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Next Restricted CD Coming Soon
jroysdon writes: "Music industry quietly unveiling copy-proof CDs - 'Gariano said the CD case would carry a copy protection sticker and an insert explaining the technology. Record stores will accept returns, even if the CD case is opened, if buyers are unhappy with it.' I say we specifically look for titles with this sticker, purchase them, give them a whirl in our PCs and see them not play, and return them. Vote with not just our money, but their overhead costs to handle all the returned merchandise and bad publicity when stores don't want CDs with those stickers." Read the article - there are some great quotes there.
Yet another 'uncopyable' cd format. The way I see it, they're actually screwing themselves, because now people will crack & rip mp3s AND still be able to get their money back. Lets hope this one backfires on the RIAA real quick.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
you know they put this on such a random, sure fire non-platinum cd for a reson. they want to see us break the shit so they can make it better ! Which I'm sure people will do.
While the poster's plan to return these cds will show an increase in sales, the massive amount of returns will hit them where it actually hurts. People that don't have computers (or burn cds) will buy roughly 80%-90% of these cds, the 10% of returns will drive stores insane and they will "prefer" not to stock them even if the album sells well.
While a record company doesnt care, a store has a vested interest in not having 1 of every 9 or 10 of an album returned with an angry customer. The stores want to keep the customer happy and these cds piss them off. Do the math.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
Seriously though, I fail to understand the whole concept of copy protected CD : if I were to buy one of these CD at the price they're sold and I couldn't MP3 it directly with cdparanoia, I'd just play it on my standalone CD deck, digitize the audio and MP3 the captured data. In fact, I'd do that just because the RIAA doesn't want me to. The only thing I would lose is a little quality (not much, my deck is a good one), a little time to split the audio block into its original tracks, and no time at all renaming the tracks to what's written on the CD cover (which I always do/have to do anyway). The most time-consuming task of course would be to split the tracks at the right position, but I'm sure a small C program can help me do that in less than 5 minutes. Then after I'm done, say after 10 minutes of manual work, and 1 hour MP3ing everything and burning the files onto a CD, I store my original CD in a corner and enjoy the convenience of my MP3s anyway : it's a one-off job, and it really is worth doing, so at the end of the day, the RIAA's brain-dead schemes will just end up annoying the crap out of everybody and not prevent any copying at all.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ok, so they're trying this "protection" out on the music tracks for the movie "Fast and the Furious".
So, now that its hit SlashDot, I expect hundreds (to thousands?) of curious geeks may travel out to their local music store, and buy a CD of a pretty awful movie that they (the readers) most likely would not have purchased under normal circumstances.
So, you're all going to head out in the name of science, and dump $20 on a CD, and plug it into your computer/DVD player. 80% of you will probably be using older drives/hardware (I still own a 2x IDE drive) that wont listen when this CD sends the copy-controls crap, and most likely you'll be able to read it like a normal CD. Or, wait a week for software upgrade, and you will. In any case, sooner or later you'll be able to rip it like normal, and the stores sure as hell won't be giving refunds.
Well, you're now stuck with a CD, and Universal just got a nice surge of capital to work on the development of "NeverCopyCD v2".
Show your anger by not buying it! Better yet, don't buy anything put out by Universal this Christmas, that'll shock them a lot more...
that this continuous bullshit actually ends up hurting the already-ailing economy (here in the States). Sure, they're trying out their lovely "technology" on less-than-outrageously-popular CDs, but that doesn't help retail outlets any...
A lot of folks here are talking about sticking it to them where it hurts, namely by buying the CSs and then returning the after they're opened. This *will* hurt retail outlets who stock the discs. Unfortunately, we don't really have any other true recourse in the matter, so I have to support this course of action.
Yes, it's true that after a few thousand returned CDs, the retail guys and gals will probably get fed up and refuse to stock such "protected" CDs. The RIAA will eventually have to stop playing these stupid, asshole games with their customer base if they want to see their precious money continue to flow. How long it will take to get this through their thick heads is anybody's guess.
In the end, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT "PROTECTION" THEY ATTEMPT TO USE. If I can play the damned thing, I can use hi-fi equipment to dupe it. From there, I can do anything I want with the information. I can keep it for my personal, private fair-use play, or I can post it to every file-swapping network in existence. Will I personally post music ripped in this manner? Probably not (although the temptation is growing, yes indeedy). I'm CERTAIN that many, many other people will post the ripped tracks, however.
