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BMG Backs Down Over Copy-Protected CD
An anonymous submitter sends in: "As reported by The Register, on the 5th of November, BMG released the UK's first copy-protected CD (more information on Eurorights and Fat Chuck's). It uses Cactus Data Shield by Midbar Tech, which aims to prevent CD to CD or digital CD to Minidisc copying, along with converting to MP3, but may have other bad side effects."
The submitter continues: "There were complaints from fans and many took their CDs back or wrote to the record company and record shops. Their hard work seems to have paid off since Virgin Megastores has responded to a complaint from one of their customers and said that BMG has set up a helpline to allow people who bought the corrupt version, to exchange it for a real one. Virgin and HMV will also be bringing in new stock of uncorrupted CDs. The message was originally posted to the Official Natalie Imbruglia Bulletin Board (free registration required) in the "White Lies" and "Lillies vs Cactus" threads, but several threads containing complaints against Cactus Data Shield have been deleted so the email has been mirrored on the Free-sklyarov-uk mailing list. This is very good news, but more work needs to be done. Hopefully with pressure from the public other retailers will follow Virgin's example. Also record companies need to be made clear that selling copy protected CDs, that infringe on the public's rights, is not acceptable. The battle isn't over until no new CDs are shipped in these formats so if you find a CD that is copy-protected then report it on Eurorights for the UK, or Fat Chucks for elsewhere, take it back to the shop, and let them, and the record company know your feelings on the issue."
I think the recall probably had less to do with consumer feedback and more to do with the fact that they could have been liable for damage caused by copied CDs, especially since fair use law allows you to make copies in certain situations...
It is not so much whether they actually believe uncrackable formats are possible, it is much more whether they believe if it is possible to deter Joe Sixpack from casually copying their stuff.
The professional, so-called pirates, will get around anyway, but Joe Sixpack doesn't generally buy many bootlegs. The proverbial geek in the basement and the hardcore fans do not add up to enough marketshare to count.
Most readers here forget that having a flawed protection is perfectly rational as long as it keeps the masses buying your stuff. It is the difference between a managerial and an engineering mindset, the difference between good enough and technical perfection.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Still, it is nice to see that they've come up with a "protection" method that pisses off non-geeks. They're the ones with the numbers that'll make returning defective merchandise really hurt.
It takes balls to pretend that they're looking out for the artists. Piracy can't come close to hurting them as much as the RIAA does every day. It doesn't even occur to them that I might want to store my music somewhere usable instead of on a shelf. Bastards.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato
Copyright protection will never really work out, because those who want to break it, will break it.. and those who follow the law anyways, won't bother with breaking it.
I have some pirated mp3's on my computer, but they are of bands whos cd's I would NEVER purchase. Generally, if I like even two songs off of the same CD, I go out and buy it.. and most other people out there are similar in nature. The RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot with all their crappy attempts at copyright protection.
I mean, the arguements against copyright protection have been posted here so many times, I think we all know the reasons that it will never work out.. I guess all we can really do is crack all of the crappy little attempts RIAA members make, and then laugh at them for dumb things like this.
Stolen from http://www.uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/overview.sh tml:
The most recent format that's come to light is the Cactus Data Shield from Midbar. The earlier German tests also came under the name of Cactus, but it appears that Midbar's protection technology has developed since then. Like SafeAudio, this new method corrupts the audio signal on the CD. However, the method used is different. In this case blocks of audio are replaced with blocks of control data. A normal CD player ignores the control data and fabricates the sound of that block using its error recovery circuitry. Once again, the blocks must have been carefully chosen so that the sound is not disrupted significantly. Again, reliability of the CD will be affected. When the CD is copied using a computer or CD-to-CD copier, the control blocks are interpreted as audio, which means that the manufacturer can insert whatever sounds they wish into a copied recording, even sounds designed to damage speakers.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
The result: a CD-R full of noise, not music. Worse, the generated waveform is of kind to which hi-fi and loudspeaker circuitry is particularly sensitive. Play the noise-filled disc back at too high a volume and - bang - your speakers are toast.
SONY says: That'll teach you to pirate music, you little bastards!
Poor Joe Consumer will be so confused he'll be certain this is because he hadn't bought SONY brand speakers along with the SONY brand DTS professional stadium concert decoder.
With the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive), that is starting the process of getting incorporated into national laws, BMG would have the law on it's side and copying CDs with this kind of protection would be a crime, even if it was under a "fair use" clause. This is the main problem with this law, for the first time any company can restrict how you use its products. Until now copyright law only affected copying, distributing and modifying the product.
