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BMG Stops Producing CDs

Posted by michael on from the retrograde-advances-in-music-technology dept.

An Anonymous Cow writes "The register has a new story about claims by Bertelsmann that they'll stop manufacturing uncrippled audio CDs. More can be found on Bertelsmann's own site (info by region, Europe only). Trouble playing it in your car stereo? According to BMG the error is your player's, and not their CD's. Quote: 'As far as we were advised, our copy protection is according to the Red Book Standard as well as all labelling on the cd.' In English: they don't even find it necessary to indicate on the CD cover that it's copy protected, nor do they think it advisable to listen to Philips' objections against using the CD logo on crippled discs, instead there's a label claiming that the CD is fully Red Book-compliant. It looks like this is a test case, because only all European CDs will be crippled."

6 of 644 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is a good thing! by Kierthos · · Score: 5, Informative

    Arista Records
    BMG U.S. Latin
    Buddha
    BMG Asia Pacific
    J Records
    Yclef Records
    Logic
    RCA Records
    RCA Victor Group (includes Private Music, RCA Victor, Red Seal, and Windham Hill)
    Robbins Entertainment
    Zomba Label Group (includes Brentwood, Jive, Jive-Electro, Reunion, Silvertone, and Verity)

    They also distribute ATO, Kinetic Records, Milan, Razor & Tie, Restless, Santuary Records Group, V2 and Wind-Up.

    And I'm sure I've missed a few....

    Kierthos

    --
    Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
  2. Re:Could Philips sue for Trademark infringment? by krugdm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just bought the new Bond CD. (Universal, not BMG).

    Popped it into my Mac. The CD mounted, but wasn't recognized as an audio CD, so it wouldn't open into iTunes and I couldn't transfer the songs onto my iPod.

    Scanned the CD case and discovered that the CD logo was nowhere to be found. I guess I should have checked for that first...

    The funny thing is, all the tracks showed up as AIFF files, so I copied them all to the HD. Double clicking them opened them up in iTunes. A quick convert to MP3 format and I was all set! Yay, Jaguar!

    Shhh. Don't tell the RIAA about this...

  3. Re:When will you people learn? by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative
    No they wouldn't.

    BMG has sales of $X. They start shipping CDs with copy prevention methods, poor copy prevention methods that result in their CDs being unplayable on many ordinary CD players. Their sales plummet, to $X/2. They can't argue it's piracy, because this loss of sales has happened after they've taken steps to reduce piracy.

    Indeed, it may well be that they end up hurting their own argument. If sales plummet when piracy is no longer rampant, then legislators could take the view that piracy isn't a threat and actually make the laws more liberal.

    I'm not sure you need to organise a boycott of BMG. Just encourage people to return CDs that do not play on their equipment. If the vendor tries to make this a problem, send the CD back by registered post and have the credit card company issue the refund - that means buying all CDs by credit card.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  4. Re:This bites by Chrisje · · Score: 5, Informative

    What do you mean, encoding?

    The red book standard is as naked as it can be. Basically it provides for:

    1) A TOC. Table of contents containing information on track start and stop time. Generally a lead-in and lead out apply, taking approximately 25 Mb space on the disc. The rest is reserved for the body of audio data.

    2) Digital wave info. A 44.1 Khz stereo wave recorded digitally onto the CD's surface. This is done in a non-encoded (let's not get caught in the semantical discussion on digitising vs encoding, please... ) way. There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme. The CDDA red book standard is a butt-naked RAW audio data standard.

    The Red-book standard technically does not allow for fancy schmancy stuff such as mixed-mode discs, multiple sessions (which is how mixed mode is made) and such.

    Adherence To The Specification WILL mean that a CD will be playable in any CD-player that has been made since 1981. Period. This is a non debatable point.

  5. Re:Even better solution ... by captaineo · · Score: 4, Informative
    I think you are right about copy-prevented CDs being expected to fail. RIAA executives couldn't possibly be stupid enough to believe that any of these "mutant CD" schemes is really going to work. Plus I'm sure it raises their production costs quite a bit (they must have to pay Midbar et al for patent licenses).

    What these schemes will accomplish is allow the industry to say to Congress, "Look, we tried copy prevention on our own, it didn't work, we need new laws that require DRM chips in everything."

    (incidentally, Barbara Simons mentioned in a DRM session at Siggraph that she believed the DVD CSS cipher was deliberately made easy to break, as a similar form of entrapment)

  6. Red Book standard compliance by Eric+Smith · · Score: 4, Informative
    If BMG's copy protection truly results in a disc that is "according to the Red Book Standard" as they claim, in what way is it protected? Any copy protection means that would have any hope of being even slightly effective would have to use discs that violate the standard in at least some minor way. Otherwise, they are very easy to copy.

    Philips wants five thousand dollars for the Red Book, and requires that you sign an NDA. But if you want to learn the details you can buy the actual international standard, IEC standard 60908, for CHF 226 (about $156).

    Other good sources of technical detail about the CD Audio format are:

    Both of these books provide fairly detailed explanations of the data format, but for the actual physical specifications you have to refer to the standard.