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CD burning Will Never Be The Same
mooneyguy writes: "Reuters is reporting that EMI has just announced a partnership with Roxio (you know, the "toast" and "Easy CD Creator" folks). They have also bought a minority stake in the company. The potential impact here is scary. Roxio's Duea is quoted: 'Our goal is to enable consumers to legally download and record music to CD in a consumer-friendly manner while fairly compensating copyright owners and creators...' What changes now are forthcoming in their software to force this "fair compensation"? And how far will those changes penetrate throughout the industry? This can't be good for the consumer. Roxio has also come forth with a press release announcing this partnership. In it they announce "EMI will work to develop ways for consumers to easily record authorized music onto recordable CDs" and, even better, 'We want to continue to work with leaders in the music industry, like EMI, to not only provide for the protection of their digital content, but also to enable record companies and artists to get paid for burning.' Yikes!" Anybody else notice how stores like Walmart and Target are pushing the Music CD-Rs more and more? Hmmmm.
This has obviously been the next logical step in the evolution of CD-R. For the longest time, people (especially here on /.) have been debating the pros and cons of taxes on the CD-R drvies, or taxes on the actual CD-R's which are meant to help compensate those musicians (read greedy RIAA). Obviously, that's a long way away (and likely to never happen), so the next logical step is software control, and here it comes via Easy CD Creator. Too bad there's a lot more better writing programs out there that are free.
They do accomplish their goal here though. they are slowly making it harder for the average Joe to pirate music. Generally, I don't think that the RIAA, MPAA and whoever else really cares if the whole slashdot crowd pirates their music (we're the geeks, we'll always have the ability to pirate). But when Joe Blow sitting next to you has to so much as scratch his head to pirate music, they've won.
Sorry for posting anonymous coward :)
I have zero confidence in the industry's ability (or more important, their willingness) to produce a solution that repsects this fair use type of copying. Those a**holes would love to make fair use a thing of the past. If they can't do it by changing the law, they'll do it by ruining all the available tools.
Normally, that wouldn't matter. I'd just say, "Screw them, I'll use my own burning software". The specs are public, there's a plethora of CD burner software. But the badly worded DMCA will make those tools become illegal because they "circumvent" a protection scheme, even if that protection scheme wasn't invented until after the fact, and even if that protection scheme is so badly implemented that ignoring it is acutally the default if your software wasn't written to notice it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
For Windows:
.ogg files into the track window and have them burn out to normal CD Audio files. Is this the first burning app to offer this feature?
Beginner: NTI's software (http://www.nticdmaker.com/index.cfm)
Advanced: Nero
http://www.ahead.de/en/index2.htm
For Linux:
Gnometoaster
(http://gnometoaster.rulez.org)
kisocd
(http://kisocd.sourceforge.net)
Or cdrecord directly for Win32, Linux, Mac, BeOS, Solaris and more.
Hey, for those of you not following, Andy (the developer for Gnometoaster) has released a 1.0Beta1 of the excellent Gnometoaster burning app.
One of the nifty new features is the ability to DnD
Ben
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
Or am I missing something?
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Are we talking about the Easy CD Creator 4-5 which has been destroying W2K and W95 machines? The above links say that the Microsoft instructions might not save your machine. Be careful out there.
Let's say I want to create a mix CD from live concert MP3s. Since this is /., let's say we're talking about the Minibosses, who distribute their unsigned MP3s freely. Will I be able to do it with Roxio's awesome software, without the cracks that will inevitably be released within a week of release?
Stealing is stealing, but this isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. Theft is the act of taking something away from someone with the intent of depriving that person of possessing what you've taken. Copying zeroes and ones while leaving the original data intact is not stealing, and U.S. law (on a good day) has different laws regarding each. All those mp3 lawsuits you keep reading about are for copyright infringement, not theft.
No I don't. But treating gnutella like a 24-hour all-request radio station does help me make smarter purchasing decisions about my music.
How does adding a corpo-funded layer of complexity to CD burning software make it easier for me to buy more music? Sounds like all it does is make it easier for EMI and their colleagues to keep CD prices nutrageously high, just to fund more copy-protection schemes like this one.
A question: How will Roxio prevent users from decoding MP3s into WAV/AIFFs, then burning them? Will it all of a sudden become morally wrong to burn arbitrary AIFFs? Somebody better tell the budding garage bands of the world that they are not welcome to use Roxio software.
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
I think you have a seriously naive view of how musicians, and the music industry, works.
