Slashdot Mirror
Still More 'Copy Protected' CDs
maniac11 writes: "This story describes new CDs planned on being released by Universal Music Group that sport anti-copying technology. Not much in the way of actual details, but a heads up on a new plan to foil." Same price, worse product -- higher sales! Universal seems to be the first company to commit to downgrading its entire lineup over the next six months or so.
Only to the rippers, my friend, only to the rippers. The average "Joe Public" could care less.
Ask your mom if she cares that she can't copy it to her computer or an MP3 player.
"Can I still copy it to a cassette tape to play in my Suburban?"
"Yes, mom."
"Then how is it 'broken'?"
I buy a lot of records. Most of the stuff that I get isn't available on CD. What I think would be really cool is if companies putting out vinyl would give me a cd with mp3s of the songs on the records so I didn't have to rip them. I would end up buying a lot more stuff then.
Obviously the big record companies have no interest in doing this as they are more committed to maintaining their monopolies then providing a legitamate service, but it would be pretty dope if indie labels started doing that.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
The majority of consumers will never know the difference. The only people the record companies are offending here are the "geeks" who play CDs in their computers. Unfortunately, we're not the largest chunk of the consumer base (right now, it's teenagers), so they really don't give a rat's butt. The record companies are of the impression that we're not worth their time, since we take all the CDs and make illegal copies of them (heavy sarcasm alert).
I for one think it's exceptionally unethical to muck with standards like this. Of course, someone will figure a way to work around it, and the files will end up out there anyway. Those files will probably get pirated more just out of spite. The best thing any of us can do is boycott any "modified" CDs like this, and tell our friends to do so as well. It's been said before, speak with your wallet. That's what I intend to do.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Good point. Here is a question... Do they lose the ability to have the "Compact Disc" logo on thier case?
"Dude, sweet tunes! When did you buy the new XXXXXXX album?"
"Oh, I didn't buy it. I downloaded it. I woulda bought it, but you can't play CD's in your computer any more."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I might be just a little pissed off if I was part
of a company marketing high-end home and car cd players
that utilized cd-rom drives and now Universal
decides to make their disks such that they won't
play on my head units and players...
I would be all about lawsuits for lost business
and research
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
newsflash: Anything I can listen to, I can record. You can too!
Checkout This Incredible Idea: Run a cable from your portable cd player to the audio-in on your computer. Play+Record the track. Run resulting file through mp3 encoder. Viola, you now have an mp3 of a 'protected' cd. Sure, it isn't a digital extraction from the cd, but I bet the average mp3-downloader couldn't tell the difference anyway.
All it takes is one person getting a decent recording of the cd for it to get in circulation on p2p servivices like gnutella.
If you can download these copy-protected cd's for free anyway, then the copy protection is worthless!
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
How will this affect car audio systems? I know alot them can play burned CD-R's and CD-RW's as well as pulling data like track names off, so I assume that they use the same type of drive as a computer does.
Also, most of the old CD-Rom drives, as well as some new ones, have stereo miniplugs for headphones in the front, will you be able to play these cd's through that? I doubt it based on the previous reports of "no disc detected" but you never know.
I think most people buy cd's to listen to in their car anyway, or at least, that's where the majority of music listening takes place, so if they're not compatible with car audio then the industry is going to have a lot of irate consumers on their hands.
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Now, obviously the Slashdot vibe is that this is a flawed model for making music, and I'm inclined to agree. That is why you should be supporting independent artists who don't pull this copy-protection bullshit on their listeners. The media cartel only exists because people keep fueling it and voting with their dollars; if we want to beat it, we need to make our own content. Support independent films, musicians, and other artists who do their work for the love of it. Hell, make your own music and give it away on the Internet; there's bound to be somebody who likes it, no matter what it is. Hell, there are people who like listening to white noise.
As long as you continue to buy mainstream CDs and DVDs, you are going to have to take whatever copy-protection measures the publishers decide to incorporate. If you don't like their terms, take your money elsewhere. That's how our society works.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Their defense would probably be that the intention of the CDs they are selling is to be used to play music in a standard CD music player. No where is it stated that they have to allow non-musical-playback purposes.
