. It makes great copies of my CDs.
The technology was developed jointly by Macrovision and TTR Technologies, Inc. in response to the widespread availability of CD burners and disc compilation software.
Hmmm, they're not even trying to pretend this is to stop piracy? This is so people can't make their own compilations? Surely this is prime fair use.
But the cat's out of the bag on CD's. They can't sacrifice backwards-compatibility so they either have to mess with the digital signal or put data in the non-music blocks on the CD. Open source tools already know how to read CD's and skip non-data blocks.
At least with VCR's the Macrovision signal is supposed to be out of range of the TV's display circuitry, but in range of the VCR's recording circuitry, so, in theory, you don't get signal degredation. I can't see how they can accomplish backwards compatibility, unadulterated audio signals, and effectiveness (unless they plan to attack linux cd tools with DMCA). Pick any two.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
hear hear, i havent paid for music in 10 years. ill happily support the artists, by attending their concerts and such, but pay the industry cartels? i think not.
I intend to start applying a restrictive license to everything I post to the net. It will permit all of the usual uses, such as reading online, archiving a copy, etc. But it will specifically require that the first page of any printed copy of any such work, even if it is contained within a compilation with other such works, must contain the full copyright notice. As one individual, I can't expect to ever prove that they have run afoul of my license. But if thousands of us do the same, it may work.
And if the copyright holders on music that the big labels aren't interested in put similar restrictions on songs they release as MP3s, we could easily see the recording industry violating the licenses of indy artists in their overzealous search for fair use that they don't like. A class action lawsuit on behalf of the very indy artists that they aren't interested in distributing could be an excellent test case for re-establishing fair use in the modern networked world. Hopefully, there are some lawyers out there interested in free speech issues looking for a chance to do just that.
> What's next?
Well, let's run down the checklist of what you "own" when you "buy" something:
1. Land? No. Very hard to get the allodial title. Taxes prove you don't own your land.
2. Cars? No. The dealer submitted the Manufactor's Statement of Origin to the government, which in turn gives you "permission" to "drive." (You just threw away your Right to Travel.)
3. Software? Nope. Most "End User License"s don't give you permission to make copies for your friends.
3. Music? Whew! You "own" it. For now... But if the RIAA has their way, you will license music in the future.
Food for thought:
If you "own" it, then WHY do you need a license to use it as freely as you like??
--
"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson
the RIAA has Backstreet Boys & Britney Spears. You have anger over restrictions on your rights. Who will win here?
The masses don't care about rights. They're sheep. Just do what the other poster suggested and get handy with a soldering iron. It'll take a bit of effort, but we'll still be able to enjoy the music we own whenever we want to.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Is there anyway we can get a group of big wig tech heads (Stallman, etc.) to ask the Justice Department to investigate the RIAA the same way M$ is being investigated? I mean, making non-standard audio formats to lock smaller labels out (DVD-audio anyone?) and trying to kill our fair use rights is EVIL. It'd be nice if we actual got JUSTICE once instead of just the LAW.
Nitpick - the RIAA is technically a collusive system, not a monopoly - all the players in the market get together and agree to things that would never happen without the communication - their behavior is no different from price-fixing.
Unfortunately, there a couple reasons the RIAA will never see a federal courtroom any time soon:
1) Bush is president. As a rule, Republicans don't bring antitrust suits. Reagan ended the antitrust case against IBM (admittedly there were reasons why this might make sense). With comments already coming from the Bush administration about how they "don't litigate lightly" you won't expect to see them mopping up the floor with megacorps anytime soon.
2) The RIAA is politically aware. Microsoft didn't know what a lobbyist was until they were served half a dozen lawsuits. These boys have already pushed through the DMCA, the Sonny Bono copyright extension, and are now buying even more Republicans to oppose any sane changes to these monstrous laws. If they can purchase copyright extensions, they can purchase an antritrust exemption faster than you can get David Boies on the case.
3) There's no business complaining. Sun, Netscape, AOL, Apple, and dozens of other companies had all seen Microsoft's tricks firsthand. They were battered, but they lived to tell the tale, and lobby Congress and Clinton to do something. It helps if you can show a judge a beaten corporation - they don't give a damn about consumers anymore.
Unfortunately, the RIAA beat its competition out of existence decades ago. There are no corporate victims to parade around, just consumers. If only Clinton's judicial appointments hadn't all been roadblocked....
Isn't this what SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) was invented for? So that you could copy your stuff, but no one else could make a copy *from* that? WTF is up with the recording industry? They make *more* money each and every year than the previous year and they *still* cry poor.
Hopefully the RIAA et al will realize that using this will do more harm than good....
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
I bought all of these devices for COMPLETELY LEGAL uses and a couple of these uses have already been taken away by misguided copy protection schemes. I want to watch VHS tapes and DVDs on my Mac while I work. I can't. I want to backup my software that comes on CD-ROM. I can't. I also want to make mix CD's to put in the car and rip .mp3's so I can listen to them while I jog or ride my bike. I've spent a good amount of money on the hardware required to do these things. What gives them the nerve to do things that would prevent this?
I'm about to say to hell with it all and just pirate every damned piece of media that I consume. That seems to be the market that the RIAA and MPAA are preparing for. Why disappoint them? If they want to dig trenches and fight their CUSTOMERS, I say bring it on. I'm tired of this crap. If this copy protection scheme really works, it's probably going to be the final straw for this consumer.
