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Coming Soon: Burn-Proof CDs
An Anonymous Coward writes: "This article on MSNBC opens the door to the "Copyright protected CD's". Apparently the very first copyright protected cd is set to burn this April for some country star's album. Copyright protected cd's do not allow you to replicate them in a cd burner nor do they allow you to rip the audio tracks "digitally" (although can still be done through analog)." I wonder how long before someone finds a way around this. Actually the article is well-written, covering all the bases, although it neglects to say how we're all expected to bend over while our fair use of stuff we paid for is taken away from us.
Oddly, this will really, really increase sales of this particular CD, and the music industry will say it's because people can't pirate it. But they'll have it backwards.
Tons of us will race out and buy a Charlie Pride CD (even though we abhor country music) simply because we want to try to break it. We want to see whether or not it's really burnproof, and whether we can be the first to figure out the easy way around it.
The industry will hail the huge sales of this CD as demonstrable proof that non-copyable CD's enjoy higher revenues because us nasty mean hackers can't make copies of Charlie Pride's wonderful stuff, and thus we have to buy several copies for our car, our office, etc. They'll show this fact to other recording artists and say, "See, you too could be enjoying this kind of royalty," and the artists will lick their chops in anticipation. I guarantee they'll be a long line of artists willing to be the second burn-proof CD.
What's your damage, Heather?
Don't buy the CD, if you don't agree with the copyright protection. The RIAA will eventually realize that their sales are dropping because of the copyright protection and they are better off without it.
I am an unfortunate owner of one such CD.
I'm sure this is just coincidence, but when I clicked on the poll on the left margin ("Do you support copy-proctected CDs?") to vote "NO", their site took me to a blank page. When I tried to go back to the article, still nothing... blank page. Shortly after that, Netscape crashed. By now they have no doubt logged my IP address and sent a complaint to my ISP that I'm a potential pirate, and asking that my account be revoked.
On the other hand, maybe I've been watching too much X-Files. And it's early... yeah, that's the ticket... early... brain not function... must... get... caffiene...
From everything I rea din this article, these schemes prevent the ripping of audio data from a CD, since there is extra data that confuses the TOC so that CDROM drives cannot read it. While this will keep your ripping program from working, I do not see how this would prevent the burning of a CD. A simple raw copy using dd or some other command would copy the raw data from the CD, no filesystem or format necessary. Then it is a simple matter of burning that image to a CD. I fail to see how there is any prevention of copying in this.
Read the Salon article. There, much better.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
Why is it when schemes like this come out they always use terms like "It will be far too dificult for the average user". Is every person on the internet expected to crack the protection personally. Dont these companies realise all it takes is for one person to write the crack, then the "average user" can just run the program for himself.
It just seems to me at times that large businesses seem unable to comprehend the basic concept of a programmable machine. The ability to store a list of instructions and repeat. Given the manufacturers reluctance to cripple dvd-rom drives, purposely making them easy to mod to multi-region. I bet they start advertising cd-roms that can read these so called protected disks fairly soon after release.
Hence, the technology, as it now stands, only frustrates the casual pirate, not the hardcore fair use maven. Also, N.B., the same article can be found on Salon, and in point of fact actually comes from Inside.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Recording from the Wire coming out of the back of your stereo system, is not a perfect digital copy. That is what they are trying to stop.
When you rip a CD, you get a (near) perfect digital copy. When you record from the analog output, you get analog with all the extra little effects, artifacts and whatever that various layers of cd player, pre-amp, amp & recording equipment add into the mix.
When you rip a CD, you just have to deal with the little skips & jumps you always get off a CD, the rest of it is a perfect copy.
-- Hulver's site
Ever tried copying an audio track with dd?
...unless they can somehow disable the CD Digital out on my DVD-ROM. It's a bit more cumbersome to have to manually record it as .WAV, but there'll be no quality loss. Right now I'm in the process of ripping all of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis format. This kind of bullshit would only prevent me from buying those CDs.
Yeah. Right. Just like PSX games.
But even *that's* different, because the PSX hardware is looking for a boot code that doesnt transfer when the disc is copied (the burner's error correction removes it).
But how will thier copy-pro work for a $50 Walmart CD player?
And on the flipside, lets assume this copy protection does what it is supposed to to, if only initially. Lets also assume cdparanoia (for an example of a beautiful piece of software) releases a patch to defeat the copy protection. Aren't they violating the DCMA, as referenced in the interview with Rep Boucher? What recourse does that leave?
dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
PowerMac G4s, for example, have no analog connection coming out of the CD drive. The CD player software works by ripping the audio data across the IDE/SCSI/USB bus and then feeding it out of the sound card. That won't work with burn-proof CDs.
The problem will get bigger with, for instance, the proliferation of USB speakers, where all data has to be transferred digitally all the way.
Hopefully the population using such schemes will become large enough that the move will be politically impossible by the time the technology is there.
If they could only limit the use of these disks to Country CDs, then its a blessing in disguise that they prevent duplicates being made of them ;)
That ultimately WE are the ones paying to have our rights taken away - how much money do you think they invested in the technology? And who pays for it, ultimately? In more ways than one.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Okay, just take the spdif output of your cd player and plug it into your sblive - perfect digital copy. Even if you don't have a setup that can handle that, enough people do that it's moot.
As a related aside, I've a friend who's entire audio system goes through his computer - he stores his music in 2 300 sony cds changers, with toslink optical outputs fed into his linux box. The clever bit is: Since they're Sony audio components, they use the s-link remote control interface - which he hacked up his parallel port to speak. So now he can rip and encode (stream?) any of his cds from anywhere in the world that he can get out on port 22 from.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Only if you rip it to a .wav of about 40MB. Standard 128k MP3s don't sound as good as CDs (I didn't believe this either until I tried it out).
RTFA (read the fine article. In brief, they introduce errors in the table of contents and the data sectors that a typical audio CD player will just skip over, but most CD-ROM driver software will hang up on. So you can't use your computer to listen to or to copy the CD. The music industry seems to believe that no one is smart enough to hack the CD-ROM drivers and change the fault handling. I give it 3 days. Of course, distributing any such hack for the purpose of defeating the security is a violation of the CDMA.
On the other hand, I really would appreciate a premium CD driver that would recover as much data as possible from scratched CD-ROM's. And if that just happens to make it read copy protected CD's...
Surely if they don`t conform to the Redbook standard exactly they will no longer be marketable as music CDs If they sell them as such and they will not work in a player that will play music CDs there are commiting a crime ie, improper description of there product Regards
Unlike vinyl records, which store music in a continuous spiral, RedBook CDs -- the CDs owned by every music fan -- break up music tracks and distribute them higgledy-piggledy around the disk in "sectors" that are similar to the data sectors on computer hard drives. Because the data are scattered all over the disk, each CD has a "table of contents" that tells the player where to find each track. RedBook CDs run a maximum of 74 minutes and can hold at most 99 tracks -- if a CD is longer or has more tracks, the player won't know how to read the extra music. Importantly, the music sectors on a CD are interwoven with additional error-fixing data that the player's built-in software uses to reconstruct the tracks if dirt or tiny air bubbles from the manufacturing process make little chunks of the disk unreadable.
