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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'?"
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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.