If the argument is then that they are degrading audio quality, you have to prove that audio quality is degraded. It's not that hard to design the intentional errors so that the interpolation produces the value that would normally be in the music (or very close to it).
I highly doubt that an A/B test would be able to find the difference to any ears.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
How about we return it for a refund? If enough people did that they'd have to stop!
You know, I bet we could just take the digital-out of the cdplayer and pipe it into our soundcard....
Even a D-A-D conversion would be a little lossy, but after that we could copy as much as we wanted.
Damn those RIAA bastards to hell! They're releasing defective CDs!
These go against the redbook standard. For shame.
Hey, I think I'm witty! I'll make a list of all the comments that people will make in the article because that's all people ever say in these articles! Oh, wait....
-Denor
Since this copy protection method works by throwing in errors which (most) CD players will simply interpolate over, won't this make these CDs much less tolerant to scratches & fingerprints? If this is the case, this would be a pretty big reason to stay away from these CDs. Blah. Time to invest in a new needle for my phonograph...
Why wouldn't someone simply start a service where users can report technical complaints about CDs.
This way it would be possible to reference this database before a purchase and be able to determine the ability to rip it based on others experience. If it's a title that's protected, sipmly don't buy it.
I agree this stuff should be labeled but that's nothing more than a pipe dream. Instead of just complaining about the problem, let's do something about it!
Like flashing a DVD to be reigonless, maybe people will make firmware upgrades that allow these 'protected' CDs to be played in PCs.
Sure, it will depend on whether your CD Rom drive can be flashed (and it probably can't if it is a plain reader, not writer or DVD), but I guess those that are informed (i.e. the rippers) will look for CD devices that have the required features. Those that don't know will just remain inconvenienced and in the dark.
As for piracy. It won't stop it, nothing can while CD prices are so high. Just get a PC and HIFI with SPDIF I/O and you presumable can make mp3's to put on Napster (or what ever is taking it's place).
-- Mike
The only thing I think this might prohibit is digital audio extraction - if you're using the S/PDIF output of a CD ROM drive, you should get the full digital info, just at 1X speed. Full digital quality, no loss. The audio portion (like the headphone out jack and digital audio out via S/PDIF) is independent of the IDE interface. Once it starts playing, it just keeps going.
I don't see how they could hobble the normal playback mode of a CD ROM - is this actually the case, or do they just hamper direct digital extraction? I just haven't had the slightest urge to buy a Michael Jackson or Charley Pride CD to try this out...
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
My response, as a consumer, is to take my music pirating up a notch. Where as before I spent a predetermined budget on the CDs I wanted the most, I'm now going to pirate everything, save the indy bands I like.
Remember, people, the ball (money) is in our court. We need to understand collectively that music piracy is a legitimate form of protest against these damaged products being sold. Use it.
----- sXe
It occurs to me that this desision also has the effect of pissing off microsoft. The order of microsoft's desires of features is as follows: they would prefer if only they had a certain useful feature but at times they can allow others to have such a feature but detest the idea of the feature being impossible to them. Not being able to play cds on windows media player is going to piss them off. My guess is once they start throwing their weight around some back door will be put in that allows new microsoft products to play these cds. Once such a back door is in place it will not be a serious challenge to reverse engineer it.
Brian Eno did that 15 years ago.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Feh, yeah right. There is no larger collection of vociferous "do-nothings" in the entire frickin' universe.
Someone set up a domain. "CopyproofCDs.org" or something. Make a list of every copy-proof CD out there.
You, sir, provide a perfect example. Why don't you set up this domain and database? Do you really think there are people sitting around out there with nothing better to do than wait for suggestions from /.ers?
I don't mean to harp on you in particular, but 95% of the people here are all talk. Nobody is writing their congressman about restrictive IP legislation. Nobody is boycotting the RIAA or the MPAA.