Congrats to marty, submitter of this story, for the story with the most sarcastic tone ever submitted to Slashdot. It was a pleasure to read :)
But seriously, it sems that every copyright story I read these days makes the "fair use" clause more and more unattainable. These stories NEVER get press in the mainstream media, only Napster soundbytes with undertones that imply all Napster users are criminals. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but is there really no interest to John Q. Public about these issues? Does anyone else feel that groups like RIAA are trying to hurry decisions through the courts at rocket-speed so that by the time Joe Average realizes he's fucked, your friendly neighbourhood megacorp can say "Why didn't you complain back then?"
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
how many people actually need multiple copies of the same cd? i've never burned extra copies of cd's i own so i can have one for the car, one for home, and one for the discman. i usually just bring the cd to where i want to play it. man that's really complicated.
Macrovision site is unreacheable, so I have not read their press release.
I think this thing is not useable for a lot of reasons.
First of all VHS macovision found an exploit into VHS recording system and used it. Most of VHS equipement was affected by this exploit, but professional beta and 8mm equipement was not affected.
On the other hand, having a protection scheme that permits the digital stream output of a CD and scrambles data audio extraction on current hardware is quite a difficult task. Remember that a CD-audio has to follow red Book rules and be readable from any CD player. You can store quicktime audio on an HFS formatted CD, but that is not a CD-audio.
Another important aspect is that Philips is not a member of RIAA/MPAA/whatever: ie. is mildly interested to enforce on their hardware content-control mechanisms, if not dictated from license agreement (ie. DVD). SACD is another question, and IMHO is the 2000`s Elcaset. If they (and Sony, and Teac) make cd-/cd-rw units is strange they will insert unnecessary content-control measaures, due the huge installed base and software existing.
Finally recording industries killed a medium that was almost uncopiable, with a high added value, and difficult to steal in a shop.
Is made normally in black plastic, round with standard diameters of 7", 10" and 12, difficult to steal from a shop and his angular velocity is 33.33 or 45.16 rpm (altrough some of there run at 16.67 or 78.81 rpm, or speed up to 100 rpm.
Why they decided to reduce to a small percentage the LP market?
The VCR with two inputs doesn't always work. I had an stereo VCR that was a 4-5 years old and everything worked ok with the DVD on the AUX input. That VCR recently burned out it's video output circuits, so I bought a new one and hooked it up the same way. No luck. Even though the manual said Macrovision would only be noticible if I tried recording, whenever I tried playing a DVD, it would fade in and out to a blue screen. I had to get a Radio Shack switch.
All this BS, just to stop the average person from copying their own tapes!
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I think people tend to forget the ease with which one can plug your CD player into the audio-in plug in the back of your computer, then use simple recording software to make your own mp3's... An easy workaround, and I don't see any possible way of stopping it.
SunnComm, Inc. has introduced some sort of copy protected audio CD format as well. This was a news item on my music tech/dance website. Check it out at http://www.candycroutons.com/morenews.php?next=47 for more details. This CD is supposed to be out in 2 days.
Vo
I'm not personally a fan of Senator Hatch, but I think that he made a good faith effort to do the right thing. The goal of the DMCA was to encourage copyright dependant industries like the music industry to release their products in new and innovative ways. It tried to acheive this by giving them additional legal protections so that when they did release their material in digital form people wouldn't be able to duplicate it and drive them out of business. It hasn't worked out that way, but that has less to do with Sen. Hatch's competence than you seem to think.
The deep problem is that the goal of providing fair use to consumers and protection to producers is fundamentally contradictory. Fair use is defined after the fact in a courtroom, so it's literally impossible even to know what fair use is, much less design a system that allows it while preventing whole sale copying. This is not a problem that can be solved by any kind of cleverness. The recording industry has also refused to implement any kind of on-line distribution scheme, and industry intransigence isn't something that you can predict. Say what you will about Sen. Hatch, at least he's trying to do good. He hasn't just taken a check from the industry to write the legislation they wanted and ignored their abuses. Instead he's trying to go back and fix the problems that were caused by what he did the first time around. At least in the case of the DMCA it's legislation that can be reversed; the anti-circumvention provisions can be altered to prevent the kinds of abuses that have been publicized here.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Take it back. Say it doesn't work right with your setup. Then get all your friends to do the same.
I used to have some pity for the recording industry and the movie industry, but now that I see how regularly the RIAA and MPAA try to screw over their own customers -- even those customers that aren't doing anything wrong -- I feel absoutely no guilt when I download the latest MP3s from Napster, or the latest movies from some web site. (Well, both are perfectly legal in my country thanks to blank media taxes, but that's beside the point...)
i think you're forgetting about the copycode system being developed by cbs music shortly before the company was acquired by sony. as i recall, the system used a narrow notch filter to remove the sound at some high audio frequency, somewhere up around 14 khz i think. electronics manufacturers were to be required to install a detection circuit that would shut the recorder down when the copy code notch was detected.
until sony killed it, the only things preventing copy code from being forced on the consumer were objections from the audio electronics industry who didn't want to have to install additional electronics in their gadgets (and increase costs), a number of critics who noted that the copy code circuit could be activated by legitimate recordings (like a home recording of a piano solo) and the audiophile industry who complained about the audibility and poor sound quality of the supposedly inaudible notch.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
..Meanwhile there's a pirate-factory out there pumping out copies of Suzanne Somners 'Thigh-B-Gone' workout tapes on an assemblyline with Macrovision intact. Why? because Macrovision doesn't eliminate the ability to copy the video signal, just the ability to copy it on consumer grade equipment.