... So the trick seems to be that the playing time of 100:30 is interpreted as 00:30." The literal-minded computer software, he suggested, stopped when told it had reached the end, whereas the "hifi-player also says 00:30 of course, but after 30 secs it goes down to 99:59" and plays normally. (Asked about this account, a Midbar representative said the firm "cannot provide more technical information at this time.")
CD-ROMs, which are also used for computer software, are different. Because CD-ROMs may have hundreds or even thousands of files, they need to handle many more than 99 "tracks," which means they have different, larger tables of contents and can, in theory, hold up to 100 minutes. Because computer programs can't just skip a bit of code if the disk is dirty, CD-ROMs are more exacting about error correction. For that reason, a YellowBook CD-ROM devotes an extra chunk of each data sector to a second method of detecting and fixing flaws.
According to label executives and audio engineers, copy-protection firms take advantage of these differences by adding extra data to both the tables of contents and the music tracks -- data that are ignored by CD players but confuse CD-ROMs. One purchaser of the Midbar-protected version of Razorblade Romance, for instance, reported on Slashdot that an Onkyo CD player had no trouble with the CD, but Cdparanoia, a powerful open-source ripping program, could extract only 30 seconds of it. The CD player, the Slashdotter wrote, displayed "a playing time of 100 minutes, 30 seconds -- not!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I don't see any possible way that this will work, short of exploiting the copyright protection schemes in the newwe M$ operating systems (ME, 2000, XP), and even that is doubtful. At most, a minor rewrite to the ripper program will be required.
If the audio tracks will play on a PC CD-ROM drive, then there is a way a ripper can save the tracks. There is just no way around that. And once the track is in MP3 format, there is no copy control.
I see this as a possible attempt by the RIAA to exploit the DMCA ala the MPAA and DeCss. Tey may next be going to court to get CD rippers and MP3 encoders declared "circumvention devices" under the DMCA. And they know how to do it, just file their suit in so-called "judge" Kaplan's "court". (as an aside, perhaps Kaplan could be the Judge Wapner in a new show on the WB called "The Corporates Court").
CD's that employ this kind of copy controls, which will NOT stop piracy, but are intended to prevent me from excercising my right to fair use, SHOULD BE BOYCOTTED! Make them fail in the marketplace. It would seem to me that this copyright control scheme would only really prevent copying on consumer level audio equipment (non PC's), where you can't get at the hardware and change the software.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
When I read "Burn Proof CDs" I thought the article had something to do with CDRs that were somehow impossible to burn. That didn't make too much sense, believe it or not, so perhaps a better title would be:
Coming Soon: Rip Proof CDs
Unless you're a big fan of, you know, blank CDRs that can't be burned. Sounds like a RIAA concept to me, if there ever was one.
so don't buy it...learn to listen to better music instead of metallica and 95% of the other pap ladled out to you...don't be so fsck'ing lazy when it comes to listening to music...as mike watt once said, "there are too many liars singing songs these days"...of course the advice is useless when your ears can no longer tell when someone is lying, and mtv and the other culture-dispensers have made damned sure that most of you can't tell sonic shite from shinola...just my two cheerful drachmas, of course... :)
Bitte Refrain von solchen Fehlern zukünftig.
Danke
Keeping
First of all: Visible gaps could be seen on the CD! (probably gaps between tracks)
The album had sticker saying "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PCs" and this seems to be true. The CD is not recognized as audio CD at all and cannot be played in PC.
Then I tried analyzing/grabbing the CD data using various applications such as CloneCD, CDRWin, Blind Read, NTI CD-Maker etc with various settings. All of this without any success. Not only did I get various contradictory and theoretically impossible error messages but several of the programs crashed spectacularly and/or produced scary noises through the CDROM drive! The best success I achieved was displaying some sort of Table of Contents which contained very strange numbers (negative data lengths, 99 sessions on the disk etc...)
Then I tried all of this with 3 different drives (AOpen CDRW, AOpen DVD ROM and Creative DVD ROM) and the results varied wildly. The best success I has was capturing 650 MB file which contained 2 seconds of the first track and then zeroes.
I tried playing the CD in two different CD players (Aiwa and Sony) and it worked without any problems. Track numbers and lenghts were ok, everything looked fine.
So, it seems that these CDs really cannot be ripped/copied using standard CD ROMs. Of course:
1) You can send the music from the CD player with digital output to PC soundcard with digital input and create perfect "deprotected" CD.
2) If this copyprotection gains any notoriety, CD drive makers will immediately update their firmware to allow "dumbing down" the drive and "really RAW" grabbing of the audio data.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Copyright protected cd's do not allow you to replicate them in a cd burner nor do they allow you to rip the audio tracks "digitally" (although can still be done through analog)."
Taco editorialized:
Actually the article is well written, covering all the bases, although it neglects to say how we're all expected to bend over while our fair use of stuff we paid for is taken away from us.
So now "fair use" for any piece of music you buy is meant to be defined by you're being able to make digital copies of it? I guess the RIAA is really fucking us with those analog LP's then, with their insidious built-in bumpy groove technology.
Fair use of a music CD is to be able to play the thing whereever you like, and generally do whatever you like with it (such as making a copy for the car) as long as it's for your own use and not giving copies away to others who hav't paid for it.
However, Fair use DOES not by any stretch of the imagination mean you should be guaranteed to be able to copy directly to CD rather than tape, or that you should be facilitated in copying it to MiniOggCD-2010 or whatever alternate formats may emerge. That is ridiculous.
I'm just glad they finally made my mind for me. I used to hear songs on the radio, grab mp3's of the ones I liked, and grab the album's of the one's I liked the most. However, my only cd players are my computers at home and my laptop at work. Now I have no choice but to do all my music listening in mp3 format. Thanks guys, saves me a bunch of money!
-Tannin Kal
-Tannin Kal
-Omar
You've done this? An entire audio cd? with dd?
Because for some reason, I don't think you can do that. You can't simply read a whole CD block-by-block. You can use DD to grab a single track perhaps..... but the whole thing?
A mate in the office yesterday bought a CD which looked kinda weird... on the back there were what looked like concentric gaps. It skipped like mad in our PCs, so he took it back. The replacement CD also didn't place in a PC, but played perfectly well in a cheap hifi.
This is _so_ wrong it's unbelievable...
from the article:
"If CDs were as hard to copy as DVDs or VHS tapes or even books, we would not be going through anything like what we're going through now with Napster or Gnutella."