Apart from whining exhaustively, nobody around here is doing shit.
And its our right to make fair use of a product by overriding their protection measures. We have as much right to override them as they do to put them there. It is NOT like breaking into someone's house, there you are breaking a protection system (lock, etc) to do something intrinsically illegal. Breaking copy protection to infringe is illegal, but doing so to make fair use shouldn't be. Fair use is legal.
(If some random person, not acting on orders from the local gov't, padlocks the public park, it would be legal to break that bogus lock. And the one that put the lock there would likely be in trouble. It would be nice if obstructing fair use were similarly illegal.)
Even the DMCA itself says it doesn't affect fair use. Anything that violates fair use is also unconstitutional.
Of course, Judge Kaplan ignores all that (DeCSS case), and he isn't the only one out there.
So we morally, and according to the letter of the law as I understand it, have the right for "self-help" to get back fair use, but not according to the gov't. As they can assess monetary penalties and even lock you up, we need to keep in mind that we need more than just a technical solution.
We need to repeal the DMCA.
Of course, anyone that knows of a defeat method or code, please do let us know.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Sorry to reply to my own post - I found further information from Phillips on licensing terms for their patented CD-DA technology:
l 00 131.pdf
http://www.licensing.philips.com/partner/data/s
It basically says that if you pay the license fee, you can use the logo. Nothing in it says that your CD _must_ meet their standard, only that in order to produce a CD using their patented technology, you must agree to their terms which include money, money and more money.
This is far from definitive, but it would seem that a company could license their technology, produce compact discs with the tm logo, but as long as you keep up with the license fees, Phillips and Sony probably wouldn't care if you mangled the layout.
If they get thousands of returns, they'll take notice....
So I agree that current standards for digital sound recording on DVD-Audio may solve the problem with 24 bit sampling rate and 96,000 hertz at the high end.
I bought the new CD from Einstürzende Neubauten (Berlin Babylon soundtrack). On the case it says, in German, that the CD cannot be played on computers. My DVD-ROM drive and PlexWriter act like it is a blank CD-R. My CD player does recognize it, with some effort -- it takes a few seconds of seeking before the CD will begin to play. The CD clearly "breaks" the CD standard, but not badly enough that a standalone unit can't plow through it.
I have not yet tried it in my standalone DVD player, or tried to send the digital output into a DAT deck or pro sound card.
You may notice -- unfortunately I do not have the URL -- that BMG backed off one of their protection schemes due to 2% difference in returns. It is quite possible that this latest scheme will cause just enough grief among consumers that other companies will back off as well.
The CD-R has replaced the "mixtape", and today's tech-savvy population is not likely to stand still for this for long. People have been able to take it for granted for about 20 years that you can compile tracks from different discs (CD, vinyl) onto the medium of choice (cassette, CD-R). The people who buy the most music also make the most "mixtapes", and turn other people on to new artists that way. I couldn't count the number of people I turned on to how many bands over the years this way. Napster just brought this type of "promotion" to a different scale. Unfortunately the media giants do not seem to appreciate the value of free publicity.
Not buying achieves nothing. No-one will notice. Your sacrifice only serves to lower your own quality of life.
What I'm thinking you should do is buy CDs. Take them home and rip them. If they don't rip, take them back and get a refund. This FORCES the store to take notice, and data on the number of returns goes all the way up the distribution chain to the asshole execs who try to work out exactly how unethical a policy they can get away with.
I'm new to this country and don't know much about consumer rights laws here. Given that CD stores are reluctant to take back used CDs (and sometimes have a policy against it), it would be useful for us to know our rights. That the CD violates your right to format-shift might be sufficient grounds that they cannot legally refuse the refund, as might the misrepresentation of the product looking like a CD but not playing in all CD players. I don't know.
If someone like the EFF could get a lawyer to write a page explaining our consumer rights with regards to these degraded-CDs, that would be very useful. It may be that the matter is legally grey and we wait for the results of lawsuits. In which case, it's up to us to not take "no" for an answer when demanding our money back.