Sure, we can all go out and buy our $40 boxes to make our new $200 DVD players to work, or better yet a brand new room-size television. but why the hell should we have to, when it is unneccesary from a technological viewpoint and does nothing to stop illegal mass-duplication?
Yes, my TV predates VCR's and DVD's, oddly enough though they all work with the good old NTSC signal which predates any and all A/V equipment I have. In fact, for a while I was running my DVD through an even older Beta VCR BECAUSE it predated Macrovision, and therefore worked fine!
air and light and time and space
Doctor Fun 010306
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Imagine the new revenue opportunities for the recording industry as you check out of Best Buy:
Sales clerk: Now we just have a few questions before we can sell you Tupac's Greatest Hits. First, will this CD be for home, office, auto or portable use?
Purchaser: Well, I guess mostly for home. But I'll probably listen to it in the car too.
Sales clerk: Oh, then you'll want our enterprise license. It'll allow you full locational use rights. Do you ever have passengers in your car?
Purchaser: Well yea. Sometimes.
Sales clerk: OK. We'll mark you down for the 10 seat license expansion. As you may be aware, CD media is subject to wear and tear and replacement can be expensive. Would you like the optional RIAA replacement warranty, allowing you to obtain a replacement CD should this one become damaged, for only an additional $9.95?
Purchaser: Err... I guess so.
Sales clerk: Fine. That brings your total to $43.45, not including sales tax. They'll ring this up front for you.
*scoove*
"RIAA: Revenue Increase Absent Artists"
One, is this sort of thing related to the music data or is it simply a matter of screwing with catalog data? If it, or some later attempt to do this, is related to music data, what is that going to do to BLER rates? For those of you who don't do this professionally, BLER rates is the amount of uncorrectable burst errors in the actual music data. 2X burning has been tested and proved to produce the lowest BLERs, other burn speeds (and 80 minute media, BTW) are worse or much worse- this is all in the context of a CD that will still play on most players, it will simply interpolate fake data to cover up burst errors. A trained ear can hear this interpolation on detailed sounds as a blurring or muddying up of the musical textures. So... are the major labels preparing to put out 'CDs' crammed with BLERs to try and trip up copiers? Will they (as with the watermarking) trade off the already limited CD fidelity on the assumption that consumers don't need high fidelity CDs for their $20?
Two, is this an increase in momentum towards a state where the labels spend nothing on their actual product (the artists) and everything on media control techniques (for all values of 'media' ;) )? I recently read an interesting interview with several members of Little Feat (Bill Payne and Paul Barrere) in which the subject drifted onto Napster. Payne's reaction was contempt- not for Napster, but for the record labels! His position was that he'd started working with the labels in the early seventies when artists had a certain amount of creative input into the process, and got support and artist development from the labels to produce better music. His scorn for current industry practices had to be seen to be believed- said that they had been doing nothing but churning out hit single 'product' for years, and that this was going to come and bite them in the ass (_his_ phrase). He asked, where are the labels going to be in ten or twelve years, spending nothing on artist development? He saw Napster as basically the 'infinte internet radio' concept, not directly bringing artist revenue but serving as a resource that hardworking independent artists could make use of- and in his opinion and Barrere's, although the new state of affairs requires a consumer to make more effort to find music, people are ALREADY putting forth this extra effort, and will be turning more and more to the indie/online/free resources. Not because they are innately evil criminals at heart, but simply because the record industry, in its own continued efforts to minimise expenses and maximize promotion and sales, is no longer putting out a quality product. The idea is that people don't really want to buy Britney Spears, N'Sync etc: it's just momentum and habit that keeps them buying from that source, the industry, and the momentum IS BEGINNING TO FAIL.
Like the man said- in ten years, the industry will be in a self-created hell. Maybe 'time loves a hero' but time hates last year's one-hit wonder! Given that the industry doesn't develop artists any more, that they don't pay and that they don't _completely_ control distribution channels (just _traditional_ distribution channels like Sam Goody and all the legal FM radio stations), there is less and less of a reason to interact with the industry on any level- whether as a customer, an artist, or even a support technician like a mastering engineer: I've seen a mastering guy admit his little secret, that half his business comes from indie musicians who want their CD to sound better than other indie musicians. The guy was leery of even mentioning this because he didn't want to jinx it. Well- he needn't worry- in ten years _all_ the competitive indie musicians will be turning to indie studios (on their own dime up-front) and indie mastering engineers to produce indie CDs (see Ampcast's upcoming program to burn to order from _red book_ masters- basically, soon indies will be able to match industry standards on ALL levels right down to the UPC barcode) and compete with other indies in a REAL market, one defined by lots of people selling their stuff with easy access to the market, the market being defined purely on the basis of product quality, not what the labels let you know about. Artist A's CDs might be incredibly well produced, Artist B is an incredible performer but the CDs are made off mp3s, Artist C's just a gifted amateur but is selling for $5 a CD- you get to pick what you want.