Almost all the great musicians have become great before getting 'signed' and 'famous'. They get good by playing in small, cheap shows over and over and over. Then, once they can make good music, they become famous (usually when they are signed by a record company). They don't get signed, start getting paid big $, and then get good.
In recent times, the record companies have noticed that 'sex sells' and started signing good-looking people with no or little talent. These people are paid insane amounts of money but I guarantee that their skill does not improve at all.
If there is no money in music, then a lot of the best musicians will simply cease to exist.
You are so very, very wrong. If you do some background research into past musicians, you will find that NONE of them became rich and famous before they became a great musician. They all became great musicians, then became rich and famous (some, maybe most, never became rich and only famous after they died).
a lot of the best musicians will never happen unless they are able to practice all day, every day, and you can't do that unless you do it professionally.
I see you're not a musician!
And no, 200 years ago Mozart or whoever DID NOT do it on an amateur basis. They were paid by either royalty, upper class citizens or the church.
Hmm...I think it's called 'a gig'? Believe it or not, there are a lot of musicians who are paid exactly that way today! And, Mozart was composing at the age of eight. Exactly how much cash do you think he was getting at that age?
My old CD burning software didn't care about copy control.
My old CD burning software did things my new CD burning software doesn't do.
My old CD burning software was more functional - I could do more things with it than I can the new version.
What's wrong about it is that there are people trying to pass off downgrades as upgrades.
If your local Porsche dealer said "By the way, the new model Porsche has a rev-limiter hooked up to a GPS system that prevents you from going faster than 55 mph! It's so much better than last year's model!", you'd slap him silly, and you'd be right to slap him silly whether you ever intended to drive over the speed limit or not.
Exactly! And that is why you will simply not be able to do many legal things in the future, if the industry goes the RIAA/MPAA/SDMI/... way. Look: You are legally permitted to make VCR copies as many as you want. But - without extra effort - you cannot. Why? Because of Macrovision. You can legally buy a DVD, and legally buy a DVD Player, and the player will refuse to play your DVD, because it thinks that you might be in the wrong country. My MD player refuses to copy my own recordings digitally, because by allowing digital copies there is the slight possiblity of maybe me committing a sinister crime (i.e. distributing copyrighted music)!
You would be perfectly legal if you could copy your CDs in the future, only you cannot. That is what "they" want, and if the industry complies, in 5 years CDs will be obsolete. What can be done with stupid laws (DMCA) will be done that way, and where they cannot castrate your basic human rights (freedom of speech for example) the industry will simply take away the technical means for exercising them, and sue every company who doesn't comply.
Look at this article for details about what's wrong with copy protection.
Remember: CDs are just about the only digital Hi-Fi media left that do not have some form of copy protection! They must be destroyed, because every CD owner is a potential criminal!
Home Page
I mean, if a song is encoded in such a way that it has a "security bit" turned on (say, uh, bit 1 turned on means "copyrighted") and all the commercial burning software "respects" this convention, then either Nero has to refuse to burn as well or it's "circumventing a technology intended to protect copyright" and becomes illegal.
IANAL, etc, but right now copying all of the bits in a file is not illegal. If someone changes the meaning of bit 1147 at some point, do they suddenly and retroactively take ownership of bit 1147 on all of my own files? What about the 250 CDs of mine that I legally ripped to mp3 for my personal use over the past couple of weeks? Can that retroactively be made a crime?
What I *do* with my copied files might be illegal (if I share them, which I don't), but I don't think you can easily distinguish between the physical act of making a backup copy of something, and making a backup copy you intend to distribute, etc. Squishy territory to be sure, but I think we're still safe as far as the actual backing up of program and data files goes. I would think that as long as copy programs can be used for legal purposes, their use can't be criminalized.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
"Intellectual property" is not a concept supported in law until quite recently, really -- think of it. The idea is that somehow this type of property is not a physical thing, something that the theft of which would deprive the owner of its use. IP is the incredible idea that patterns of bits are a piece of inventory that can be somehow taken from some metaphysical warehouse. Digital copying removes the scarcity factor from the market -- we must adjust to this somehow.
Why is that? Is it because the record companies and associated studios have near-monopoly on publication, marketing, and distribution, so they set incredible prices for which the bands must sell their souls? How is home recording doing this to them? Is it not in fact the record companies, not the listeners, that impoverish the bands?
Maybe they didn't sell out because not enough people thought them a good enough draw to buy a ticket. No one promised musicians that they could make a living at it. Hell, the market is oversaturated with them -- there just aren't enough customers to make all of them wealthy, or even give them enough money to give up their day jobs. And let's not forget that the bulk of the money spent on concerts and albums go into the companies' pockets -- it takes a long, long time for a band to pay back its "bill" to the company. Intentionally.