Yeah, it took a teenager a whole week to figure out how to copy a DVD. (I realize that it's quite hard to burn a DVD now, but 5 years ago CDs were equally hard to burn)
I would imagine that it would only take slightly longer to break this method.
What really needs to be done here is to give consumers access to digital music for a fair price. I don't see RIAA or any record company even trying to do that. If MP3s were 50 cents per copy, I think record companies would make a mint. I certainly would buy a ton of them.
-_underSCORE
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
Now you've hit the nail on the head. Obviously, "The Programmable Machine" must die. The first step is to key the BIOS and OS together, so it only boots the One True OS, Windows. Then come up with copy-protected and access-controlled media. Then how about Windows-only peripherals, network connections, etc. Once you've taken The Programmable Machine and made it fully Windows-bound, you've got a set of deep pockets available to sue, and Microsoft will make sure that machine won't be usable for illegal copying.
The Programmable Machine can be dead and gone within our lifetime.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It was nice for them to mention /. in the article, but it would have been nicer if they had linked to /., or at least said something along the lines of what /. is.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
If you go check out the Salon article, you'll find some more info on how this works.
I actually think this is kind of funny. The proposed schemes mostly work by expoiting differences int the redbook(cd audio) and yellowbook(cd-rom) standards, making it impossible to play these CDs in most cd-rom drives.
Well guess what you twits, I buy quite a few cds but I hardly ever use them in a stero style cd player. Basically what they're going to do is make it so I can't play them in my desktop, I can't play them in my laptop, I can't rip them and play them in my rio and they may not work in the high end player I've been thinking about buying. Even some car cd players may have problems.
So I'm supposed to pay 20 bucks for a cd I can only play in my $200 bookshelf system that sounds terrible and my 5 year old discman (which I can't find). Oh goody, I'm gonna go buy lots of these things.
idiots
I admit it- I'm a music junkie, and through my CD purchases, have been supporting the RIAA. I'm a very good customer of theirs. I feel very ambivalent about Napster, and have never shared an MP3 with anyone.
BUT- as soon as I unwrap a CD I rip and encode it as a high quality MP3. It goes back into the case, and from that point on I primarily listen only to the MP3, whether it be on my stereo, computer, laptop, or Rio (don't have a car player).
I know I'm a geek through and through and that relatively few other people in this country exercise their "fair use" this way. I've been extremely scrupulous in upholding the rights of the copywright owners, I've fattened their wallets, and what am I going to get for it? They're going to try to f**k me over.
I will be the first in line to download the "crack" when it comes, DMCA or not. They're turning me into a "criminal".
But distributing it in order to allow interoperability is explicitly allowed.
So, my question is...What are the "best in class" linux CD audio tools that would be a good base for working on this (cdparanoia springs to mind)? What is the ISO designator for the format of CD audio?
SuperID
Copyright terms are limited. Is the copyright protection?
Of course not, that's nearly impossible to do. If a copyright term today is, say, 100 years, will that copy protected CD be copyable in 2101? Same goes for SDMI, DVDs and all that other crap.
After the term, will it then be legal to "circumvent" such copy protection?
But wait, there's more! Copyright term extensions of been hostorically retroactive (for no legitimate reason I can see). So, is someone were to make a copy-protected CD that then becomes copyable after 100 years, what do the copyright holders do when the term has been retroactively extended to 200 years?
If they can't properly protect something for the term of its copyright, they shouldn't protecte it at all -- its at the expense of society ultimately and it shouldn't be allowed.
The last time I checked, almost all CDs were "copyright protected". Remember, it's copy protection not copyright protection.
Copyright protection comes from the law. Copy protection comes from technology.
(It should really be called copy hindering. CP has been proven countless times to be impossible. "Here, I'll encrypt something and then give you the keys. That'll stop you from using the data!")
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Back in the day (mutters the grizzled, 35-year-old software veteran ;) ), most floppy disk copy protection schemes relied on formatting the sectors differently so that they couldn't be copied, only read. It was just a matter of time until Copy II PC, and its ilk, came along to allow legitimate users to back up expensive software off of annoying fragile media.
How is it going to be different this time? The talk here is not about _if_ we can by pass the protection scheme, but how many days (counting on one hand) will it take. And I have no doubts it will turn out to be correct.
What I have to ask our friends at the RIAA, if they could hear us over the crackling of burning hundred-dollar bills lighting cigars is, who are they trying to kid? Are they assuming that the majority of CD rippers will simply give up if they can't copy music off of CD's and only the hardcore fringe will attempt to break the copy protection? Will they somehow try to leverage the DCMA to make all CD ripping illegal? Are they stupid, naive, hopelessly optimistic or just plain evil? Well, I think I can answer my own question ("Yes.")
Anyhow, just like the SDMI stuff (so far) and DiVX (capitalization?), this will probably just be a small blip on the radar of consumer consciousness and then slink back to the swampy hinterland of all failed, bad ideas.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
According to the article, many car CD players will refuse to play these CDs, as will all "multimedia PC" systems. So, let's assume I've got my big Altec Lansing subwoofer hooked up to my PC, and it's the only CD player I own (not really, but many of my friends in the army only have their PCs to play CDs on, to save space). Now, I can't play any new CDs on this machine, because I MIGHT copy them? Well, I can't even listen to them "wherever I like" so I'm not going to buy them either.
If I put this CD in my new RioVolt MP3/CD player (the only CD player in my car), will it cease to function? Now, I've got a portable CD player (RioVolt) that can't play audio CDs of the new style, I've got a home audio system (MPC) that can't play the new CDs. And, this somehow does NOT infringe on fair use?
I know plenty of college students and soldiers that don't buy stereos, because they have computers. These happen to be the ages that buy the majority of popular music as well. I imagine the RIAA is not so smart on this one.
Illegitimi non carborundum
I doubt it will push up sales much, if a few thousand hackers go and get a copy it won't register much more than a blip on anyone's radar. Here's a brief article about Charlie Pride's reasoning on why he wants to do this.
Basically he believes that others are making money off 'pirated' music. I myself have fundimental problems with making copies of a CD and selling them for profit. But I have huge problems with the way the industry is trying to ignore our fair use rights. If the artists understood what was going on here they might have a different view, but they're being fed propaganda by their labels. "Yeah, Charlie, that Napster thingy is just like when you saw pirated records in a gas station... exactly."
>>engineers in the world are working on this,"
>>says Samit of EMI.
Yes and the rest are just waiting to crack it.
I can't believe the music industry is being so blaise about the fact that many consumers are getting ripped off. In fact just about all are. There is no reason that you shouldn't be able to rip songs off of a cd that you purchased (or were given). The music industry acts as if it has some god given right to exist, and that it can do whatever it wants. Don't these music executives realize that without the consumer they do not exist?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Most likely this is the case. The mastering people can do funny things with the TOC, lead in/out and sub-channel data.