THAT is the future. If the industry's attempts to cripple its own products make this happen sooner, or make indie media more reliable and playable and usable than industry stuff, then I would have to say go to it guys! Go nuts, add copy-control onto heavy watermarking and make it so you can't play the product in half the CD players out there. You'll earn my undying gratitude by committing quality suicide in this way...
My only concern would be, keep a sharp eye on the legislators. It's one thing for the industry to mandate something- it's another for them to railroad through legislation that deprecates existing stuff. For instance, if they come up with a new Audio CD format, that's one thing, but if they get legislation made to massively tax, or prohibit, humble ol' Red Book CD Audio format, then they'd get to arbitrarily handicap the indie producers. If they get to define a replacement format and it's like DVD then they get to prevent indie producers and consumers from even having access to the authoring technology (see the stories on Apple DVD and what the MPAA has forced Apple to do). This is the hot issue, not whether you have a right to fair-use copy any company's specific product. You can survive doing without Britney but it's another story if nobody is permitted to do their own music and media and put it out alongside Britney, over the Internet. Public access to authoring and media is a _must_.
We made our copies onto analog cassette tapes in real time and traded hissy compilations amongst ourselves and we liked it!
....
....
--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
Cable-\
DVD----->Stereo Reciever -> TV
VCR-/ /
PSX--/
Perhaps someone with a projection TV who hasn't disabled their Macrovision can comment.
These are the people who developed the process. Sounds like it's supposed to work much like Macrovision on VHS does.
They insert an error into the signal which is undetectable during normal playback, but that mightily confuses anybody trying to read the bits with a CD-ROM drive.
I don't know enough about the EFM encoding process to know how this is supposed to work, but it sounds reasonable. Seems like a few changes to the ECC on the audio data would probably do it.
On the other hand, it can't be all that difficult to work around, either...
You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
I take it you've never had one of those visit's to a friend's house where they complain because no matter what they do, they can't get the DVD/VHS player to work right. Oh, yeah, you can't plug a DVD player into a VCR that's connected to a TV. Or a VHS player through a cable box, or a DSS box, or anything else becasue the Macrovision screws it all up.
God forbid someone should desire to plug all their stuff into the TV at once -- you're trying to rip off the content producers!...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Counterpoint: The market won't force anything. The recording industry doesn't give a flying fsck about the market, it is an international cartel that imposes its own dictatorial grip on pricing and distribution. If the RIAA decides that we should all pay 50$ per cd, then that's what they will start charging in stores worldwide. They've heard of supply-vs-demand, and they bought it out with capitalism.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Might as well get rid of that whole pesky fair use provision of copyright law, right?
Fair use does not mean that the software producers don't have a right to protect their product via hardware innovation (IE: copy protection). Fair use just says you have a right to defeat copy protection for personal use. There are already protections built into consumer audio disc burners. They don't allow second generation recordings (a big problem for musicians), and they require a special preformated disc that pays a surcharge directly to the RIAA. So the Macrovision must be aimed at computer based burners, which means it must take advantage of some preexisting condition, like error correction, and probably encoded discs will probably not play on all cd players. As defeats are already in available for it, that means the real losers here are those who have incompatible hardware, and the record industry who will have to spend large sums of money to purchase copy protection that will reduce sales due to the fact that it won't play on some machines, and won't stop people from making copies.
Success needs support, which was lacking for these products you mention. Laserdisc has garnered quite a following among the more purist among us. We even have Laserdisc movies in our local libraries by the thousands.
The plaguing factor for MD is its lossy compression. Granted, it is still very high quality and much better than tape, but at the time of its launch it was yet cheaper to obtain a home stereo cd recorder, and of course blank cd's have always been cheaper than proprietary MD media. Minidisc is nice in that it is very compact, but otherwise has no true benefit against convention CDs. It came around too late, too expensive.
As far as DAT are concerned, you're just aside the topic altogether. DAT is still immensely popular within music professionals because it is more convenient and reliable than CD recording. DAT tapes do eventually corrupt their data but it takes many years, and even then you can just re-record them, they don't just go bad or skip like recorded CDs. CD mastering plants still take DAT tapes even though home-recorded cd's are becoming quite popular, simply because DAT was the industry standard for so long.
Just because something isn't popular in the mainstream doesn't mean it's a failed product.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sorry, I didn't mean to gloss anything over by using the nominative sense. Let that read "was not intended by Sen. Hatch to turn out as it did."
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
A microscope can be used to extract the raw bits from a DVD, without regard to the copy protection. Are microscopes now banned by the DMCA?
Does this mean that the RIAA will relinquish the tax on all recordable CD media???
Yeah, right.
Could people who submit stories just give the facts and leave off the stupid remarks?
The problem with analog copies over digital copies is that a copy of a copy of a copy ... of a song /will/ sound noticably worse, whereas an mp3 still sounds like an mp3.
-Splat
Do you think they care one iota that in order to reduce illegal copying they'll make it harder to make legal copies? I'm as annoyed as anyone, but all this paranoid talk is plain stupid.
Anyone that can't see that the record industry is about to enter some very rough times is deluded.
I mean, I know my memory has been going downhill ever since the age of 14 (ah, the glorious early 90's...), but I know I can't think of one that hasn't been hacked...
sigs are for suckers
Try something like this - http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/328a.html. This is a bit high end, but there are cheaper ones out there.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
dual tray home audio cd-r components already do this. they have an internal D-A-D converter.
so
1) just like the original home cd-r's
2) just like both original and dual deck cdr's
Shrug, what's the diff?
