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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.
These products should absolutely be labelled as "non-compatible" with the CD standard if they in any way are not compatible with other CD usages.
This includes playing on a computer. Many of the other "copy protection" schemes make it impossible to use them on a computer of any sort. Others degrade sound quality.
If they're not clearly labelled as such, I could see lawsuits over mis-representation of the product.
INIAL, IAJAMC.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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'?"
The only thing you can do when a vendor is providing a defective product is not purchase it. So, stop purchasing CDs, DVDs or other copy protected material. Encourage everyone you know to stop purchasing the same.
Otherwise, all you are doing is encouraging them to produce defective products.
..It'll be said again:
Return faulty products for refund or exchange. The marketplace rules, and if enough people return these cd's this technology goes to an early grave.
air and light and time and space
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!
Yeah. Seeing as how I play CDs through my DVD player which has a digital coax out into my receiver, I'll be in touch with my lawyer with a quickness if I run into a CD that restricts my ability to listen to music that I've bought on my home system.
Someone needs to reverse-engineer these systems and release their findings in an encrypted format. You'll have violated the DMCA, but they'll have violated the DMCA proving it.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
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.
Seriously, I have bought maybe 15 cds in the past 3 years. Three of those were replacements of cds I'd have for years had been remastered, and the rest were by bands that allow me and others like me to freely record and trade their live concerts. Radiohead and U2 are two big name acts that have recently figured out that people who trade their concerts are more likely to buy their albums and attend their concerts than someone who doesn't trade.
Check out the links above, there is something for all tastes. There is plenty of music to be had for the price of your bandwidth and blank CDs.
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.
If the industry is losing billions to copying, and they've made it impossible, we can expect to see prices fall to say $4.99, right? Or were they lying about napster....
According to this, the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo can only be used "on discs complying with the CD-DA specification: IEC 60908 and/or the Philips-Sony Compact Disc Digital Audio System Description) also known as the RED Book)."
Someone set up a domain. "CopyproofCDs.org" or something. Make a list of every copy-proof CD out there.
Then we need to get people to sign up and deliberately go out and buy them.
Here's the fun part.
Once you've bought them and opened them up, return them.
Do this ad nauseum. On your way home from work or school, on the way to the store, or when you're at the mall. Just return a copy. They'll have to throw it out. Ask for another copy of the same album. Bring in a laptop to prove to them that it doesn't play in your computer. What can they do? They HAVE to give you your money back or give you a new copy of the damned CD.
Now, if we get THOUSANDS of people doing this -- and we can, this is slashdot we're talking about -- record companies will soon realize that there's NO money to be made in copy-proof CDs.
Good idea?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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...
Sure you can. The DVD-Audio standard allows for audible watermarking, which is exactly what is being done to standard CDs. SACDs are much different. They are watermarked, but the information is stored in the Text area and TOC. The audio is not affected like it is with DVD-Audio
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
If there's one thing this argument needs, it's a catchy label. If copy-prevention on CD's get slapped with a 'downgrade' label, it'll be dead before it gets any momentum. Joe Sixpack will NEVER stand for it and the media will have a field day demonstrating car stereos and home computers balking at the latest N'Sync CD.
We should push this rhetoric HARD.
Let's not forget about Dave Matthews Band. They had the foresight to pass on several offers from record companies because they wanted one of them to guarantee them the right to allow their fans to record concerts and swap songs. For that reason, while I have not bought a new CD in months, and don't intend to, I will make a small exception to my boycott and buy them -- assuming they don't allow copy protection to be foisted off on their CDs, in which case, I'll have to take a pass on that, too, since I almost exclusively listen to them on my box while working.
Am I bad for business? I've bought every album, some more than once because of mishap, plus their bio CD and a pair of DVDs (one was videos, one was a concert). I've also been to two of their concerts and would gladly go to another, and snap up their professionally recorded live albums eagerly.
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
Okay...the latest tripe gets shipped to Blockbuster, Best Buy, etc...
:)
They put it on the shelves right in alphabetical order where it should be. Do you really think the consumers will care if it says "Compact Disc Digital Audio" on it? As long as it's in a jewel case the size of a CD, it won't matter.
I'm looking at Pink Floyd's "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" right now. Nowhere on the outside, which you would see in the store, does it say anything about it being a CD. I see it in 4 places as soon as I open the case, but I also see this shiny metal disc which I assume is the CD, even if it didn't say so
Yeah...it would be a way to sue them if they marked them as such, but it's not gonna hurt them if they don't.
"Hey, Mom, would you care if you can't play CDs on your computer?"
"Uh, YES, don't you remember? That's how I play all my CDs."
"Hey, Dad, would you care that you can't rip CDs to your computer?"