In the USA the won't probably do a recall because all this is legal under the DMCA. Providing "fair use" became optional.
My opinion about the piracy-stages in music & movie protection:
:)
:)
1. some nifty guy cracks the protection
2. it gets rumour on the net the protection has been cracked
3. the hardcore crackers start using it
4. the advanced PC user uses it
5. some company releases a software package that allows even my grandmother to avoid the protection...
I think about this because yesterday I saw an advertising for a budget sotwarebox which allows everybody to rip DVD's to DivX and burn it on CD with an easy point&click interface for less than $20... It just remembered me about the early DVD-rip days when you were almost a hero if you could rip a DVD
In the early days of MP3, you had to use non-UF commandline tools to rip a CD, nowadays even Windows has it's own ripping tool
It's only a matter of months before these "ripping4everybody" tools implement the latest protection-bypassers.
I guess these new protections only help small software companies sell the newest version of their copy-tools...
Mac OS X/iMac-DVD: Track 1 doesn't play, rest okay (ripping not tested)
Mac OS 9/iBook-DVD: All tracks play and rip okay
MiniDisk: Refuses to record digitally
PS2: Track 1 won't play, rest okay
Linux: Tried extracting tracks (cdparanoia), disk is not always recognised first time. Out of 12 tracks, only track 3 extracts cleanly - all others hang with read errors (probably work better with a better drive than mine).
Windows: Runs a custom MP3-player from the CD, playing data from a 30Mb data file of unknown format (according to a report I've just had).
This could be a good wake up call for Joe Six-Pack, if only for the PS2 having problems with the disk. If the industrys can pass it off as "Something that only affects Home Hackers", they can keep the attention down. When it starts going wrong in mass produced home appliances that could never be used to copy it, maybe the public will pay attention?
But this has been said before, last time it was about in-car CD players not playing protected disks...We can only hope public intolerance is cumulative, and people will start to vote with their wallets, because that's the only way things like this will stop.
I bought Codename Outbreak last week, and the copy protection on that game doesn't allow my (Original) CD to be read when the game boots...Have to "Hang" the system to kick start it every time. The site's forum is full of people with the same problem. Copy protection in itself I don't mind, if people want to get paid for their efforts I don't see why they shouldn't. But when you can't use the product you just paid for, something's gone awry.
I don't think I'm very happy. I always fall asleep to the sound of my own screams.
Of particular interest is the section:
During duplication the CD encoding circuitry merely sets the P-channel=0 while recording to the data are, and therefore the P-channel setting of portion 60 is ignored. Thus, during playback, the substituted audio data portion 58 is provided to the digital-to-analog converter as normal data, resulting in audio distortion and potentially damaging the output circuitry. (emphasis mine).
They also don't seem to be as confident about audio quality as I would have hoped:
Thus, the substitute audio data portion 58 of FIG. 4B is ignored, and instead an interpolation, substantially equivalent to the original portion 50 of FIG. 4A, is output, thus resulting in little or no net difference in audio quality between the corresponding track port 44 and 52 of FIGS. 4A and 4B (again empahasis mine).
If I buy music, I want the CD to be as close as possible to the real thing, not with any noise added.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
I just sit back and laugh, personally. Because if it is possible for the medium to be recorded and perceived originally, then it can be again. This is why there will never be an end to forgery, illicit copies and that sort of thing.
On that note, why has the music industry not taken a tip from mints? After all, why don't more people forge money all over the place? Because it is too expensive. (i.e. Printing equipment, speical paper, etc etc.)
Just remember it is not the copying that is the problem, it is the distribtion.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
All of this has meant that the technology hasn't just been introduced with nobody noticing, or putting up some resistance (as I'm sure the music industry would have loved...) - bringing the damage here to the attention of the public is surely greatly influential in BMG and Virgin's decision to back down somewhat.
This is indeed only the beginning, but at least it's a beginning, before it's too late. Pressure needs to be kept up. At Cato's recent
The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age conference, Mitch Glazier, legislative counsel for the RIAA stated (somewhat hypocriticaly, imho):
I can't speak for everybody else, but the RIAA doesn't seem to be anywhere closer to the answer than it was a year ago...
Also I wholeheartedly agree with Virgin's statement: "As retailers we do support the fight against copyright theft, however this should never be at the expense of the customer."