JKL
Why make copies of CDs? Well, a friend of mine had his CD collection stolen. He'd have been a few hundred dollars to the better if they'd only been able to get copies because his originals were stored elsewhere. In fact, they probably wouldn't have taken the copies because they couldn't be sold to second-hand shops. Plus, here in Canada, where we pay the equivalent of the RIAA for every blank medium we buy, it is legal to borrow a CD, make a copy for yourself, and return the original. An excellent way to expand your CD collection. And yes, that law runs counter to what everyone thinks of as fair play, but everyone+dog doesn't know about the levy on recording media.
I think that makes two very good reasons.
Gareth
This one will likely be just as successful as Macrovision's pervious attempts at CD copy protection, Safedisc and Safedisc 2.
.iso format before they ever hit the stores.
Both Safedisc and Safedisc 2 can be defeated with generic cracks that were released as soon as the schemes came on the market. Safedisc and Safedisc 2 software are almost always released with specific cracks in
Macrovision's attempts at copy protection are worthless. They are sold to moronic executives with little technical knowledge, people too ignorant to realize how useless Macrovision protections on CDs are.
Yeah - you'll get dragged into it just like Jon Johansen.
VHS macrovision is popular precisely because it's undetectable in how it alters visual quality. You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't. Hook up the output of your DVD player to your VHS VCR. Hook up the output of your VHS VCR to your TV. Play a DVD and notice how Macrovision degrades the video signal on your TV even though you're not making a copy. The combination of DVD and VHS Macrovision results in a lot of angry DVD owners.
While cracking code is an effective measure, we also need to fight to lessen the friendliness of current laws towards the RIAA, or at least explain to the legislators our point of view. If the RIAA lobbyists are the only ones talking to the legislators, then this is a fight that we will gradually lose.
Yep, you guessed it. This is another one of those write-your-congressman posts. Write your congressman! If you're not in the U.S., write to whoever is responsible for making laws where you live.
--
Ahem!
High Criteria - Total Recorder
TurboD
However, if they're so concerned about all of us "robbing them blind", why don't they give us just a little less incentive to "rape them" and DROP THEIR PRICES! I'm being serious and sarcastic at the same time. Don't try and sell me a product at a cost several dozen times what it took to make it, and then tell me not to find an alternative!
Makes me want to sink my movie buying dollars back into VHS.
But you won't.
The simplest way, is to vote with your feet. You don't want macrovision stuff, don't buy it. You don't want region encoded DVDs, don't buy them...Just don't whine that you can't see what you want, the way you want to. If enough people care, then it'll fail, if no-one really gives a shit, then it'll succeed. But if people care, but don't stop buying stuff, then it'll succeed, and you'll be fucked.
When are they going to give up? If the sound can make it to your ears, then you can burn a copy onto a cdr. D-A-D. Same with video. Camcorder/microphone. RCA cables. Not until they figure out how to make our ears and eyes authenticate media will this crap work.
flip your mouse over and surrender
Not a problem for the consumer. Just quality assurance for the labels, and a pain in the butt for the replication facility.
Its a virtual sound driver, can even speed up the dump process by signalling much faster than real life sound cards.
I don't work for these guys but I bought it several years ago, and grab the upgrades (I get for lifetime), and it ROCKS. Very nifty for grabbing newsbites, etc., from webcasts.
TurboD
I have never understood this. Why do people demand that they be able to make multiple copies of music CDs to store in different places? Honestly, how hard is it to take a few CDs that you think you might like to listen to at work WITH YOU? So say you work 10 hours... that would give you enough time to listen to 11 or 12 average length CDs. Is that too many to put in a CD holder and pack in to work? Same with the car... how long are you going to be driving? An hour? Two? That's not enough time to listen to your whole collection I'm willing to bet. So pick some you want to listen to for the day and take them with you!
:)
I guess the moral of the story is that there's only enough time in the day to listen to so much music... indescision about what you want to listen to during that limited amount of time is your problem, not the record industry's. If you're going to fight for something, fight for the lowering of CD prices instead!
(Of course, copying CDs because prices are so insanely high might be one way to get them to drop prices is one way to do that... )
Is it just me, or will this idea completely kill the entire line of CD to CDR standalone burners that have been on the market for the past year or so? Philips Magnavox might not like this too much, considering that they were one of the first to produce those units.
Not really much of an argument, but it's a thought that crossed my mind.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
2. They control the licensing of the logo, technology, etc.
3. Philips manufactures and sells CD recorders that use the music CD/R media.
It would be in Philips interest to see that the CD logo, name, etc. did not appear on technology that was purposely made incompatible with the CD standard -- especially if it rendered their CD recorders useless. Maybe I'll give their U.S. office a call...
The person that I was replying to asked if anyone that had such a device had problems, I answered him. Period. Now I do not pretend to be an expert on hi-fi or macrovision, nor do I pretend to be a support "guy", so it really is not at all equivalent.
And your point is? I neither affirmed nor denied that it _works_ on all without issue, what I did say is that it works on mine and gave the context.
Perhaps you should be considering self-examination. Clearly you're the one with issue. I gave an honest and direct answer, but you can't handle it because you have issues with your self-esteem and/or relative lack of wealth. Grow up, or at least learn to troll a little better.
