Slashdot Mirror
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."
"I brought this discman home with me, and I found a way you could go in the back of the CD and, like, pop it open. So I got the actual disc out."
So, they can't even use glue properly, its not wonder everything else has failed.
Get the EULA T-shirt
Let me edit this to make it actually make some sense :
... the headphones are glued to the players too, to prevent any unauthorized output. A low-tech answer to a high-tech issue."
"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 now disseminating the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos CDs inside Sony Walkman players that are glued shut. Oh yeah
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
then you can take a look at each others walkman collection ;)
Privacy is terrorism.
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.
Use those greeting cards that play a tune when you open them.
Pay Tori to personally visit each reviewer with a guitar and play her songs.
Distribute the songs in Ogg Vorbis format. (rimshot)
What's your damage, Heather?
I'm gonna start reviewing CD's. Can't make a living with my reviews, but sure can use the extra income from the unglued diskmans I sell.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
...would just have to be glued to your ears to prevent someone else from listening to it.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Nothing. However, then they would know that there was an attempt at access. To them, clipping the wires is the same as breaking the case to get to the CD. Think about it. If Sony gets the Walkman back with any kind of damage, then they have a good idea where to look when the CD shows up online before it is released.
--Mike
I'm sorry, your post is in violation of the DMCA. Please turn yourself in to the authorities immediately.
I know they are only releasing a limited supply of these to journalists, but seams to me this is very environmentally unfriendly.
Don't think a Sting preview will be released this way.
Are there plans to reuse or recycle the returned CD walkmans?
If you get modded down for a first post... What do you get for a last post?
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
... by glueing the earphones to the ears of the reviewers. Disposable reviewers will be needed, though.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Back in the day of the original NES (and even today, I presume), Nintendo used to send a rep to the magazine reviewing the game, and he carried a system with the game bolted inside and sat there while the game was being reviewed, and the whole package was whisked away when the their time was up. Sounds like the record companies are taking a page from the gaming industry's playbook.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
So is hitting the walkman with a hammer an offence under the DMCA...?
This has been done before. In 1998, preview copies of Radiohead's album "OK Computer" were sent out in sealed cassette players. And in 2000, preview copies of "Kid A" were sent out in an encrypted format on Sony VAIO digital players.
More info: http://www.followmearound.com/press/083.html
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...
The problem is rouge reviewers putting the music on the internet
I hear ya brother! Those damn ladies' makeup magazine writers are the worst! Freaking Cosmo!!
Oh.
Never mind.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
"Put it on something that can't be digitally extracted."
8-tracks, baby!
September 16, 2002
Epic Records Takes Steps to Seal Its Newest Music
By CHRIS NELSON
The Epic Records Group, a unit of Sony Music, is approaching the sticky problem of prerelease music's being traded online with an even stickier solution.
Writers receiving review copies of two soon-to-be-released albums -- Tori Amos's "Scarlet's Walk" and Pearl Jam's "Riot Act" -- are finding the CD's already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut. Headphones are also glued into the players, to prevent connecting the Walkman to a recording device.
By locking up the discs, Epic hopes to keep writers from converting the music to MP3's that can then be traded over the Net. But even a "glueman" player is unlikely to deter a diehard critic.
"I'm a pretty big Pearl Jam fan," said Bart Blasengame, a staff writer at Details magazine who was sent one of the contraptions with "Riot Act" inside. "I brought this discman home with me, and I found a way you could go in the back of the CD and, like, pop it open. So I got the actual disc out."
Mr. Blasengame said he had no intention of making MP3's . "At the same time, if I want to give it a proper review, I'm going to listen to it how I want to listen to it -- and in my stereo is where it sounds best," he said.
For several years, prerelease music has turned up online before it reaches stores, distributed without permission by journalists, radio employees, record company employees or other sources. This July, for example, a six-song sampler from Ms. Amos's upcoming album was shipped to writers the old-fashioned way. The songs soon appeared on file-sharing services like WinMX.
The Recording Industry Association of America blames Internet music-sharing for declines in CD sales, though proponents of MP3 trading dispute the group's arguments.
A Sony spokeswoman confirmed that the glued players were being used to combat piracy, but would not talk about their effectiveness or responses from writers.