I have no objection to meaures that prevent only illegal or immoral behaviour, but by preventing digital copying the record companies are preventing the public from making legitimate, legal and moral uses of their CD, such as making a backup copy for safety reasons or transferring to a MP3/Minidisc player. I am also unconvinced that such draconian measures need to be put in place since the availibility of MP3s has not been shown to decrease CD sales, in fact the contrary seems to be the case, as shown in the paper "The Use of Conventional and New Music Media: Implications for Future Technologies" by Brown, Geelhoed and Sellen (2001).
This paper argues that intangible files, such as MP3s will never replace the role of physical objects such as LPs, CDs and casettes since music enthusiasts are collectors, and just the ability to listen to music is not enough, rather a tangible object is desired. Instead of trying to eliminate duplication of Music (which, both historically and technically, can be seen to be impossible), they would be better to use it to their own advantage, which would help them, the artists and the public.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
Do the maths and work out what the loss of one section of each frame is over a complete CD - its a reasonable portion of one track that is effectively missing.
Nothing is said about the fact you are buying a faulty product either, nor that chunks of it have not been supplied.
First up, this is pure hunch, so flame on if I'm wrong. There seems to be two pieces to this problem:
1) The TOC appears to be nailed so that many players looking for data can't find it. Stereo components look for the lead in track - not the TOC, so they are unaffected. PS2s and PCs look for the TOC - hence are affected.
2) If your player overcomes the TOC issue, then the data itself is full of errors that can be fixed by a domestic D-A converter, but not by blindly accepting the data (as PCs tend to do if the CRCs stack up). The algorithms in the domestic D-A converters are well known.
Neither of these problems seem impossible to resolve. I give it 3 months before all rippers have a check box labelled "rip as domestic CD player" or similar. This is not an "encryption challenge". It is a challenge of emulating a domestic CD player's D-A converter in software. This is the achilles heel: they have to maintain compatability with the huge installed base of CD players out there.
Given that one of the so-called anti-piracy systems has been bypassed, according to this link, I wonder why the companies even bother. Also, these work-arounds are more likely to be used by bona fid pirates than someone unhappy that they have a CD they can't make their MP3s from ( yes, I know its a generalization, but the general point remains ).
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I still stand by the idea that copywrite protection laws are the first casualty in the war between geeks and corporations that will eventually end in the anarchistic Geek-governed utopia, which is simply a slight variation on Socrates'/Plato's Utopia.
All I know is that I'm keeping my DNRC card handy.
(Please save all flames saying I'm a moron for believing this. I know I'm being delusional, but heck... a man has to dream...)
Karma: Non-Heinous
This isn't about preventing people from "stealing from the store", this is about preventing people from being able to cook what they've bought on the majority of standard cookers (make personal copies, even play their own music on DVD players, modern computer systems, and car stereos) because of the tiny risk that some might have guests around for dinner (might share their copy with someone else.)
It's not fair. It's not reasonable. And companies who do this deserve to go bust and have their work ripped off.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
you don't even need decss to crack it. once writeable dvds hit a reasonable price, you can literally click'n'drag the files from the original to a blank and you'll have a perfect copy.
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
I'm allowed to make copies of my music for my own personal use.
I'm allowed to lend an original CD to a friend.
That friend can copy it for their personal use.
I am NOT allowed to make a copy and give it to a friend.
If I make a legal copy of the music (say for my own mix CD) and it damages my equipment, you'd bet I'm going to go after the music companies. We don't have the RIAA here.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I don't think the record companies understand that ripping a cd isn't the only way to pirate the music.
Increasingly, the MP3's being traded online don't come from CD, but from television. Nowadays, with digital cable and Sat TV all over the place, the quality of the audio coming in over your TV is as good as any CD. Digital audio out to the PC, a little record and waveform edit later (to get rid o fthe beginning and ending you messed up), and boom, perfect track.
All they are doing with these stupid schemees are annying people. They are not solving anything.
Isn't that always how it works though? The last steinberg product I ever bought was a copy of LM4 -- it had this *whacky* copy protection that was incompatible with win2k (the installer always detected a pirated copy in win2k, and we're only talking about a 60$ program here) ... So I ended up having to use the pirate version anyways ... Steinberg! listen up! I'll start buying your products again when you grow the fuck up.
.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
The Slashdot Scooby gang wins another one. We can all go home now.
_______
2B1ASK1
Oops.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
So he signs on to the net, downloads the copies illegally for backup instead.
Oops.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Ok, I'll admit I am not a l337 |-|4X0R, but seeing as the "corrupted disks" contain a player for the tracks on the computer (if I read that right) would it not be possible to correct the errors on the cd?