I think that most CD-ROM drives will require a firmware upgrade to deal with this (if you want to keep using your old ripping software).
What I could envision is software that reads the entire data stream into a buffer, and ripping software monitors the buffer in real-time, correcting the TOC and sub-channel information as it goes. Should work like normal then.
My $0.02
Do not break the seal on this CD until you have read and agreed to this license. (We have placed this license underneath the seal, in order to protect our intellectual property.) If you do not agree to this license, please apply 1500 PSI to the entire package and kiss your fifteen bucks goodbye.
... tough.
... unless Screwed decides otherwise.
The party of the first part, known hereafter as the Screwed, agrees to the following provisions as stipulated by the party of the second part, known hereafter as the Screwer:
o The Screwed agree the that Screwer may employ any legal, technical, moral, or immoral means to protect the intellectual property of the creative artists who are so critical to the success of the industry. (By "creative artists," we refer not to the scribblers or performers, but the truly creative: the bookeepers and executives who serve the stockholders. You think that's not creative? You have no idea how long it took us to come up with just this license.)
o The Screwed will chose one (1) device, approved by the Screwer, to play the product recorded on this medium. (It's called a "medium" because it's neither well done nor rare. Yes, it's an old joke. We said we were creative; we didn't say we were original.) Screwer reserves the right to un-approve a device after it has been chosen. If the Screwed does not chose a device, the Screwer reserves the right to chose a player for the Screwed.
o The Screwed will chose one (1) person, approved by the Screwer, to listen to the product recorded on this medium. If any other person or persons listen to this product, Screwer will charge Screwed a performance fee to be determined after our next "business" trip to Las Vegas.
o This product is not guaranteed against manufacturing defects or any other flaws. We don't promise that there's even a medium in the package, that if there is, that it has anything but zero bits on it, or that any so-called "music" corresponds in any way to the label on the outside of the package. If our copy protection schemes make it impossible for you to listen to the so-called "music"
o Screwed has the right to listen to the product as many times as he or she likes
o We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We control the treble, and all your bass are belong to us, too.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Now, now, calm down a bit. Take your medicine. There, feel better?
Now then, I wouldn't worry too much about these guys. I used to be a pirate back in college, myself. I was even proud of my collection. However, several years later, I have gotten rid of my MP3 collection, ripped only the ones that I own, and bought any that I wanted, but didn't own yet (most of these CDs were really cheap by now).
So relax, the world isn't coming to an end, and most people will grow out of it and eventually pay their dues.
However, please note several things: I haven't bought a music CD in several years; I replaced the stuff I wanted, and forgot about the rest. They ARE too expensive, thus, I don't buy any more, and I don't listen to any new ones.
Additionally, I will be quite unhappy if I buy a CD that I cannot rip for myself. This is, as many people have noted, quite legal, as I have paid my dues to the artist (not much, unfortunately) and the record company (too much).
I am just demonstrating that, yes, there are people out there who do really want to only rip their own CDs for their own purposes. I suppose all I can do now is wait for the next format.
Ok, it's apparent that these things succeed by preventing themselves from being read by CD-ROM drives.
But what happens if you stick it in one of those new stereos that has a CD burner built in? I know Philips has released several models like this, and other companies probably have, too.
Either it's a simple way of copying them, or the RIAA has broken much more than PCs with these non-standard discs.
Okay folks, if you're going to spout off about Fair Use at least read the clause. It's not very long, and it's not what you think it is:
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use38
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-
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) 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.
There it is. If you're teaching, editorializing, reporting, or researching the work you can reproduce limited parts. No, you don't get to make all the copies you want regardless of the media used. Technically, if you want a copy for the house and one for the car then you are supposed to buy two. If you want a CD for the house and a tape for the car then you are supposed to buy one of each. Maybe it sucks, but that's the way they wrote the law.
When I got a set of copyright registration papers several years ago there was also mention that, generally, if the owner does not offer the work in a particular medium then it wasn't considered infringement to make a copy for your own use in that medium. So if you buy a CD and the owner doesn't offer tape, mp3, vinyl, etc. then you are probably OK to make yourself a copy on one of those. DMCA may have changed that view though.
You can read the whole thing at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
My wife left me, my dog died. The bank now has mah truck and I can't even play my Charlie Pride CD.
Yes, any protection scheme will probably be quickly broken. But the major labels shouldn't even try to protect their data until the next audio format.
--
Mac software says right on the box that it requires a Mac. If copy-protected CDs say prominently on the box that they won't work on CD drives and might not work on some audio CD players (the former is insufficient; all significant deficiencies in what a reasonable consumer would expect by default must be covered), then the analogy would hold.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Come check out a site I am working on, musiciansview.com.
If you don't buy or share music from musicians who agree with this crap, the RIAA will be forced to take people to court on behalf of artist who don't want the help!
It's still a work in progress. TBA soon.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
My audio CD drive is pretty old and crappy, so I have not used it for years. It's just so much more convenient to use the CD-ROM drive in the PC, too. I have a radio tuner card in my PC, so the stereo only serves as an amplifier in these days.
I am sure many people have similar setups. Considering this and laptop users, I don't give those CDs much of a chance in the open market.
General comment: Copy protection inevitably involves violating the specifications of the medium: Macrovision violates the NTSC video standard, Those CDs violate the Red Book audio CD standard. So manufacturers get suckered into making standard-compliant devices, and media producers go right ahead and break those standatds.
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The number one reason why I "rip" CD's is reduce the storage space needed for my music collection.
I am currently trying to get all of my stuff turned into digital format and burned in an efficient storage format to CD that I can use/play in my computer. This includes pictures/photos, music (especially the stuff still trapped on phonograph records and cassette tapes). By doing this, I can get rid of the extraneuous equipment taking up space.
I expect to end up with TV shows, movies, books, music, photos, all on CD's in efficient and standard storage formats. Then integrate everything with webpages. The article mentions that I am supposed to maintain a cassette tape player and a stand-alone CD player just to listen to music. This is silly.
The financially successful artists of the future will make their work available in a digital format directly available to the purchaser as demanded by a computer-savvy market. The RIAA will be left out.
What with 83 percent of 5477 voters voting no, that makes around 4546 pirates, according to RIAA-logic.
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
If I told you, four years ago, that your "average" Mac or Windows user would be copying binary data off of a CD, encoding it into a new format, then then exchanging that data over the net freely, downloading it into personal devices, or burning it onto CD's that could be played in other devices, would you have bought it?
While it's popular to flog the masses as being "iggnerent lusers," the truth is, if you're capable of making a process fairly straightforward, Joe average will actually be able to follow along. Joe Average wasn't supposed to use computers in the first place. Or be able to get on the internet. Or be a threat to the mighty music business. Guess what? It happened.