What industry bribed congress to let us make copies?
Sales are not down, an impressive thing considering that the economy has downturned. Napster did nothing perceptible to music sales. Not that this is an argument. Buggy whip manufacturers took a lasting hit from the auto industry.
Congress made Fair Use copying legal because in classic theory, when I bought the record, tape, CD, whatever, I owned the item. I could copy it, sell it to someone (right of First Sale), set it on fire, write on its pristine surface. No one considered the owner of the media to be merely licensing "intellectual property". The owner owned the tape, the book, the CD. This was settled by the Supremes over a decade ago.
What seems to be happening today is that the federal judiciary was seeded over two decades with pro-business judges who seem to think that law should enable businesses to make profits in a time-honored fashion even if that fashion is obsolete. IP is a concept that is being molded by the collective rulings of some really misguided jurists -- we are losing First Sale rights, Fair Use rights, and the concept that we actually own the CD or whatever we paid for at the store. This is not good, people.
I don't really care if companies like Roxio will stop making ripping-friendly software... as a zillion other posters have pointed out, we can always use other software (or other OS's, if need be).
:)
Here's the thing, though, that's scary. When will they start going after the HARDWARE makers? If I was an bastard record company exec, I would go after the CD-ROM drive manufacturers and fight against the digital audio extraction (DAE) feature. Because without that, you can't rip songs directly from a CD. Sure, you could do an analog rip, but that's a pain in the ass (and usually sounds like ass).
Are there any uses for DAE, besides ripping music? It's seems to me that's pretty much it's sole purpose... used to be, in the days of 8x (and lesser) cd-rom drives, a lot of drives didn't even support DAE and they worked fine for everything but ripping.
So, to me, based on the $#$%#$ evil laws that we have in America it would be hard to defend the inclusion of the DAE feature. Not saying that's right, but basically, from a functional standpoint... DSS:DVD = DAE:CD. You know what I mean? Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong in a legal sense. I hope I am.
One good thing: the hardware manufacturers WILL fight efforts by the RIAA, et al, to defend their hardware's ability to rip music... because as another poster pointed out, ripping/burning/downloading music is pretty much the only new "killer app" for PC's these days.
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
When you get into bed with a giant, you gotta expect he'll roll over during the night. Roxio's management seems to be so ignorant of a fact that's left a string of empty buildings from Fisherman's Wharf to Los Gatos that they've gotten into bed with two giants.
This is called the Dance of the Doomed.
The only sensible advice to shareholders of ROXI is contained in the subject line.
If you don't own any shares in Roxio -- and why you'd have held any after their announcement of the alliance with MSFT escapes me -- and if you don't use their Easy CD Creator/Direct CD -- another "in God's name, why?" kind of practice --this is a NOP. Roxio won't be here to worry about this time next year.
And if there's anybody on /. who didn't already know that Windows and Office XP were going to be very nasty propositions -- helLOOOOOOO!
Easy way around that; use another CD writing program.
With the problems that Easy CD has been having, that's probably a good idea anyway.
The reference to the 'Music CD-Rs' is another of the music industry's daft ideas. From the CD-R FAQ: http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7-17
So potentially expect to see Easy CD whinge if you try and burn audio onto an ordinary data CD. I doubt they'd be silly enough to block it, but pop up a warning and your average user gets worried enough to think maybe they ought to buy those 'Music CD-Rs' after all.
use another CD burner, or don't upgrade Toast. Roxio loses money. Fuck 'em.
sulli
RTFJ.
This really is the new killer app. Think of Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads. Of course the industry is running scared ... serves 'em right.
sulli
RTFJ.
This will stop only the people who are ignorant to their options or too lazy to find a different route.
If an mp3 search engine gets axed (or a file-trading service has its hands tied) it doesn't slow the people who use IRC or FTP. Sure it's less convenient for most, but it doesn't stop the practice.
If Adaptec handicaps their product, it will only make other burning software more appealing. If you're reading slashdot, you're probably capable of finding an alternative.
that's why we have other programs like Nero out there. So what if Joe-Schmoe uses Easy CD Creator and has to pay a small fee. Your average computer geeks will still be using Nero or some 'other' program out there.
Really, when you get down to it, this could be a big mistake. Nothing could drive more people to a different product than creating some sort of burn-payment scheme. Nero and others like it should be happy.