Exactly like the DeCSS key were obtained, in a way, one company (Xing in DeCSS's example) does not protect the keys in the app enough and one person discovers this.
Or, compare the data track to the pre-ripped mp3's for a higher quality rip (say 320K vs 128K) by using the ripping routines compared to the data extraction routines.
I'll probably wind up repeating myself (developers, developers...) but the mp3 codec is not "bad/illegal" in and of itself but it seems as if the 'use of' is being villified or "circumveted" (ins't that illegal under the DMCA?).
Sometimes I really, really wonder what the MPAA/RIAA et al hope to accomplish with these so called "technologies", but all too often it is over looked that your rights of "fair use/space/time shifting" are not at issue but the excercising of those rights are.
Trying to legislate morality, humm, deja vu, all over again.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
HUH?
.. I can listen to it safely at normal listening levels.... and give myself a headache or annoy the neighbors, the dog, my daughter, what have you.
The guy you talked to is a liar.
first off you have an audio amplifier there, not a broadband amplifier. there is built in (intentional or just to keep costs down) filters that remove subsonic and hypersonic elements. reproducing anything above human hearing is a waste of money and anything below 20Hz is moronic. (I doubt you have a room in your house that can hold a wave from anything lower than 40Hz. Otherwise you have to be in the near field (2X the speaker diameter in distance from the cone) to hear it.)
Second, there is nothing your stereo can produce except distortion or massive power that can destroy a crossover or speaker. that is why when you buy 3000watt speakers and put them on a 100 watt stereo you can toast them in minutes. (harmonic distortion will take out anything.)
While a 2000 watt stereo driving 100watt max speakers can drive the speakers so hard the they sound great up to the point you either melt the coil or rip the suspension out of them.
So, if I play digitally created white noise, I have a cd player that will play a CDrom track as audio... kinda wild to listen to slackware 8.0
Hell I have a set of speakers I can plug directly into the wall outlet and all I get is a really really loud 60Hz hum. (Bose 901's)
your stereo guy obviously knows nothing about audio, let alone high end audio. I suggest learning about audio yourself and then have fun making these salespeople look stupid.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ruri put it best: "They're all idiots."
Ok, so Sony, who cowed my college into banning downloading of "copyrighted information" (not just Sony's, mind you, but everything, which, because of current common law, actually does include everything, even copylefted stuff), is going to create CDs that, when copied, destroy other people's real property.
gah
Ok, let me get this straight: I can play the original, because it is read. But, magically, I can't play a burned copy? Ok, if this works with traditional copy methods, why not just instead ignore distinctions between all kinds of data on the cd, control, audio, digital, etc., and just copy an exact replica? Correct me if I'm wrong, but if it can be read, it can be written. Anything else would mean that it couldn't be read in the first place.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Counterfeit music stores were everywhere. Racks and racks of cheap, unlabled tapes housed in cheap covers with questionable artwork (side note: artwork blacked out "excessive" female skin in accordance with local laws but Madonna's erotica-laddened lyrics went unscathed). The recordings themselves were suitable enough. The tapes made use of extra space by including a few tracks from simular artists (kind of a bonus). And the product, while cheap, was inexpensive.
One would expect that legitimate music products couldn't exist in this environment. One would be wrong.
First - at the time, it seems that CDs were too expensive to create (CD burners weren't as inexpensive then). Legitimate CDs were sold on racks right accross from the counterfeit tapes. Which kind of makes sense - the product was too expensive to create and sell cheaply, yet there was added value in this format. There was a market for them.
I was very suprised to find legitimate tapes at a store in Kuwait City. Most of the music stores I had seen were, frankly, low-budget affairs. This particular store would have been at home in any mall in the US. It was chock full of CDs, listening stations, stereo equipment, conterfeit tapes, and a wide selection of legitimate tapes. Prominent over the legitimate tape selection was a (I believe Sony) sign extolling the high quality of legitimate tape music products.
And the legitimate tapes were selling.
The price for the legit tapes were a bit more than the conterfeit tapes. But they had obvious advantages in quality. That combination of a reasonable price and better quality tape offered a competitive product to cheap knock-offs.
Its interesting to watch the music industry now. Their control over distribution is crumbling. The market they're used to is being eroded by the free flow of data (legitimate or not). Its got to be stressful to watch your industry's business plan evaporate.
But all's not lost for them. They've competed in this kind of market with the Middle East. It all comes down to a competative product. Provide something of value at a reasonable price. The music industry has the resources to create a great product at a price point that would be difficult for conterfeiters to compete with - and may even make it worth the public's time to purchase rather than try and copy/pirate.