The argument used that "this will be beyond the ability of average user" is bullshit. Just like "no one will ever find this security hole if they can't see the source code" and "open source software can't be worth anything, becuase it is free." It's what clueless executives murmur over and over, while clinging to their dreams of a new Lexus and a vacation home in the Bahamas.
That sounds incredibly time consumptive and a huge waste of plastic (which has my pseudo-environmentalist hackles raised). If you really want to hurt the record companies and enjoy music, go buy a fscking instrument and play your own damn music!
I do not have a signature
However, the record companies want it both ways.
They think long term -- they're counting on the Third Law of Termodynamics as an ally. Entropy means in XX years all electronic devices in existence today will rot and become unusable. In the meantime, they try to ensure no new device which will allow copying will be ever built again, anywhere in the world. A near impossible goal, but they think they can do it.
When I say "near", I mean the only way they could possibly achieve such a thing is by turning this planet into a global China-cum-Afghanistan-cum-NSA-like police state. And make no mistake, they do want that. Rich people in Chile, for instance, tend to love Pinochet (former mass-murdering dictator).
(Closely avoiding Godwin's Law. Whew!)
Well true, if I were listening to the Backstreet Boys I obviously don't care about quality and thus wouldn't care what it sounded like.
But not all of us listen to crap music.
But distributing it in order to allow interoperability is explicitly allowed.
"Interoperability" - that's a good one. Why, next you'll tell me American law also provides for "free speech" and "due process of law".
In other words, the interoperability clause in the DMCA so far seems like all those other too-good-to-be-true laws on the books that lawmakers and judges (and corporations) always conveniently forget - little things like the first ten Amendments. Publish a crack so these playback-inhibited CDs can be played like normal in CD-ROM drives and see how far "interoperability" gets you in court.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Here's why:
Usually, when I go to school each morning, I bring my collection of CDs with me. This numbers about 36 or 38 legit, purchased CDs, as well as 12 or 10 burned CDs .
Yes, I realize that bringing something of that much value to school, even my private school, is a bad idea. Unfortunately, I found that out the hard way, when, about 5 weeks ago, they were stolen. Poof, gone without a trace. Now I don't even have the originals still with me, because they were all taken.
Now what I'm going to have to do is to burn copies of all my CDs that I purchase in the future, so I can take the copies with me and still have the originals at home, so that they can be re-burned in case my CDs are stolen again. This is a perfectly acceptable example of fair use, since I (the purchaser) was the only one who used the albums and (as far as I know) fair use laws allow you, or at least USED to allow you, to keep extra copies for backup purposes.
Time used to be when you wouldn't have to rebuy CDs or other items such as video games if they were stolen, you could just rely on your backup copy. Not anymore.
Corporate greed has finally overridden any concern that the music industry might have once had for the consumer, because the average American consumer is either so dumb, or so lacking self control, that they go right on and buy from them anyway.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
So now I'm into buying music of local artists and watching traveling performances. When I want a movie, I rent it.
If the industry doesn't want us to truly own what we buy, them I simply won't buy.
Give me a break. Ok, tweak two lines of code in the CDROM driver. Oohhh, scary.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I bought a copy of Type O Negative's "Least worst of" a few months ago, and I've noticed that it won't
play in my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 5k, 24x CDROM), yet works fine in my car.
I never really thought much about it, as I don't usually listen to CDs anywhere but the car,
but now I'm wondering if this disc is usage-disabled.
The symptoms sound similar, the machine can't identify the disc, never starts playing, and occasionally the drive makes a 'wugga-wugga' sound as if it's moving the read head back an forth, looking for something.
Has anyone else seen this happening with this disc?
I just kinda assumed it was mis-stamped or something, and my 'puter couldn't handle it...Now I'm not quite so sure.
C-X C-S
Is it just me, or does this seem trivial to work around? Here's my idea. Go out and buy one of those nifty little Sony mini disc thingies. Connect to your pre-amp/amp/whatever, play your cd and record it to the mini disc. Now you're ready to record your music anywhere. I mean this seems just like making a tape recording except with digital media. Any comments? Am I just clueless here?
According to the article it will block many car CD players, portable CD players, and of course CD ROM drives. That is a pretty significant amount. It's not just ripping that will be affected. You won't be able to listen to your CD player in your car anymore. You won't be able to use your discman. You can't listen to them at work in your CDROM. This idea needs to be flushed immediately into the rancid stinking hole it originated from.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I have three comments on this latest RIAA gem.
First, is Philips (or whoever makes that 'create your own cd dub device') on board with this? If they can't copy it, there will be a lawsuit over lost revenue.
Second, I have a great device, 100% guaranteed to copy any form of digital or analog music. It's called a decent stereo. Mine just happens to have digital, analog, DTS, Surround, and DVD jacks. Oddly enough, these encrypted CDs and DVDs come out in dolby, DTS, RCA, what-have-you. No problems. The DVDs come out in crystal clear S-Video, no country code problems.
Third, I wonder how this will work into their price scheme? Will we, the consumers, have to shoulder the burdens of their R&D with price hikes? Will they increase the cost of legal music, thereby making the illegal music the only avenue for most low paid people? I know that when I was making minimum wage I could only afford tapes. I had to tape the artists who only released on CD from my friends. Will this sort of thing cause the RIAA to have a backlash, where people are more willing to 'pirate' than to purchase?
I think this is the worst idea they have had yet. Perhaps in the future, they will realize that if they want people to purchase their audio legally, they need to make the price/quality ratio so good that the value will be much higher than the pirated stuff. I'd certainly pay $5 for a CD, no problem. $15 is a stretch, and I will bet that if this encryption raises the prices into the $20 range, many people will just 'pirate' from the radio, from friends, from whatever.
-WSAn operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Did anyone else notice that this first "uncopyable" CD is Charlie Pride doing "A tribute to singer Jim Reves"?
"A tribute to" means an album where ALL the songs were previously done by the singer to whom the tribute is being paid.
In other words, EVERY SONG ON THE ALBUM is Johnny Pride COPYING a song done by Jim Reves.
Somehow this seems appropriate. B-)
But it's not a copyright violation. Johnny will have licenced all those songs from the current copyright holder.
So if Jim actually WROTE any of them and his estate or heirs still own the copyright, perhaps Johnny actually WILL pay some tribute to Jim, in the financial sense.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you can manage to find some old crappy 2x CD-ROM or something that WILL play one of these, just rip in analog with your sound card and then encode to MP3.
Either that, or don't encode to MP3 at all, just burn it to another CD.
It's hardly an issue, more sound quality is lost to MP3 encoding than analog ripping anyway (Supposing you have a good sound-card with built in "Save what you Play" software... the Sound Blaster Live comes with such features.) Must be sure that you disable all system sounds and don't tax your machine. There are good ways to do this, and I would know -- I've had CDs so scratched up ripping digitally just wasn't working, but for some reason I was able to rip in analog. And as I said, the analog ripping didn't effect the sound quality any more so than the transition to MP3, in fact, probably much less.
