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DVD Drives Defeat Cactus Data Shield
jsepeta sends in a story about Cactus Data Shield, one of the schemes to be used for copy-protecting compact discs. A reporter for TechTV notes that DVD drives see right through the disc corruption that Cactus uses to supposedly prevent those CDs from being ripped.
Will this end up like the VHS market where VHS recorders started intentionally mis-recording Macrovision protected content, despite the fact they had fixed the original flaw that allowed macrovision copy protection to work? Or will the DVD drive manufacturers stand up to the recording industry?
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
- RIAA and friends (via their pocket-reps) are trying to push through laws to force everyone to run a "Digital Media Rights" operating system.
- Microsoft have already filed patents on a Digital Media Rights OS.
- If this law was passed, wouldn't that give Microsoft control of 100% of the operating system market in any country where this law and their patent were both in effect.
An interesting turn of events..455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
People will be lining up to buy them. When they notice that they can't rip, it'll be too late- and the only response they will get is "what, you want to pirate music? You are a bad person, I ought to report you." Makes me glad that I've already got a drive.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Hmm... just had a thought inspired by some posts in here: Doesn't the DMCA's demanding that people use the products as they are defined start to sound like communism? Every time I read an article like this I keep picturing Adolf Hitler as CEO of whatever company is being written about.
You'd think the industry would learn that a new market has opened up and learn how to profit in it instead of trying to close it. The most damning thing for them is as long as Linux is around, there will always be ways to prevent copy protection from ruining our lives.
How many more subtle changes to the law will it take before it becomes illegal to not purchase a product because you saw the ad on TV?
"Derp de derp."
Sure there's a plan: digital speakers (usb?) that include tamper-proof decoding hardware. Of course they can't prevent you from mic'ing the speakers, but then microphones are just tools of pirates and kiddie-pr0n drug-snorting criminals anyway.
Better yet, first be sure it's got the "copy protected" label. Then insert, rip to AIFF (just a copy command under OS X, which presents audio CDs as implicitly ripped AIFF files!), burn CD-ROM with AIFF files. Then go back to Circus Shitty (they deserve this kind of hassle because of their old Divx "rental" format), whine that "it won't play in my DVD player!" and demand a refund.
As far as I'm concerned, RIAA record companies have got the best kind of copy protection of all: they don't make anything new that I would want to pirate, much less buy. And the old stuff I can usually find much cheaper used, if I care enough to want to hear it.
Just about all the music I listen to these days, aside from talk radio bumper music, is from JASRAC, not ASCAP or BMI. In other words, anime music and J-pop. And I prefer the original CDs when I can find them, because they almost always include the lyrics, and printed lyrics are helpful in one of the most homophone-laden languages on the planet.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I've thought about the following for a while. There ought to be a two-track system of copyright. Whenever anything is released for public consumption, the publisher would make a choice:
In other words, the content publisher doesn't get to eat his/her cake and have it, too. By restricting Fair Use access, by cordonning off the material from the public domain (essentially forever), the publisher loses the protection of the courts. If you don't want to play ball with the justice system, you don't get to use it, either.
This approach is entirely justifiable, as copyright is a privilege granted by the state, not a right inherent in the content. As Litman and others point out, historically, copyright has been viewed as a bargain between the publishers and the public. If publishers try to unilaterally change the terms of the game -- by, for instance, encrypting data streams -- then the public has every right and justification to revoke the copyright.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Why am I somehow not surprised at this? Anyone got information on what it sends and where, if it does turn out to be spyware? If I was the kind of fool to write software like this I'd probably have it look for mp3s on the assumption that all mp3s are by definition contraband. If I was more of a fool I'd have the program delete them or something. Has anyone studied the behavior of this apparently annoying and awkward program?
For a fun little diversion, go to the midbartech website and try to get information about one of the Cactus products. You'll get to a page that has a one-field form asking for a password. Get your browser to show you the source for the page, and groove on the unbelievably sophomoric obfuscated password verifier. Ha!
The issue we were seeing was customer resistance to disks that were "defective". End users weren't terribly technical, and tended to call a colleague company's help line whenever their disks didn't read.
Of course, stealing copies of our program was as illegal as breaking copy protection is now, and that was sufficient for the majority of our customer base. When a customer called our help line with what turned out to be a stolen copy, we first helped them, then arrange for them to get a copy of the update release (with some bug fixes they needed!) for the regular update price.
I recollect actually going out to both a local college and high school and helping them set up whole labs of our product after they agreed to put us on next year's budget at the reduced academic rate (;-)).
Just like they were non-technical, you see, they were also well-meaning and faily law-abiding. We played to these, gained friendly customers, and got our profit margin back by selling upgrades, which were much chaper to produce than the whole package with manuals, etc. This approach allowed us to entirely avoid the known, quantified (and large) cost of copy protection. And this in turn allowed us to survive far longer than our management deserved!
My conclusion? Companies selling ordinary CDs without copy protection will have a business advantage over the ones trying to shoulder both the costs of DVDs for normal-fidelity audio and the support costs of "copy protection". Scofflaws will further reduce the profitability of copy-protected DVDs if they target them preferentially...
davecb@spamcop.net
Please excuse any rambling here. Your post started this stream of thought, so it's a reply to your posting.
Since neither option would be attractive to most publishers, it would appear that widespread copyright violations (and violators) will be with us for a long, long time.
Really, the RIAA is facing nothing that retailers haven't faced since the beginning of commerce. While copying (or theft to use their term) is a bit higher than for retail, but their loss per copy is also lower.
