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Fighting Music Piracy with Glue
Scott Granneman writes: "The New York Times (Free Blah-di-blah) is reporting that Epic Records, in an effort to prevent reviewers from creating mp3s or even playing the preview CD in anything they don't control, is not disseminating the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos CDs inside Sony Walkman players that are glued shut. Oh yeah ... the headphones are glued to the players too, to prevent any authorized output. A low-tech answer to a high-tech issue."
Ummmmm. I guess they must be assuming journalists are not engineers, as otherwise they could just cut the headphone wires and them connect them to their favourite input.
Presumably other artists' CDs are put through the reviewers' own systems, set up the way they like them. Just say a fair comparison is impossible without putting these new CDs through that same system.
Of course, if you're feeling vindictive, you could always slate them instead...
Cheers,
Ian
Now, they just need to develop something that destroys the disc, if you happen to force the cover open or remove the Headphone jack.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
So they are expected to review the CD's through headphones from a walkman?
Doesn't that just strike people as being stupid? How will they get a subjective review of the audio quality? Are the music companies trying to hide poor audio quality from the reviewers by making them review the music through sub-optimal equipment?
This is just a sad example of how paranoid the music companies have become...
I want to know why a solid-state mp3 player couldn't be used? They could just build their own and put the songs in ROM and just have no input. Kinda like those little "tiger beat" or whatever players that just play Britney Spears and you can get them at McDonald's.
I imagine building a custom player with built-in earbuds and only one album on it would be cheaper than this dumb glue thing.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
But if you number each player, send them out, and expect them to be returned, then by identifying the missing or broken players you could pretty much work out who it was that smashed their player open and put the music on P2P.
Isn't that why they do it?
Well, my TiVo has recordings of copyrighted media inside of it, and it's likewise pretty hard, though not impossible, to get it out in perfect digital fidelity for archiving on other devices or to play on different players.
I expect to see more of this in the future as hardware prices continue to slide. Media will become more and more locked into a particular device one way or another. Your next CD player could well require an Access card in it to enable it to play the latest CDs.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I'm no music reviewer, but it seems to me if I were to review a new album, I would want to listen to the CD on the best stereo I have access to, not a little crappy discman with $5 headphones.
You should read the DMCA more carefully. The device has to be primarily designed for circumvention, and must not have any other commercially significant uses. Also, it would probably be hard to argue that glue is a "technological measure" as defined in the DMCA.
The DMCA is a bad law, and I know you guys are half joking, but blowing it out of proportion like this I think does our cause disservice. Actually understanding what it makes illegal, and being able to hold intelligent conversations about it's implications -- that's what helps us.