I've love to buy a copy of this CD, burn a copy onto a very generic, unmarked (no branding information) blank CD, and then take it back to Wal-mart and claim that it's defective as it had no disk face printed on it. Get a replacement. Repeat.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
They burned me a full 12 hours earlier and when they finally post this story they use a version white-labelled by the Microsoft/NBC alliance. Why the hell Taco is sending users to the MSNBC site instead of Inside.com baffles me. That's a great idea! Let's give the large media conglomerate (which has already shown its journalistic integrity to be tenuous at best) all the page views and ad revenue instead of the site which actually authored the article! Sometimes, I think the guys who run this site really need to walk their talk a little more.
Here is the original Inside.com link.
-------
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
But my MP3 player doesn't have a 20GB hard drive, it has 64MB of Flash RAM, so ripping at 256k would allow me to have about 5 songs whereas 128k allows me to have 10 and still have reasonable quality. I'm not saying this to diss MP3 in anyway, it's an excellent format and all the music I own and still like is on my hard drive now.
This will not hinder anyone who really wants to rip the data. So what if today's cdparanoia can't read it; tomorrow's will. And there's always audio resampling.
But it will anger customers who will not be able to play the CDs that they've bought, without going to extra trouble. In fact, that "extra trouble" will probably involve ripping the music and then either encoding it as mp3/vorbis, or reburning the wav/aiff data to a standard format CD. Then the customer will be able to play the music on all equipment, not just some equipment.
Thus, it will effectively only hurt the publisher's sales and reputation, while not doing anything to address the alleged agenda of reducing piracy. It's just a dumb idea. Apparently some people need the market to teach this to them. Fine. As long as I return and get refunds for any CDs that don't play correctly, then it's their money that they are spending on this education, rather than mine.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Trust me, she's going to be calling me, saying "this new CD won't play in my computer... why not?" I want them to explain to her that they deliberately did it, there's nothing wrong with the CD (other than they broke it, and there's only broken copies around) or her CD-ROM, they are just afraid she's going to distribute it over the net. Please do that for me.
I wish I could say I'm not buying any more CDs, but I've already done that. Did that last year -- not because of Napster but because I'm tired of the strong-arm tactics and "sue everyone" stance. It's a cartel, an organized monopoly of five big companies. Now, they want to do away with the CD player all together -- because it's become too easy to pirate. Not that they weren't raking money in hand over fist or anything. Now, they want you to replace all the media players you've currently got, and all your media once again.
I don't think it's going to fly this time. They made an almost perfect media in CD. Small enough, durable enough, direct track access, and any improvement in sound Joe Sixpack won't notice nor will he pay extra for it. Joe's just going to realize that new discs won't play in his current player, and they want him to buy a new one -- that won't play any of his old music. And, there's no benefit to the new music! Think that won't piss Joe off?
And hey, where's all the fair use? I think the pendulum has swung far enough, and if the RIAA isn't careful, Congress will suddenly swing it right back the other way.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.fairtunes.com
DNA just wants to be free...
> I used it to make a copy of my diablo 2 play disk so I could play at home on battle.net and also do the same at work.
.iso of the 2nd disc (it's not copy protected) and just use Daemon Tools to "mount" your .iso in the virtual cd-rom! Change the registry drive setting for D2 and you're set! (I have drive R: cdrom, drive V: virtual, drive W: burner)
;-) but at least I never have to worry about my cd getting scratched.
I frequently play a few games, and they all require the stupid cd in the drive. After getting tired of swapping cd's all the time, I found this page:
Game Copy World - Diablo 2
Which gave me a link to game CD ripping utils
Then finally to Daemon tools
Use DiscDump to get an
Sure it takes 640 megs (good thing 30 gig drives are less then $200
If I bought the game, wtf do I *need* the cd in the drive to play?!
UT has a real nice compromise - you only need the cd-rom for patches: you can play BOTH single player and multi-player without the cd. I find Q3 and HalfLife to be annoying that you need the CD for single player.
I wish certain idiots would wise up and realize ALL copy-protection schemes have been and will continue to be broken.
I read on this page about CD standards that the well known little 'Compact Disc digital audio' logo has these requirements:
This logo may be used on discs complying with the CD-DA specifications: the IEC 908 standard and/or the Philips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description (the RED Book).
So yeah, it seems as if these protected CDs should not be allowed to carry this logo. But I doubt anyone is going to rub their nose in it. Worse is they'll probably get away with a 'may cause problems in some CDROM drives' sticker - which promotes unwarranted doubts about the compatibility of CDROM drives.
I read the article on both the MSNBC web site and the INSIDE.COM web site. The MSNBC version really sucks bad. The text appears to be there, but it was harder to read and very poorly layed out. Notice how it is formatted into a little narrow column on MSNBC while INSIDE.COM has it filling out the whole screen, even though they do have menus and ads along the sides. This does show the case that big corporations are really goofing up bad. And they are wondering why the net isn't turning huge profits for them?.
Slashdot needs to start making a better choice about which sites they give primary links to and start encouraging better web sites, instead of brown nosing big corporations that can only make screwed up web sites.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you're unhappy with the RIAA's pricing scheme, then you have the option of not buying their CDs. As long as you continue piracy of your music, you are contributing to the problem(RIAA paranoia about piracy) rather than the solution(cheaper CDs). You have no more intrinsic right to the music you wish to acquire than you do to read my health records
Visit the
Try a different encoder. In general, you'll still be able to tell the difference, but it may "suck less".
The poster in the other followup is right, though - unless you're intending to share or stream them over the 'net, bandwidth isn't a premium. If it's just for your own use, encode at 256. Or 320. Diskspace is cheap.
Note that this technique only works for copy protected CDs, since others cannot be returned after having been opened.
--
<insert blank cd>
# cat file.img >
If you do a bit for bit copy from the "protected" cd to a blank cd won't you be avoiding this "table" that the cd burner is supposed to get choked up on? Or do the tracks actually have to be created one by one and copied onto specific sectors?
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
--
Garett
Freedom: "I won't!"
I have >500 cds. I've ripped ripped them all and listen to them on the pc, the cd's just get archived :-) It seems that I am the prototype of someone who bought more cd's since the mp3's got popular. For every mp3 I like, I buy the cd or cd-single. (These are kept like a backup, with the highest quality.)
...
Of course I won't buy such a disk, because I simply can't *use* it the way I like. I'll get the mp3's and not support the artist anymore
So these "copy-protected" CDs won't work in CD/DVD-ROM drives...guess what I, and a few million others, use to listen to their CDs? Brilliant move, ensuring that a good-sized chunk of their customers won't be able to make use of their products anymore. Sounds like a sure-fire way...of driving people to Napster, or Gnutella now that Napster will soon only list RIAA-approved files.