"Well, yes, because I copy all my CDs to MP3s so I don't need a CD changer to listen to them in sequence."
I suppose my parents may be weird though. After all, my Dad listens to country... (and he's got *all* his CDs on his computer as MP3s, but then again, he works for Digital - er, Compaq - er, HP). My Mom does some work with editting webpages, so I guess she can be considered a "technical" type.
But I know many people who I wouldn't consider a "nerd" who use their computer to play CDs straight. And they'll be mightly pissed if they can't listen to their new CDs on their $2000 laptop...
Don't forget, computers are slowly becoming "entertainment centers." My Mom basically gave up on her little CD player she used to use to play CDs and now (would) play her CDs via her CD-ROM drive -- except that she uses AudioGalaxy now. (And the incident with the CD-ROM door being stuck shut. Ignoring that...) Her computer sounds better than her small "portable stereo."
My sister (who is definately not a tech-type at all) uses her computer to play CDs - which, considering she only uses it for homework any other time should tell you something. (Although she has a "real" CD-player now she uses instead. It's a portable CD-player with headphones which is the real selling point.)
Many people who own a computer - a growing portion of the population - especially in the "pop music" set - end up playing CDs through it. Sometimes it's because the computer is in a separate room from the stereo and they want to listen to music while doing homework. Sometimes it's because they want to rip the 2-CD set and listen straight through them without swapping disks.
Legal digital music is becoming a way of life for the "younger" generation. Go through practically any college and you'll find that most of the music pumping these days is either a mix CD or straight MP3s being played through a high-fi stereo system. (With more colleges requiring computers, college students stick with the tool that works - if we can't spend $500 on a stereo, we'll use the $1000 computer we had to get instead...) It may not be near 50% of music listeners yet, but it's at least 10% - which is a lot of listeners to potentially permentantly alienate.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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 your idea if winning includes statuatory damages of $250 (MINIMUM) to $2500, actual monetary damages (i.e. whatever they hoodwink the judge into thinking you cost them), and possibly 5 years in prison (NO PAROLE ALLOWED IN FEDERAL PRISON) if you at all financially benefitted (*) from it, yeah, in that case, I'd say we have a good chance of winning.
* In the copyright law "financially benefit" has been redefined to include non-monetary benefits!
See the DMCA and how Judge Kaplan interprets it as removing fair use in the DeCSS trial (*) for more info.
(*) The DeCSS defendants have been ORDERED TO PAY COURT COSTS, i.e. ordered to pay the court for their own persecution by the court. It would be like me throwing a rock and you and billing you for the cost of the rock.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
7.5 IPS is far more common. 30 IPS players had too much trouble with Wow and Flutter. Plus the trade off between resolution and capacity is too drastic. It's like the difference between encoding at 360Kbps and 160. For reference, the average car casette is 1.875 IPS.
60 Minute tape @ 1.875 IPS =
15 Minute tape @ 7.5 IPS =
2 Minute tape @ 30 IPS.
It is far more common to improve resolution by writing fewer tracks. Also, the tape manufacturing has come a long way...
BTW, The real problem with digital is it's unnatural reaction to saturation. They try to combat this with the High and Low pass filters, but the result is not satisfactory.
The history of music signal processing is all about trying to re-create the limitations of earlier equipment. Your distortion pedal mimics an overheated tube, compressor mimics less than ideal tape media.
Digital Mixing is the most popular form of music editing. It is so much more flexible than good old analog. Even those who still use the analog processes do it either in a "studio-live" environment where no extensive editing will need to be done after, or mix the tracks digital to get a final draft, and then mix the final track from the analog.
This is why the first Kent State memorial song came out almost 2 months later, while Tom Petty's Rondney King riot song only took 9 days. On a side note, they sang about the terrible riots, but not about the savage beating he recieved at the hands of some overzealous cops.
~Hammy
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.
If CDs were copy protected, would most people rip them by attaching their CD players to sound cards? Probably not. And not because of the quality, but because of the effort required. Consider this:
Ripping a CD to MP3s involves: (a) fetching track names automatically from freedb, (b) reading the audio off the CD (much faster than playing it) into separate files and (c) making MP3/ogg files.
Ripping a recording from line in involves (a) recording the whole damned thing at real time, (b) cutting it into separate tracks (no track info, remember), (c) hand-naming the files and making playlists. Takes a lot longer and requires more effort. I've done it once for a live recording from a MiniDisc, and it's not something I'd want to do for every CD I wish to listen to on my computer.
Of course, the payoff for going to this Herculean effort would be the kudos you get from all the mp3 l33ch3z when you upload it for the taking. So, in effect, copy-protected CDs would punish honest home-rippers and encourage file-sharing mp3 d00dz.