The folks behind this insanity are just plain stupid. They've been slow to embrace the concept of selling their music properly over the net, and choose instead to spend their money on dead-end paths such as paying attorneys to harass people. I laugh my ass off at them every time one of these stories breaks.
RIAA and pals, have fun hurting the economy while you can. You're only hurting yourselves in the end.
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If you're gonna email, use the public key!
yeah, that works great if you don't mind:
* doing it in real time. Glad you paid extra for that 50X speed cdrom drive?
* splitting the songs into separate files. Unless you explicitly do 1 song at time you'll be spending a good amount of time with SoundForge or a similiar editor.
* automate file naming via an external program.
The great thing about rippers is the automation. The one I'm writing myself puts the FreeDB/CDDB info into a local database along with track times from the CD and other metacrap that I deem important. All this automation is negated with what the record industry is trying to do.
I swear, the moment these things cross the border, I'll be on my MLA's ass like a fat kid on Smarties.
Honestly, every time I puchase a CD-R, I am paying a levy that gets redistributed to the record companies for the priviledge of being able to record music at home. The moment that I can no longer do so, it's -- repeat after me -- "taxation without compensation".
Otherwise: buy-return-complain-rinse-wash-repeat
I'm sure it will be economically unsound to distribute CDs in a format that the consumer does not want. Namely, ones that prevent fair-usage rights...the one's that I'm already being taxed on.
That, sir, is a key point in all this mess. People are, more and more, wanting the ability to play their media in such devices as DVD players, the XBox, their PCs, etc. The RIAA must be completely blind.
How long before the majority of their customer base (music lovers at large) are primarily using "all in one" equipment (with PC-like capabilities) to play most of their CDs? I'd wager it won't be too long. People, seemingly by nature, love buying gadgets that do everything but clean the kitchen sink, and audio equipment is no exception. The technology is here to stay, regardless of whether or not the RIAA wants to cry about it.
My question is this: how long before the major manufacturers of such hardware get together and sue organizations like the RIAA for everything they're worth, el class action style, because their consumers can't play CDs on the equipment? Think about it: I'm a consumer, and the hardware I just bought says it can play CDs. Except it *can't* play these "protected" CDs without some sort of wierd hackery. If I'm not a geek (okay, I am, but just play along here), I won't (a) know *how* to get around it, and (b) won't *want* to get around it. I'd just want my hardware to work, damnit.
So, I complain to the hardware manufacturer, at which point they tell me it's not their fault, it's the fault of music distributors using stupid protection schemes. Uh, oh. I might get a wild hair to find out how many other people had been hurt by this, and toss my own personal class-action suit on top of the heap. Looks like the RIAA is headed for a major dent in the bank accounts.
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If you're gonna email, use the public key!
I find it entertaining that my post here was marked as flamebait.
What I'm hoping for is certainly not flame. I agree that these copy protection methods are wrong.
But we can't put all the blame on the RIAA. Some of the blame has to go to those who copy files illegally, like myself.
PS, I've got karma to burn - I think this is worth saying.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Its a digital line out. There are usually two different types of digital line outs: optical and coax.
Grab a CD with optical out, grab a soundcard with an optical in, have fun ripping songs.
The only downside is that you have to rip in realtime and you'll probably have to ID the vast majority of the ripped files yourself.
I'm afraid that given the music and motion picture industry's paranoia regarding piracy, some type of copy protection will become standard. I've seen quotes in recent press stories that the industry expects to loose 5% of it's customer's because of this. The person quote was perfectly happy with that amount.
The reason of course is they believe they are losing much more money to piracy!. While we in the US have some fair use rights, the copyright owners don't have any obligation to make it easy or even possible for consumer to exercise these rights. And with the DMCA they can keep most people from being able to get around copy protections. This means that only the technical elite will be able to enjoy fair use rights in the near future.
If you have concerns about this I suggest that you do 3 things.
1) Write your Congressman and Senator. Yes you hear this all the time. But the be assured that the Music Industry is doing that. That is what the RIAA is... A Lobbying group for the Music Industry.
2) Support the EFF. They are on the front lines of trying to fight this type of limiting of our rights.
3) Support the ACLU. The ACLU are also on the front lines in a wide range of issues.