I used to chase hi-end audio till it drove me to the poorhouse. it was a never ending quest to get that perfect reproduction of music.
then came mp3. it taught us that content was usually more important than raw audiophile quality. at least as long as the audio was listenable; which with good mp3 encoders, it is.
so how does that relate to this story? well, if we have to start making copies by going via the analog domain instead of purely digital, then so be it. that used to be a big no-no, but with the widespread acceptance of mp3 and its lower quality sound, a regular old analog-to-analog copy (actually, digital, analog, analog, digital) doesn't look so bad anymore.
there is no standard on earth, imaginable or real that can prevent an analog copy (since you have to be able to LISTEN to it at some point) from working.
so far the music industry has declared war on its own customers. do they think we'll just take it sitting down? restrict our LEGAL right to make personal-use copies and not only do you risk litigation and more black-eyes but we consumers will always find a workaround to your madness. and angering us will only persuade us to NEVER line your pockets with our spare change ever again. create an enemy in us and you'll go poor sooner than if you had just let us use the music as currently allowed by law!
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Well, the obvious solution to Safeaudio would be to buy no copies of any disk that uses it. And then continue boycotting until they realease a copyright-law compatible version. There isn't any CD out there that would drastically affect my life if I didn't have it.
No sales -> No consumer support -> No Safeaudio
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
TV doesn't have RCA ins (it's old). DVD doesn't have COAX out.
End result? shelling out $50 (cdn) for a macrovision nuking box.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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crazy dynamite monkey
If new CDs won't play on old players, people will just not buy the new discs, and market forces will FORCE the record houses to comply.
And if the new CDs are backward compatible, then they remain copyable.
- Ok, I'll admit some ignorance here, as I don't own a DVD player, but couldn't you hook them up in a different order?
Theoretically? Maybe. Actuality? Nope -- I know of no DVD player that has A/V inputsVCR -> DVD -> TV
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
How long until someone creates a "write to file" DirectX driver that pretends it's a hardware driver?
Heck, I can even see some adventurous soul tapping the lines right before the last D2A conversion on a sound card and capturing that to a file.
Regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA/whatever try, our eyes and ears don't conform to any copyright protection schemes. Until they figure out a way to change that, there will always be a way to get by it.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I have a setup with a doulby digital reciever that acts as a video switch and a TV with RCA inputs, so I don't have to run my DVD player through my VCR for RF output, but in testing I have.
The really odd thing, everthing works fine just using the VCR for composite => rf conversion (or at least it did until my VCR's rf modulator went out recently). However, It would go foul as soon as I pressed record.
I know this is different than most people reported. I believe this is a functin of my VCR passing the signal through unaltered until I hit record. Then it is monitoring what is being recorded.
Anyone else experience this? This is with a JVC dvd player and JVC VCR.
I suppose one way to fight back (for those of us in the US) would be to see how many congressmen here we can get to consider the idea of supporting legislation protecting fair use. Perhaps if it's couched in terms of the DMCA:Since they've passed legislation making it illegal to circumvent legitimate copy protection, it should only be fair that copy protection schemes which place and undue burden on Fair Use should also be illegal. It should go both ways!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yo minidick, I always sign my trolls.
And you're so right.... I'm just INSANELY jealous that you obviously have more money than me.
No, I'm not being sarcastic, really. I wish I was JUST LIKE YOU!
You crack me up, dillweed.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
I have a couple old mono "tape eaters" whose tuner sections are still good, I keep them just for this purpose. The way Macrovision was perpetrated on us was through planned obsolecence. Virtually all broken VCRs I come across have either broken mechanical parts (because the cams, levers, etc. are made of injection molded plastic and snap easily), or because VCR tape is wrapped around the spindles, guides, etc. like black cocoons. Yet the tuner and video output sections work perfectly. When the mechanical portion of a VCR conks out and the repair center tells people that it would cost more to fix than it would to buy a new one, they pitch the old one and go out and buy the new one with better features, i.e. stereo, 4 heads, etc., but they snuck macrovision in along with these new features.
As for the USA, such boxes are now ILLEGAL. Thanks to the DMCA.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Clearly this explains why you took the time to reply! I guess I just won't be a dillweed anymore if real-winners such as yourself troll me.
FYI, I just got home, it is a Faroudja VP400. All I want to know is, how is your cult going to jive Britney Spears as the "Virgin" Mary? Ooops, I did it again...
Never heard a complaint about Macrovision signal quality? Read on, MacDuff.
I have played DOZENS of Macrovision tapes on two different VCRs made by different manufacturers, and the picture invariably shudders and shakes for the first few minutes of EVERY SINGLE ONE. Regular tapes play fine. Don't tell me to clean the heads, rewind the tapes a few times or adjust the tracking. Been there, done that.
On the other hand, tapes I record from cable play great. So now you have heard a complaint about Macrovision picture quality, okay?
I don't get it. why would you go to all the trouble of getting a sound card with digital in, when you could use your cd rom drive?
It is a cat and mouse game where the gov't, with the DMCA, has made it illegal for the mouse to run from the cat.