I usually buy a CD, listen to it a couple of times, decide which tracks I like (maybe all, maybe some), and rip them to my mp3 directory for later random playback. Now, suddenly I'm told that I'm not allowed to listen to music that way? Fsck that. I'll just stick with artists that don't use the anti-consumer protection scheme the RIAA wishes to impose.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Nope. The good thing about Philips (arguably the most important cd patent holder) is that they got out of the media business by selling Polygram to Seagram. This is why they're on our side in stuff like this. That's also why they (and not e.g. Sony) are behind Tivo. They don't have to protect the IP of their media daughter anymore.
Tob
Yes, buy copies of this CD. Buy many copies. Play with them a couple days, try to crack them, whatever.
Then return them all to the retail store and demand a full refund. Site the fact that these CDs will not play on your CD player, your mother's CD player, your brother's CD player, etc. Don't settle for an exchange or store credit. Get angry and tell them you will never buy CDs from this store again. You ruined little Timmy birthday party when his new CD wouldn't play boo hoo hoo.
In short, hit the record industry in its most important link...the music retailer. Customers don't buy opened CDs, re-shrinkwrapping is illegal and now there is no way for a store to tell if a CD is truly defective (warped) or just semi-defective (copy-protected) which means a lot more stock is going to get tied up in the return process.
If enough stores get burned by these copy-protected CDs, then guess what? They probably will stop carrying them. Artists aren't going to like that. What will that do for sales? Or store owners will start bitching up the channel all the way to RIAA. RIAA can't piss off the music retailer because right now THAT IS THEIR ONLY SALES OUTLET.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Now I'm forced to wonder if software that burns a cd bit for bit can be considered illegal under the DMCA as a form of copyright-protection circumvention. In this case the software came first, but the case for this seems as strong to me as the case they had against DeCSS.
After all I supposed pay the big bucks not for the piece of plastic but to pay to the artists and songwriters, so if I back up what I get with my "license" then I am not gaining any unfair advantage,
Except that most of the money is probably going into the pockets on "middlemen". Who appearently want to have things both ways. They are selling a "product" when it suits them and they are selling a "licence" when it suits them.
Microsoft has a legal monopoly on distribution of certain software programs. They use the law, they should be subjected to it. I am willing to give Microsoft an out: They can continue to act monopolistic with free rain as long as they forever give up the right to "intellectual property" "protection". Someone leaks their source code for NT - no trade secret protection. Somone copies/redistributes/modifies/clones/emulates their products - no right for M$ to sue them.
That is a consistent argument.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Of course, now it collects dust, since my computer is next to my component system and I play MP3s through it. Not that I'm gonna get rid of the CD players anytime soon, I still buy CDs of songs I like (besides that, many people do NOT know how to do quality rips, the topic of a different rant). I just want to know these new copy-protected CDs will play on 10 and 15 year old players, just like current Macrovision tapes will still play on those ancient 20 year old top-loading indestructable easily repaired VCRs.
Take it home, and put it in my CD-player (very old, quite likely to not be able to read it) or maybe one of those MP3/CD players. It doesn't work. I go back to the store with my CD player in hand, and go to the manager. "Look, this new CD is defective. I doesn't work in my CD player. This other CD of mine (non-crippled) does work, so the CD player is not broken. Please refund my purchase." A couple of these, and the stores will be leery about stocking them.
Then I write a short letter to the actual band: "I bought your CD. It was broken, my CD player was unable to play it. I returned the CD to the store. I downloaded the tracks from Napster/Gnutella/Bearshare. Here is a cheque for $8 that I think you deserve for your efforts in producing the music. I don't think the record company deserves anything, as their CD does not work in my CD player."
Then I write a letter to the RIAA: "I bought an album. You crippled it. I returned it. I downloaded the tracks from Napster/Gnutella/Bearshare. I paid the artists directly for their efforts. You are no longer part of the equation. Good-bye. I hope that you sold your shares two years ago."
Artists get paid, I paid less for the songs, and the record company is taken out of the equation entirely (except that they now have a returned CD to deal with). Keep this up, and they will be forced out of business. And I can rest well, in that I didn't rip off the artist. In fact, the artist probably made 8 times as much from me as they would have from the record company.
Why continue doing business with a company that is trying to hurt you, when you can simply work around them and take them out of the equation?
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
Granted, I don't care about country albums. However, I often rip solos from jazz albums and slow them down with a sound editor to pick out the solos. I guess I either have to go analog or just be SOL.
It doesn't imply that the people producing it HAVE to make the product copyable...only that if the product is copyable, I can copy it, under certain circumstances.
-h-
Piracy (as opposed to theft; they are NOT exactly the same) hurts copyright owners not because they no longer have as many copies they can sell (that's how theft hurts the victim) but because they no longer sell as many copies because some people pirate rather than buying. This is why copy protection of software SOMETIMES works, especially protection that makes copying impossible but doesn't keep the software from working. But more importantly, most heavily protected software (like, say, Quark or Media100) is the way its users make a living, so they WILL accept limitations (such as needing a computer with certain free ports for a hardware dongle) to be able to use the software.
:)
On the other hand, nobody buying a CD is making a living from that CD (usually; I'm talking about consumers here). People who find that these new CDs don't work in their new $500 car player, or worse, their $2500 laptop, are NOT going to replace those devices. They're going to return the CD, and certainly not buy any more CDs with that copy protection. Thus, the goal of the copyright holders, namely, to sell more CDs by not having people pirate them, is not going to be accomplished. Instead, people are going to not buy CDs EVEN if they might have bought them without the copy protection. While some may now buy the CDs (if they work in their players) who might have pirated before, some other people are going to NOT buy the CD when they might have before. I, for example, often buy CDs and then rip them to mp3 so I can play them in my livingroom mp3 'jukebox' (headless computer) or my car mp3 player, not to give pirate copies to other people. However, if I could no longer do this form of fair use, I WOULD NOT buy the CDs.
Thus, rather than selling more CDs, the industry will sell fewer CDs.
This same thing will happen if the industry tries to push new secure formats like DataPlay. Some users will like the new players and thus buy the new format, but if the old format is still available, more people will stick with it. And if the old format is NOT available, many people will simply not buy the music.
A hardware manufacturer selling, say, shovels, will probably make more money (with their thin margins) with 1000 people buying shovels and nobody stealing them, than with 10,000 people buying shovels and 10,000 more stealing shovels. On the other hand, a music company will make MORE money with 10,000 copies being sold and 10,000 copies being made of those (50% piracy) than they would with 1000 copies being sold and NO piracy.
In other words, for a company that is selling something that's copyable, like music, the amount of money they make has NOTHING to do with piracy and EVERYTHING to do with how many copies they sell. Piracy only hurts them in so far as it is an alternative to purchasing. I am assuming that the number of actual physical CDs that get stolen via shoplifting is irrelevant here.