One more note of clarification, the RIAA is an association of the largest music publishers. While they claim 100's of member, there are really only 5 publishers that matter. I believe these are
Universal
Bertelsmann/BMG
Sony
EMI
Aol/Time Warner
Most of the other labels you hear about are subsidiaries of these companies or very small.
Hi there. Fuck you. Check out Insound for the ill shit. Also, I might add that anyone who thinks radio music is good for anything but a laugh can go pound sand. The indie music scene actually encourages the listener to "pirate" (not my word) their music. That's because most of their money is made from playing live. You know, actually playing their instruments in person for money.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
...ever made. so what if someday, when hackers and DMCA-circumventers get tired and capitulate to the RIAA's tech prowess (hah!), you can't trade the latest the N'Sync 2030 reunion album? guess what, all the music ever recorded and worth listening to will still be freely available without watermarks, SDMI, and anything else they might come up with.
even if in the year 2030 you're a 20-yr. old, wet-behind-the-ears coder frantic because you can't play the Matchbox 20 oldies compilation you just bought, all you need to do is ask one of us greybeards to spot you a file. so who cares if they successfully DRM the next (dare we hope?) Britney Spears CD?
frankly, i'm not the least bit threatened by the RIAA's gestapo tactics as far as my music enjoyment goes. however, their efforts to obliterate your and my human rights in the process leads me to believe that somewhere out there the editors of a certain travel guide are making an entry: "RIAA: A fascist organization whose members will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," and that a copy of said guide will drop through a worm hole from the future and read "RIAA: A fascist organization whose members were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
I'm in the middle of reading a Robert Heinlein book, the 'Expanded Universe' collection. In it are his reports on visiting the Cold War USSR as a tourist.
Your advice is apparently EXACTLY what you had to do to not be blatantly lied to and jerked around as a tourist to the Cold War USSR (i.e. around 1960). Having read his articles ("'Pravda' means 'Truth'" and "Inside Intourist"), I can also expand on your advice in a useful manner:
Feign losing your temper, but do not actually do so. Don't lose control, remain in control at all times, but behave as if you are losing your temper. Don't allow yourself to be moved away from the front desk/cash register, you must block other customers until you are satisfied and get what you want. If you allow yourself to be moved so you're not in the way, you lose: you're off the game board and can expect to be lied to at length in some nice little office but you won't get what you wanted because you're no longer causing a problem, just an inconvenience.
Also, try to remember that the first line of defense against you are likely poorer than you are- they're helpless functionaries, cash register operators with no influence whatsoever, and they don't personally deserve your anger, they are just part of a system designed to rip you off. This is another good reason to feign anger rather than let yourself really be angry- it's not right to take out real anger on these people, they have no power at all and will probably have a horrible day as a result of your feigning outrage and anger. Unfortunately you have to go through them to get to a higher level where you might possibly get close to what you want, or what you legitimately paid for.
Now... having relayed this good advice from Mr. Heinlein, I have one question.
How the hell is it that we, in the USA, are reduced to using techniques Heinlein was driven to using in the freaking Soviet Union under Leninist Communism, just to avoid being ripped off and cheated?
He was convinced the USA would collapse before 2000. I'm not so sure he was wrong... and I'm damned glad he didn't live to see this.
Because I don't listen to Top 40 music I thought I would be immune to these copy-protected CD's. But it seems smaller or specialized labels are adopting this technology as well - not just Sony, EMI, or whatever. I bought Absu "Tara" at HMV, which is on a "small" label from France, Osmose Productions.
I brought it home and put it in my CD-ROM and it started making a lot of weird sounds, like when you put in a damaged CD. The CD-ROM wouldn't read it but it worked fine in my Discman. I have my entire CD collection on my computer and use it as a giant jukebox. It's an awesome album but I don't want to screw around with CD's.
I did not expect this from a non-corporate label. If record labels put politics and money before music, then can take their CD's and shove them. There's plently of other wicked music out there.
Just write yourself a little program to...
- wait a second
- start recording and start track X off the cd
- when the track ends stop recording
- trim the silence off the ends of the track
- encode the mp3
- repeat for all tracks
Ok, you will be ripping real time, but big deal. Let it go overnight. You will also need to type in your own track info until someone writes a new freedb-like service that uses a fuzzy audio signature instead of the digital signatures.No special hardware or loopback cables are required. (well, maybe one cable if your machine doesn't let you route CD audio to the DAC input) Just a different ripper than you are used to.