1. Fair use was legal.
2. Content controls stopped one from making fair use.
3. People found a technical means to make fair use despite the content controls.
4. GOVERNMENT made number 3 illegal.
(start of rant)
Not RIAA, not MPAA, not DVDCCA, not Cactus, not Macrovision corp, not TTR. GOVERNMENT. Using our tax dollars to restrict our rights with ARMED force. A court is just a shield to make the guns of gov't pointing at your head socially acceptable. It is still force. Fight even for a right that the law (which includes the Constitution) says exists, but gov't does not, and they'll sentence you to prison or order you to give them or some other party your money. Resist and you literally can have Federal marshalls putting a gun to your head and even shooting you. GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM HERE FOLKS. CSS and all the other schemes would not be such a big issue. If DeCSS was LEGAL, the DVD mess would not be as bad. Even if it is legal under law, Judge Kaplan, who can and has fired the guns of gov't at the DeCSS defendents (albeit it figurativly) is a man with an opinion that counts more than yours or even the law if you end up in his courtroom.
Sad but true, even if you can afford a good or great lawyer AND are right you can still LOSE. The DeCSS defendants did and are barred for life from distributing their product and are ordered to pay for the costs of the procedings against them!
(that is adding insult to injury).
(end of rant)
#1, #2, #3 were all legal. It was a technical ballte which each attacka nd counter-attack was legal. Gov't was not involved. It was capitalistic. Then gov't stepped in, made #3 illegal. This is merchantilism - where the gov't restricts the free market to help the corporations. This is a lot like Fascism/National Socialism's economic policy.
Now #2 is legal, #1 is legal in theory, but since 1 is impossible without doing #3, and #3 is illegal, #1 might as well be illegal. It is either impossible or illegal if you take steps to make it possible.
So the gov't can say fair use is still legal - even if any method to make it possible is banned.
They get their fascism but can deny they banned fair use. They just say they are stopping illegal "hacking"/cracking. And gloss over the distinction between breaking into someone else's system, and hacking a system YOU OWN. The anti-"hacker" hysteria works to their advantage. DMCA is seen as pro-capitalist when it is anti-capitalist, pro-merchantilist, pro-fascist, and un-American.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
There's an aspect of Canadian law that really:
1) makes me happy we have this law currently
2) will piss me off if technology like this takes off
In Canada, March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the Copyright Act came into force. Until then, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright. Part VIII legalizes one such activity: copying of sound recordings of musical works onto recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy.
Specifically, the Copyright Board says their ruling "does not legalize (a) copies made for the use of someone other than the person making the copy; and (b) copies of anything else than sound recordings of musical works. It does legalize making a personal copy of a recording owned by someone else." So to fufill the spirit of Canadian copyright law, I assume Macrovision's technology will continue to allow me to make copies of all my friends CDs for my own personal use (which the law allows).
> No signatures. No "I Agree" buttons to click before I get to hear my music.
;-)
You've hit the nail right on the head. Since you didn't waive your rights via a signature, you own the music.
> he added his son to deed, so when the father died there was no "changeover in ownership".
Congrats ! You're one of the few people that "truely" own your land.
> Today this also avoids income and inheritance tax since there was neither.
Corporate Sole's are another legal way to avoid the inheritance tax, since they legally exist for perpetuity.
Macrovision merely targets the black areas of your vertical blanking interval. VHS VCRs use this area to set their record level. Screw around with the VCR's recording level and you interfere with its ability to copy stuff.
*Unfortunately*, as a collector of antique TV sets, and as someone who enjoys watching old movies and Honeymooners reruns on them, Macrovision upsets the purpose of the vertical blanking interval, defiles the NTSC standard, and makes several of my TV sets roll vertically round about when your videotaped copy would be flashing between bright and dark. This is very much a problem with very old (1940s and 1950s TV sets) because even when they were new, they tended to be rickety and unstable. 40+ tubes and hundreds of paper capacitors = even when they were new, you'd turn it on and wait 20 minutes before the set is stable enough to watch.
Now, because you're not going to use this to make personal copies of DVDs to VHS or like you'd use an "educational-purposes" pay-TV decoder, how do you scrub Macrovision? Simple. Build a circuit with an LM1881 chip that resets a counter when the vertical pulse happens. Turn on a circuit that clamps the video signal at 0 IRE (0.3V) during each scan line until the counter has counted out 25 scan lines. Release the clamp and wait until the next vertical pulse.
Or, just run the raw video into the Video In jacks on an old Beta VCR, then back out the Video Out jacks to your VHS machine. VCRs usually regenerate crucial parts of the video signal as they pass it, and Beta VCRs don't set their recording level from the vertical interval.
Hey, anyone looking to hire a computer geek with lots of broadcast video and audio engineering skills? Perfect blend of skills for streaming media websites! E-mail me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
That's because most people haven't figured out WHY the picture curls at the top, or why it keeps getting lighter and darker on a cycle. Until I researched Macrovision I thought all my storebought tapes were being damaged at the checkout line when they demagnetize the anti-shoplift tags!
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The only reason crap like this works is because the RIAA is essentially a monopoly. A giant consortium that gets away with murder that a single company would never be able to without having the Justice Department breathing down their neck. They appear to collude on prices with each other, etc. I know that there are a lot of little record labels, but lets face it, their dollar amounts are nothing compared to the big 4 in the RIAA. That plus they can't afford to get their music played on mass market radio stations.
Is there anyway we can get a group of big wig tech heads (Stallman, etc.) to ask the Justice Department to investigate the RIAA the same way M$ is being investigated? I mean, making non-standard audio formats to lock smaller labels out (DVD-audio anyone?) and trying to kill our fair use rights is EVIL. It'd be nice if we actual got JUSTICE once instead of just the LAW.