All COTS cd players have a DAC. Acheiving perfect digital reproduction is a simple matter of intercepting the clock, channel, and data lines going to the DAC. The cd player control circuitry has already made the error correction, and this data is ready to be converted to analog. The data will almost always be in I2C format (I squared C). Some professional equipment uses this format and can accept it directly. There are commonly available chips to convert i2c to sp/dif (this is how you can upgrade your old analog output cd changer to a analog + digital for cheap). There is also the possibility to build a usb interface for ripping. If you do that you might as well hook into your cd player's control buttons and make a computer controled cd changer.
Would be a fun project for some EE student.
they have a US bill with "You are not a slave" on it in what looks like red texta.
But there are also other reasons to copy money. If you are trying to convey the meaning of money without text, a picture is the obvious way to go.
For that reason, the name 'Cactus Data Shield' is very appropriate: when ripped it is full of 'spikes' ruining the music, when perfectly interpolated it may possibly be sample-for-sample identical (assuming the substituted samples are ONLY those where surrounding samples interpolated will return the exact, precise amount- I'm not at all sure this is a safe assumption), but when imperfectly interpolated the _best_ output still has traces of the 'cactus spines'- like stubs :)
On a CD player with inferior interpolation it is probably slightly more sonic degradation than you get from DVD-A watermarking because watermarking is bandlimited to avoid the more sensitive areas of hearing, and this 'residual cactus spikes' effect will reach into the highs and spit out artifacts on steep wave slopes.
I know that in debugging azumith-correction algorithms I could hear high-frequency artifacts of just one sample duration when they were of this nature- a departure from the even slope of a waveform. I would respectfully suggest that the dangers of inadequate error correction are more severe and audible than the CDS guys are ready to admit, and that on many CD players traces of high frequency crackling and grunge will still be audible even after 'interpolation'...
As an indie music maven and audio tool coder I have to say I am just tickled by all this. How nice of the music industry cartel to ruin the quality of their products FOR me, thus making it easier for people in basements and dorm rooms to produce music that's actually better than the cartel makes. A few more years of that and they'll have done serious damage to the former popular opinion that industry music is more professional than unsigned music :)
You recieved new specs... the 901's from 1987 are rated at infinate ohms.
The speakers are heilically wound and increase in resistance as the power increases.
anything made by bose today is pretty much innovative enclosures with el-crapo drivers inside.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This sounds wacky, but I think it's true. I got a bunch of MP3s of Primus. I had heard the odd Primus song before and after hearing a whole bunch of MP3s I realised I liked them.
Now I could have just burnt their songs onto CD-R and be done with it. I only listen to CDs on a discman these days anyway, so I don't care too much about sound quality. 128kbps MP3 is good enough for me.
Instead I went and bought every Primus album I could find. I'm not sure why. It would have only cost me $5 to put all the MP3s onto CD-R, print off the album covers, and I'd have something not half-bad without the effort. Buying the CDs was a relatively difficult thing to do!
your speakers are not designed for this. your crossovers (if you have any... real high end is tri-amped with active DSP systems shaping the audio for each driver.) will dump to ground anything over 50Khz and dampen the low frequencies.
Low end, the worst thing possible is DC, and your amp and crossiver will not allow that in.
High end... >50Khz will do nothing to a tweeter... it cannot make it past the inductance that is the speaker coil, let alone the components.
It's just basic electronic theory.. capacatance, resistance and inductance. then in speakers acouatical engineering comes in... but that has nothing to do with the audio source just reproduction of the audio.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The picture cycled from clear, to grey, then back again. Hum. Checked the user manual, and it was due to copy protection! The DVD player had to be plugged directly to the TV or it wouldn't work. But I wanted to play the sound through my good speakers, not the TV's speakers. I tried plugging it into the amplifier. Now the video was clear, but the sound was distorted. User manual says, copy protection: it's supposed to be that way. OK, so I hooked it directly to the TV. Now I could play DVDs. But now the VCR wasn't plugged in. Perhaps I could hook the VCR through the DVD player? No, no terminals for that. Perhaps the TV had two sets of video terminals? It did!
I still don't have the DVD playing through my good speakers. I haven't exhausted all combinations of terminals though. Perhaps there's an audio output from the TV that can be routed to the good speakers, without turning on the copy protection noise or the video distortion.