BMG records already had an embarassing setback with this type of scheme in the UK. Customer returns forced them into withdrawing the copy inhibited version and re-releasing a "standard" CD. They're a business, and cannot sell something which people don't want to buy. Returns cost, in real money as well as bad publicity.
It is your civic duty to protect your rights by buying and returning these CDs. The attempt to force copy inhibited products on us can be defeated simply by making digital rights infringement technologies too expensive to introduce.
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That's a load of crap -- just because they are the seller does not allow them to set the rules. Just because they produced something does not let them set how we can or can't use the product (DMCA be damned -- that's an illegal law that needs to be overturned on constitutional grounds ASAP).
Fair use is being stepped on left and right, and if the large media companies continue to sell crippled products, its up to us to protest this illegitimate end-run around consumers' rights.
Furthermore, this is an excellent example of how consumers can "vote with their dollars" -- by making pointed complaints and showing the whole distribution network will lose money, we can possibly reign in this kind of abuse.
Not when they send the signal down the line encrypted. The speaker has an onboard processor that decrypts the stream.
At which point, we arrange to interrupt the signal further down the line, after the decode. Seriously, unless the system somehow convinces the speaker hardware itself to do the decoding, or we get used to listening to raw encrypted sound, there'll always be SOME point down the line that the unencrypted signal can be retrieved before it hits the speakers themselves...
Perhaps the RIAA is looking to come up with watermarking magnets?
"Piracy" is a convienient excuse for the record companies when their latest crap album doesn't sell. "Ooh. Piracy".
Watch. When their crap music still doesn't sell when it's copy protected, "Ooh. Evil Hackers broke our copy protection."
Exactly the same thing happened with copy protected floppies for games. Game doesn't sell? Blame it on "pirates".
The real "pirates" run CD factories in East Asia or Central America and make CDs indistinguishable from the originals, 10,000 at a time. "Copy protection" won't even slow those guys down.
Last time I priced CDs in quantity, they were $0.35 each. Perhaps if the record companies charged a fair price for the disks?
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
saddling consumers with all sorts of stupid shit-broken protection mechanisms
Nope, thats not why record sales are down... How many copy protected CDs have been released? One, two? I can't think, but it is a very small number. Even if nobody bought them that wouldn't dent sales.
slandering and libeling customers and consumer's advocacy groups and basically anyone who dares question the supreme truth of the RIAA
The record industry is hell bent on alienating their customer base by treating every single one of them, without exception, as criminals
Just because it gets a lot of play in the geek circles doesn't mean the general public knows about it. I have see virtually no high profile coverage of this in the conventional media. If people don't know about this it can't hurt music sales.
Releasing vacuous drivel like "backstreet boys", "britney spears", "n'sync"
Record sales aren't down because of this. Just because record companies release crap doesn't make me stop buying the music I like.
I don't know why music sales are down, and personally I don't care. If music comes out that I like, I will buy it. If I can't exercise my fair use rights on it, I will take it back.
As of this writing there are 21 posts at threshold 3, and none of them look at what I consider to be the bigest flaw in this conflict: The 'music industry' seems to think the 'pirates' have disposable income which they are witholding from the industry out of greed.
In other words, the industry seems to think they will get more money if they crack down on so-calleed piracy. However, even if they get perfect control of the data (impossible, I know), they won't get any more money out of consumers. If we had more money we'd be spending it. If I can't get the music I want within my budget, I will simply buy less music. It's true that there are unscrupulous people charging for pirated data, but eliminating that won't improve the industries' position significantly because the people buying those pirated disks probably won't buy official disks ever.
I admit this is a broad over-generalization, but it should be obvious that the effort invested in anti-piracy is squandered. Cut back on the legal staff if you want to keep more money, Mr. Industry!
Noam's e-mail address is noam@midbartech.com. I encourage you to write him and let him know you are not a pirate. If you do write him, please be polite.
I sent him the following e-mail...
Stand Fast,
tjg.
Let's face it, the RIAA has no clue about how to stop P2P copying. The reality is that if a very small group of dedicated fans want to make copies and can figure out how to do it, P2P technology will make it available to the world.
This fact was proven by one of my favorite (ex)bands: Smashing Pumpkins. Their last album was released on VINYL and only 25 copies were pressed. MP3's were on Napster within 24 hours and good quality MP3's took two weeks. Is there anyone who can't get a copy now?
The RIAA should spend their money trying to find a way to get us to buy rather than keep us from copying.
Viv
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