At the same time, retailers have faced a serious threat to their profits for many years that the RIAA never sees in any realistic way....Competition in a free market.
Imagine starting a new department store in an environment where some sort of DSIA (Department Stores of America) controled every single advertising medium you might use to advertise your existance except for word of mouth.
One symptom of this state of affairs is that prices are much higher than they would be otherwise. In any sane pricing in a free market, the seller has to strike a balance between profit per unit and consumer willingness (and ability) to pay the price that results. Since the barriers to entry for the music market are artificially high, the RIAA has been able to consistantly keep profit/unit high. At the same time, they have created an unusually large population that really wants music, but can't/won't afford the price they charge. By consistantly making large profits while the artists make very little, they have also made themselves easy to despise.
That is a combination that makes widespread copying (or theft as they prefer) inevitable.
Returning to your equasion, I believe it will better reflect the real world as:
Rc = (Cp - (Ce + Cm + (Ca*Pa))) * Vd
I agree more or less with your analysis of the controlability of the variables (Though RIAA HAS tried hard to manipulate Cm and Ca through legislation and Ce through stupid copy protection scheme). Note that this version of the equasion subtly changes the meaning of Rc to utility (to the consumer) of copying.
For the sake of convieniance, I will define Cc, cost of copying, as Cc = (Ce + Cm + (Ca*Pa)).
Note that in any case where Cc < Cp there will be negative utility in copying. In those cases, the RIAA is a commodity manufacturer and gains it's profits from the efficiencies of mass production vs. individual copying.
I believe that the RIAA CAN compete with Gnutella! There is value in not having to hassle with crappy quality tracks, nodes that are too busy, or never seem to actually provide the tracks they claim to offer, misnamed tracks, etc... In addition, video tracks in free and open formats can also up the Cc without 'cheating'. If Cp is low enough, the only people who will copy are people whose time is worth nothing (who couldn't pay anyway since they are unemployed and unemployable).
The RIAA can also boost their profits through business innovations. At a low Cp, they might be best off by terminating their expensive ad campaigns and instead producing a subscription based review service. They could also capture value by charging a nominal fee to broadband providers to colo a music server (yes, charge a fee to allow a provider to colo!). The provider could then use that as an incentive to sign up and reduce their costs for upstream bandwidth.
Other sources of revenue could include providing a content rating system for parents and paid advertising in their review media (website, magazine, television show, streaming broadcasts etc).
In short, they could switch from their current strategy of poisoning every well in town but their own to the strategy that made them big in the first place: providing something of value at a reasonable cost.
Where is the profit for the artist? The same place it is now, concerts, merchandising, paid television appearances, a small cut from the RIAA's income, etc.
First, does this mean it's Windows-only? Probably. What happens on a non-Windows system? Is the disk labelled accordingly?
Second, unless the install process ("install process to play an audio CD?") makes you sign a EULA, that spyware thing could be considered hostile code, and might be illegal under anti-hacking laws. This is definitely worth litigation.
An AC wrote:
> Oh joy!
>
> So now we can get back to stealing from the artists!?
>
> What a wonderful discovery!
No discovery. Artists have been stolen from all along by the recording industry. Hardly anything you pay for a CD goes to the actual artist. It goes to a bunch of greedy exploiters that call themselves the RIAA. Now they want to make the artists to work for a paycheck so all their IP belongs to the record label they work for.
To make matters worse, they want to restrict what law abiding people can do with their overpriced CD by selling broken ones (only their broken ones still don't do what they want)! As far as we know, these Universal CD's only play on Windows PCs with their crappy software, or on (some?) Windows PCs with DVD drives. If you want to play the songs using Windows Media Player on a PC without a DVD drive, you are out of luck. (Has anyone even tried to use Universal's player on a Windows XP PC? Does XP even let you run it?) If you want to use the XBox's feature to rip songs and play them as you game (or even just play the idiot CD's) you are out of luck. (Why Microsoft, patenter of the all-wonderful DRM OS and all around monopoly-abusing juggernaut, isn't screaming bloody murder here, I'll never know.) If you have any non-Microsoft OS, computer, or game console, you are seriously out of luck.
No, I don't trade mp3's. I'm not into mass-piracy, or even the "information should be free" movement. But I am also not into paying $20 (or whatever they are now) for broken CD's, especially when the money goes to greedy sharks and not to the artists. On the other hand, I happily paid $60 (and waited months to get) the two disc "Mothra 3" soundtrack, partly because it is the only way, without a US distributor, to reward Toho for one of their best Mothra movies, and because I have had so much fun translating the label and writing English lyrics to the instrumental pieces.
"They bind our hearts: 'Let's sell them again and again!'"
From the fairies' song "Infant Girl" in the Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961).
Jobs' recent quote when the iPod shipped was right on the money:
"Piracy is a social problem, not a technological one."
That really sums it up. And you can see in Apple's products that they really believe this.
Ripping MP3's (or AIFF's) in iTunes is ridiculously simple. Like it should be. (Single click rips an entire CD)
Copying those MP3's to a portable music device is also incredibly simple. Even automated if you use an iPod (though iTunes works great with other MP3 players too!)
The only copy protection on my iPod is the fact that it's a one-way sync. And for what it's worth, it's a LOT LOT LOT harder to do a 2-way sync than a one-way sync. So I really don't believe the conspiracy theorists, and I think it's all about keeping things simple!
Steve's on the right track here. He understands.
There's no real technological reason that other companies can't do what Apple's doing. But for some reason, they "get it" and folks like MS, etc. don't.