If the TV didn't have the spare set of video inputs, I'd send the DVD player back because the copyright protection measures would prevent me from using a VCR. But the TV did have a spare set of video terminals. Not being able to play the DVD through good speakers isn't annoying enough to be worth the effort of returning it.
Whatever copy protection they invent, there will always be a workaround...
:) by ordinary citizens.
If we can crack DVD, why wouldn't we be able to crack this new cd-protection?
This thinking is both incorrect and dangerious IMHO. It works in their favour.
First of all, one MAJOR reason we could crack DVD was that in order to comply with US crypto export law, the encryption was pathetically weak.
Next format, we'll be up against serious armour, PGP-strength crypto built into the hardware. Thus breaking the crypto won't be an option - we'll probably have to hack to the hardware.
Law changes are in the works aiming at making it illegal in the USA to aquire ANY digital device that doesn't have copy-controls and cripples built in, and it's already illegal to tamper with the cripples. Naturally, you then won't be able to buy hardware that doesn't lock you out.
So if we keep thinking that we can just break whatever they come up with, we might just end up in a situation where you need a soldering iron and a shitload of illegal knowledge to remove the cripples, and you become criminally liable in the process, and you have to go through the work of soldering and chipping for each and every playback device to wish to liberate - no instant copies of DeCSS source here - but sheer manual labour from highly skilled individuals who risk their careers and livelyhoods with each crack.
In other words, we've got to prevent phase two of the RIAA/MPAA hijack of copyright law - if we sit back with the assumption that whatever they come up with we can crack, then we run the risk of being dreadfully wrong.
Also, IMHO, if joe average on the street can't make a personal copy, it doesn't matter if you or I or other "tech elites" can - the cartels have won and our defense of the copyright balance will increasing come to be viewed as illegal hacking (and economic terrorism if the RIAA gets their way
"You're recording a movie being played on HDTV? Isn't that illegal? My digital-VCR tells me that recording is disabled for the sunday night movie on digital TV. What happens if they catch you?"
You go to jail.
Don't lie back in overconfident belief that you can thwart whatever they come up with. You might just be wrong.
In the name of Digital Rights Management, corporations prevent you from editing or copying stuff they have published to you. This is odd, and at at odds with the spirit of Copyright.
No-one can tell you how much of their book to read, or the order you can read it in. Why do they presume to do so with sound or video? Why must I look at a green FBI notice for 15 seconds at the start of a DVD?
It is the act of re-publishing where the potential copyright violation occurs, not the act of viewing or editing.
Reject uneditable content and say why. Rights are for people, not digits or management.
- Put cd in regular CD player.
- Cable from line-out of CD player to line-in jack of sound-card
- Start sound-to-wav converter and CD player.
- Encode wav to mp3.
wavrec and bladeenc work good under linux for steps 3 and 4, but there has to be something similar for windoze.It's easier to rip straight from the CD, but the quality difference probably isn't noticeable after MP3 encoding (this is a guess). This method guarantees that there will be MP3 on the net of any decent tracks 20 minutes after the CD hits the shelf. And once the first one's out, that's all she wrote baby. Eat my dust, RIAA!
But while we're doing this, don't forget to oppose the SSSCA absolutely and to agitate for the repeal of DMCA. The real danger lies in the next generation of hardware and formats, where more protection is built into the hardware.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Unfortunately, in most of the US a retailer can't get away with refusing to accept returns on defective products. The UCC requires warranty of merchantibility and fitness for purpose, and manufacturers and retailers aren't allowed to disclaim those warranties. All it takes is one customer getting ticked and talking to a lawyer, and the floodgates open.
And yes, the retailer's caught in the middle. A smart retailer would look at this and refuse to carry product that's going to cost him money. The label doesn't have to listen to consumer complaints, but they'll sure as Hell listen to major retail chains that won't carry their product because the retailers can't make a profit on it. Which is the only thing that'll kill these copy-prevention schemes for good.
"Small Claims Court". Small suits like this are what small claims court is all about. A lawyer is not required (but it helps to talk to one first) -- the procedures are steamlined and are designed so that non-lawyers have a fighting chance, even if up against a real lawyer. There's a statutory cap on the damages you can claim ($2500 in Maryland, IIRC), but other than that there are few restrictions. It's about the only venue left where an ordinary person can get justice against a megacorp -- frequently they will accept a judgement without a fight, because it would cost them more to send a lawyer then it would to pay off the claim. The downside is it can take a very long time to get a court date, because of the tremendous backlog, and you do have to pay a bunch of fees and do a lot of paperwork yourself.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?