So it is not in the industry's interest to ensure that nobody pirates their music, if that means fewer people buy it. Stopping piracy without gaining new buyers will not benefit the industry; stopping piracy while at the same time losing would-be customers because of incompatibilities will destroy the industry.
Which I hope happens
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
(I am really curious to know how the new DVD/CD players that will be able to read CD-R and MP3 data discs are going to respond...)
I can almost guarantee that it won't play.
DVD players are a lot more intelligent than your average Discman,
and that's what this anti-copy tech plays off of.
They make the format slightly out of spec, so that the more intelligent devices get confused.
It's a lot like Macrovision in the way it exploits certain features of the hardware.
C-X C-S
IANAL, but I've noticed that everything I buy says "without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose"
So, what would you argue?
I find it hard to argue any moral dillema against pirating a full version of software that is designed solely for the purpose of piracy.
Exactly; it's no worse than rear-ending a radar detector salesman's car, breaking into a locksmith's shop, or shooting a gun store clerk.
*g*
Seriously, though, I don't know if "solely for the purpose of piracy" is accurate. It occurs to me that if I wanted to publish just a few hundred copies of my own copy-protected CD-ROM, something like CloneCD would be the way to do it.
According to this url, it seems they got the co-operation of the cd-rw drive makers for one of their standards breaking technologies. This is absoloutely unacceptable to purposely sell broken hardware.
Maybe you should buy an MP3 player, rip all the good tracks into MP3's, store them on one or two CD's, and just take the MP3 CD's to school.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Man, ain't that the truth. Actually, the absolutely most obscenely rich kids at my school steal the most stuff. Usually, they just throw it away afterwards, or something. I really don't understand them.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
There are 2 different types of offenses, violating access control and "copy" control (measures "protecting" exclusive rights). Access control isn't really copyright, but it is part of the law. The definition there for circumvention is: "to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; ".
Okay the CD copy restriction technology does not encrypt/scramble, so a "hack" won't decrypt/descramble. One can already get access to the work directly. The work just has defects designed to make accessing it difficult. No lock, just garbage that makes a CD-ROM puke. Locking content and making your content exploit a bug in CD-ROM firmware are 2 different things. Hmm, deliberately exploiting a bug, could be illegal under anti-"hacking" statues, especially if a CD-ROM damages itself trying to read it...
Next, effectively controls access: "effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
Nope, the work is right there in front of you. Adding stuff to/messing with it to confuse CD-ROM's which are smart enough to see it and get hosed, whereas CD players are too dumb to care is indeed clever (albeit it detestable and unethical). That hardly qualifies as requiring special steps to get the access. MPAA did a MUCH better job with DVD by using CSS. Even a 1-byte XOR would be better, legally. The RIAA could not change the format retroactively and keep backward compatibility (which the citizens who purchase music demand - note: MPAA did not have this problem, they controlled the format BEFORE its adoption). So they do the ONLY thing they can do - which is clever tricks. You can't put a lock on something if legacy devices don't grok keys. So you look for the next best thing.
Now the copy control bypassing prohibitions: to ''circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure'' means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure; and (B) a technological measure ''effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title. We could get nailed on circumvention theoretically. However the effective protection clause helps us (encryption being weak ala CSS may not, but this is different).
Does the measure protect a "right"? NO. It stops ACCESS, not COPYING. COPYING is an exclusive "right" (monopoly), not ACCESS. Copyright does not grant an ACCESS monopoly. The only access prohibition were dealt with above.
The device prohibitions depend on facilitating those violations, so if you aren't illegally circumventing, a device you use won't be considered an illegal cirumvention device.
Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer, nor Judge Kaplan.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
So I have begun bringing up copy prevention (not protection) in every conversation where it is appropriate. I mention XP, SDMI, the Sound Blaster Audigy (encrypts PCI traffic), the Dataplay discs, and now this. And what is the reaction? From those who listen to music they didn't overpay for and those who don't alike, the reaction is "Wow. That's shitty." Often in those exact words. I then tell them that I (a Win2K user) don't plan to "upgrade" and will move to Linux when it better meets my needs. I explain that I won't buy this shit. They agree. I think many will follow through.
Anyway, most of them are (I think) above average computer users, but they can all understand that all of these prevent them from getting to *their* music (not the RIAAs. They paid for it and they know it).
At some point in the discussion they raise the point that "It'll get hacked soon enough." Then I paint the pessimistic (maybe not?) picture of WinXP not copying the files, not playing through an insecure player, not giving sound to an insecure driver, and that driver not giving sound to an insecure card. And then I say, so maybe you could hack the WinXP kernel. But they quickly realize that's a LOT harder or impossible in any practical sense.
So, they realize how shitty it is. And the next time the topic comes up, I mention it again. IN PASSING. I don't go off on a rant (or try not to) until and unless they ask a question, and then I answer it. And guess what? the response to a brief comment is usually "oh yeah, that shittiness" or "huh?" in which case I explain somewhat more, and they ask more questions. No one I mentioned this to said "yeah, whatever."
GET THE WORD OUT. It can be done. The consumers don't want this and they know it. They don't read Slashdot, but a large number of them know someone who does. TELL PEOPLE. It can work.
Please, before it's to late, GET OFF YOUR ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. it's not even all that hard. And I'll bet it does more than a letter to your rep (do keep them up though.. and vote.. but do this too).
OK, I'm done ranting now. bye.
Am I the only one on this planet that prefers Win 3.x to Win 9x any day!
[Still chuckling about the day I installed DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11 on a 1.1 GHz TBird...]
I can't believe after 20 years of the Reagan-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Clinton criminals that any American has any respect for the law anymore anyway.
Think the laws are unfair? Break them. Break them repeatedly. It's your duty. Just because it's the law doesn't make it just.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
"
It does not matter to them if CDs are copy protected -- they weren't going to be even thinking of copying a CD anyway.
"
It does if the CD doesn't play in
their CDROM drive
their new spangly DVD player
their expensive high end CD player
their mp3 player
their in car CD player
their discman
which is what these non redbook CD's are proposing to do.
We must also remember that mp3 is now mainstream throughout the music buying public. CD writers are also quite common - a reasonable percentage of the music buying public now have one.
"
We have very far to go indeed before Joe Average and his sister are even remotely concerned about what the {RI|MP}AA are doing to our rights.
"
Joe Average, this CD won't play in your car, on your walkman, on your computer or in your DVD drive.
Do you feel your rights have been infringed?
What we have to do to educate Joe Average is to explain that because he *might* distribute this CD over Napster the record companies have forbidden him from playing.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Let's try getting your head out of your ass first. Okay, now that it's out, try to use dd to rip an audio CD. What's that? It doesn't work? That's right, it doesn't. Maybe you should try things before saying they work.
Hey jackass -- did I say it would work? That's right, I didn't.
cdparanoia is just one program among many that can rip audio tracks.
The enemies of Democracy are