"...they had the law and they had justice. They understood they were two different things. Justice carried a sword." - D. Drake
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Hook up the output of your DVD player to your VHS VCR. Hook up the output of your VHS VCR to your TV. Play a DVD and notice how Macrovision degrades the video signal on your TV even though you're not making a copy. The combination of DVD and VHS Macrovision results in a lot of angry DVD owners.
Ok, I'll admit some ignorance here, as I don't own a DVD player, but couldn't you hook them up in a different order?
VCR -> DVD -> TV
Is the signal screwed up that way too?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Not always true. At home, I have my apex 600a plugged into my vcr which is plugged into my tv. With macrovision turned on, dvds play just fine. I checked to see what would happen if I tried to record a tape with macrovision turned on; During the recording, image quality was degraded to fuzzy black and white. Playing back the copy showed no image at all. With macrovision off, it copies and plays just fine. I suspect it depends on how your VCR is implemented.
You can check out Stanford's fair use web site for more information. Also, see EFF's Understanding Fair Use Rights.
First the boy bands, and now this, good God what is the world comming to? Actually, its no big deal, just a little challenge--doesn't the recording industry know this? They need to make CDs that dont scratch so easily, and then i wouldn't have a need to make backups, but there just asking people to hack this shit.
Many DVD players do not have passthroughs.
Plextor drives just don't make mistakes in ripping CDDA. It's the same every time, bit-for-bit, and at high speed.
It doesn't matter if Hatch was hoodwinked or not, the fact remains he pushed this monstrosity despite warnings from many groups. These groups said the content providers would have too much power.
The RIAA and MPAA are throwing money in Washington like crazy to fight DeCSS and Napster. I suspect Hatch will have his hands full fighting off the Democrats (a big entertainment supporter) and more than enough Republicans to prevent any serious challenge to changing DMCA or copyright laws.
The public is too lazy/ignorant to put up a big stink and even if they were the same people who make the content own and run the media.
Yes, I have no faith in lawyers and money.
That's what I'm screaming! Whatever happened to the good ole days of AOR? Where all the songs were meant to be listened to, not one or two songs singled out by fatcat record execs to be the hits, while the rest is (a) either lame padding, or (b) totally excellent, yet underrated due to the fact that the radio execs wanted to use them as (a)?
Most CD-players, even cheap ones have S/PDIF out these days. So you pickup a sound card with S/PDIF in (cost you around $100) and then hook them up. Now you can just record the incomming stream digitally. Now the CD will no doubt have the SCSM to disallow copying but the particulat card I'm thinking of (the M-Audio DiO 2448) is a professional device, and is therefore exempt from obeying SCMS. It will record a steram even if the SCMS bits are set for no copying.
At any rate, it's no real problem either way. Analogue copying used to be a problem because electronics and storage mediums really weren't that good. There was an audible loss copying one tape to another. However with the high grade digital converters we have today, the loss really is trivial on all but the best systems (and ears). Therefore, protections like this really don't matter much. Just get a high quality soundcard, and go at it.
I think that should be a perfect reason for returning the DVD or the VHS or both, since it probably isn't mentioned on the box, that this device doesn't work with the other. Return it to shop, and demand another product until u get it working. If they don't want to exchange it make a ruckus so everyone in the store gets the message. And by the way there should be enough organisations which would happily take up the issue and force the Manufacturers to print it on the outside of their box in big enough letters.
Then you only need to wait for the day when "Macrovision can be disabled" becomes a salesargument.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
what happens when these works go out of copyright? Are there any provisions for allowing free copying of works after that? How do people who advocate such a system plan to deal with this?
Has this ever been thought of as a valid argument against these sorts of copy prevention schemes? The idea is that they are putting The People's property in jeporody by not insuring that there is a way to make such works freely distributable after the term of copyright is finished.
-Legion
The DMCA (PDF), however villified it is here on Slashdot, was not intended to turn out as it did. Sen. Hatch's intent was a law that would allow digital copies to be made. The no-circumvention clause that we're all familiar with was supposed to be a pot sweetener to prod the recording industry into releasing digital media. Unfortunately, we all know how the law was abused by those it sought to protect.
Sen. Hatch's office has links to a number of letters and opinions regarding his true stance on the issue of digital media copying. I don't doubt he will bring this issue back up, and as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee the old media companies will be in the hot seat for what they have done.
So get moving! Do something that will have a real impact. Write your represantitive! Many of them were elected on non-technical issues and don't really know about the topic. Maybe it will be your letter that shapes their opinion.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I need music. I want to consume music under the terms granted in copyright law. If the big boys can't follow these terms, then I don't have any choice other than to "steal" the music by downloading MP3 versions of songs I like, with no money going to copyright holders or artists.
I wish there was another way. But, alas, it looks like "theft" may be my only option.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
It doesn't matter that the copy protection is worthless.
Thanks to the equally worthless DMCA (a most agregeous piece of tripe, and a good example of why all officials in office when it passed should be ousted, since they refused to do a roll-call vote and specify who was involved), cracking the protection scheme, and possibly, distributing the crack, are now illegal (within the U.S. anyway).
What the end results of all this mean, depend on how the DeCSS trials go.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I get the same thing with a Sony DVD player and a RCA VCR. Passes through fine until the record button is pushed.