Ebert, Gillmor on the Music Industry

TTop writes "Roger Ebert has weighed in with a scathing critique of the Universal Music Group and its new copy-protection scheme which renders CDs unplayable in non-Windows operating systems, DVD players, and CD-compatible game consoles. It's nice to see the mainstream press start to come out against the idiotic copy-protection war the RIAA is declaring on their best customers, music lovers. Having to agree to a legal contract to hear a CD you've purchased on your own PC? Puh-leeze. Ebert compares these copy-protection schemes to Circuit City's failed DIVX DVD format." Columnist Dan Gillmor wrote a piece a few days ago about drawing a line in the sand.

Comments

It's weird

[TheGreenLantern]

I used to think Ebert was some pompous windbag, who wouldn't know a good movie it it slapped him in the face. But the older he gets, and the more I read stuff he's written, the more I come to realize he's a guy who really "gets it".

Re:Conclusion

[svferris]

I know quite a few people who are going out of their way to buy copy-protected CDs, then turning around and returning them to the store, complaining that they wouldn't play on their CD player/Computer/whatever.

One guy was up to like 10 or more.

The Grateful Dead

[t0qer]

Used to let their listeners bring recorders into their concerts and "bootleg" them. While JG was alive, the dead had a following you would not belive.

Their reason for allowing this was the band felt that they had "made thier money" Each member had enough to keep their families set for life.

So despite this lesson, why does the RIAA continue to hurt both the artists and listeners that underwrite their business? Lars isn't selling a BILLION copies of your record enough?

A true artist likes money, but that is never their motivation. Most artists starve until they are discovered (if that happens) and are more than happy to let people MP3 their songs just to "get the word out"

Someone somewhere will write some cool little app to circumvent this little bit of copy protection i'm sure. If people are really fed up with the RIAA don't buy any more big label records then. Check out your local hip-hop, grunge, punk scene and buy music from those guys, they ARE starving and are more than happy to let you copy their stuff.

Quantity does not equal quality RIAA, i'm not buying this noise shit crap you try and schleff off as music anymore. Fuck off!

Does anyone else...

[brogdon]

Think it's idiotic the way the labels go about their copy-protected CD strategy?

Now I don't mean the specific technology used, or the fact that it's stupid in general. I'm referring to their choices of *which* CDs to use the copy-protection on.

So far, they've all been big releases that they're going to sell a million or more copies of (N'Sync, Natalie Imbruglia). They don't do it at all to the smaller releases, which basically ensures a lack of success.

All the copy protection does is make it harder for someone to make an illegal copy. It doesn't make it anywhere near impossible. If you want a copy in mp3 bad enough, you just find a CD player that can play the disk (if you can, of course), run a line into the back of your PC, record it to wave files, then encode to mp3. I ripped a record this way, it'll certainly work for CDs. At that point the guy doing it is probably pissed off at the labels enough to make his freshly made mp3's available on a P2P network of his choice, at which time they get copied over and over again, and the whole "copy-protected" CD is all over the net. Thus all you can really accomplish by putting that crap on a blockbluster CD release is a lot of bad press and a few weeks in delay before everyone has a copy on their hard drive.

With smaller releases, however, it could work. There aren't as many people who want a copy of the music, which means less who have the knowledge and desire to rip the stuff correctly. If the labels put protection on the under-500k-sales category, they might make a serious dent in the amount of pirated music out there because it would be a pain in the ass for all the hackers to get it into the mp3 format, so fewer would bother with smaller releases and the copies would never get made that crucial first time.

It astounds me that the record companies are to stupid to even use the technology they undoubtedly paid a mint for in the correct way. I suppose I should just expect any implementation of technology by them to be exactly backwards by now.

Re:Money and Political Action

[Alioth]

Political action can have results - even with the money.

Here's a little story. It might seem off-topic at first, but keep reading. After September 11th, despite the fact that general aviation had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, GA (specifically, the smallest and least harmful aircraft involved in aviation) were grounded for a LONG time (on the order of two months).

The airlines and many politicians have always wanted to get rid of light planes. They are considered a "nuisance" - and this was a way to take our freedoms away (despite the fact the FAA wanted to have GA flying again two days after Sept. 11 since the FAA knows that an aircraft weighing less than a compact car isn't a big threat).

What's this got to do with encryption, the RIAA, MPAA, SSSCA (or whatever they renamed it to this week?)

Political action worked for GA. There are only about 300,000 active GA pilots in the entire country - i.e. about the same as the total number of Slashdot readers. AOPA organized a day where all pilots would call up their local congresscritters - all on the same day.

Every representitive's office in the country got HUNDREDS of calls on the issue of VFR pilots still remaining grounded. They were still getting calls the next day. And the next day.

Very quickly, the issue was a hot topic. Not long after that, the restrictions were pretty much totally dropped.

Slashdot has at least as many regular readers as aopa.org - and this issue has MANY more than 300,000 people interested in the SSSCA (or whatever it's now called) being passed as law.

So it's time for political action. Slashdot should do the same as AOPA did - organize a single day where everyone calls their local representitive and spells out this issue. A few hundred thousand phone calls from voters and they WILL listen. It worked for AOPA and GA pilots - it should also work for us!