This is not the first time prerelease music has received the glue treatment. Gil Kaufman, a freelance journalist in Cincinnati, said he owns a prerelease copy of Radiohead's 1997 album "OK Computer" that is glued into an Aiwa player -- an Aiwa analog cassette deck. That makes MP3 conversions a bit more difficult.
"In an effort to prevent reviewers from creating MP3s or even playing the preview CD in anything they don't control, music labels are now disseminating a prewritten review of the CD, along with a bill for $17.99."
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Epic Records: What happened to the walkman?
Reviewer: I didn't want to meet Tori Amos.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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)
In this case, I'm sure that a decent lawyer could successfully argue that gravity could be used to circumvent the 'glue lock'. My reading of the DMCA text leads me to think that any device or method used for circumvention is illegal. Dropping the unit would be a method. Hmm, guilty of dropping the unit? Then jail time for you. I would not want to accept such a liability for a simple review.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
A lot of times these methods result in getting a much lower quality piece of software/media than if it were simply bought. A lot of times (mostly with software) the result barely works at all.
So is it really worth it to copy some of this stuff at any cost? I can't help but think that sometimes it would cost less time and aggravation to just go out and buy the damn software/music CD/DVD. And don't give me that "information wants to be free" crap either. There comes a point when it's just not worth the time or effort to circumvent copy protection just because you can.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I noticed that certain pages in my friend's twat magazines were glued together, presumably to prevent unauthorised copying.
What's to prevent someone from buying a bottle of acetone and unsealing the thing, then gluing it back together when they are done?
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
what is the world coming to?
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?
I can't help but wonder if the publicity around the stunt won't generate more press than the releases alone, after all, they just successfully told half a million slashdot readers that there's a new Tori Amos and Pearl Jam album coming out.
And if it will prevent just one 12 year old from downloading music they would never buy anyway, then it will all have been worth it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
... they obviously misunderstood.
Of course, I haven't shopped at Radio Shack in years. Odds are, someone has declared them to be terrorist tools or something...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I have recently been looking into the problems associated with secure document transmission. What this ultimately comes down to is the following: There comes a point where you have to define your level of trust. If you don't want anyone to copy a document, you can't distribute it in electronic format - after all, once it's on a screen, it's not safe. You have to have a controlled number of paper copies which you don't let out of your sight.
When applied to music, if you don't trust the reviewers at all, you make them come to a hotel room where you've set up a hi-fi, give them a comfy chair to sit in, and let them listen. You don't ever give them the CD. The best they can manage is smuggling a Minidisc recorder in, and the quality won't be great.
Glued-together Walkmans? I'd only settle for _that_ if they supplied quality headphones. You can't possibly review music properly on anything less than proper hi-fi equipment. Walkmans, micro systems and the like just don't have sufficient quality.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
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."
1. Open player with your favorite screwdriver/utility knife.
2. Remove CD. Rip, mix, burn.
3. Replace CD in player.
4. Back over player and headphones with your car.
5. Return electronic crumbs to Epic Records in plastic bag, claiming you "dropped it".
Problem solved...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It's pearl jam and tori amos, the record companies are just admitting that with a walkman that's as good as it's ever going to sound. Plus they're sending a nice little signal that if you listen to such music don't bother the people around you with it (use headphones). :)
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
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.
There's gotta be irony somewhere in having two articles on /. about the record industry in one day.
Article 1: Record companies are sending expensive sealed players to reviewers instead of just CD's.
Article 2: Artists are fed up with being screwed over by the record industry, but the industry keeps bleating about how expensive it is to handle their artists.
I see a nice cycle here: They have to spend more money to keep their music controlled because they need to make more money to spend more money to keep their music controlled because they need to make more money to spend more money to...
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How is this in any way important, interesting, vital, relevant or worthy of consideration on any level whatsoever which is not petty, braindead, boring and totally fucking Prozacked up the wahzoo?
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3. Replace CD with crappy Kenny G. CD
4. Write review about PJ's new stuff being really "mellow".
5. Return CD player to company.
It'd take them months to connect the review to the player. The look on their faces, as they opened the player, would be classic.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.