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BMG Stops Producing CDs
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."
Well, if I can no longer spend my hard-earned money on CDs that will play on the various CD players around my house (including, I might add, the one in my computer), guess I'll have to resort to just downloading the songs instead from whatever Napster-clone I decide to use at the time... And all this time I thought they WANTED us to be buying their CDs... Sheesh!
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
If you stop paying for their products, the RIAA and MPAA won't have money to pay congressmen/women for laws like the DMCA.
Seriously. It seems to me that if they are going to be using the CD logo (even stating outright that the disk is compliant to Red Book standards) that Philips should be able to haul them to court over improper and misleading usage of Philip's trademark.
Don't know if Philips has enough interest in doing so, though. After all, removing the mark from these "discs that kind of look like CDs" would probably make zero difference to the buying public, but would in fact remove a (probably small) revenue stream for Philips (BMG would no longer need to licence the trademark for their packaging).
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
The disc may be barely compliant with the red book specs for cd audio, but the changes to the 'redundant' data to throw data decoders will ensure the error handling capability is serverely reduced. One scratch could literally kill your CD. Thing is, the majority of consumer electronics firms are rapidly going in the MP3 direction (hence data drives) which would spit out 'protected discs'. This is the manufacturing industry going one way and the media industry going the other. That leaves the consumers caught between a rock and a hard place. :-(
It was good while it lasted. Guess it's time to stop buying my music and start stealing it like everyone else. :(
They are going to produce a product which is the same size as a CD, and even looks the same. But if it won't play on a CD player then it's not a CD.
...because of this whole war they are waging on their customers.
Do you?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No? Look at the aggressive line that they're taking. "These are RedBook CD's and the problem is in your player". You can bet your life that they'll pass this position on to retaillers and make it 100% clear that they won't be accepting "bad media" returns on these disks.
So try taking one of these crippled music disks back to MonstroMart and claiming that it doesn't play in your CD player. Last month they'd have taken it back (maybe), and that cost Bertelsmann money. This month, they'll trot out the "the fault is in your player" line like the loyal little appendages that they are and stonewall you, because of two things. One, they know that it's not like you've got a choice in how you obtain music in the future, because every store will be carrying crippled disks, and two, if it turns out that your daddy is a lawyer, they can always point the finger at Bertelsmann and claim that ze vere only obeying orders.
Those people predicting a drop in sales that will scare off other music behemoths need to take a clue pill. Mandy Music Buyer doesn't read The Register or Slashdot, and she won't know about these crippled disks until she buys one. She'll buy the disk, then find out that it's crippled. Sure, she'll be pissed off if she can't play it in her mom's SUV's CD player (Mandy Music Buyer is 12-18, remember), but what's she going to do? Stop buying music disks? Friends, if she's still buying them today, she's not going to switch to kazaa or gnutella tomorrow. She's going to keep buying them and whine at her mommy that the man at the music store said the SUV's CD player was broken.
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I find this sentence especially amusing from the Bertelsmann's site :
"World music sales for the year 2001 fell by 5% in value and by 6,5% in units."
Blaming that music downloaders where the reason for the fell. I wonder if they remember that there was a recession in 2001, IT bubble broke and almost all industries fell into downswing. It would've been a miracle if CD sales hadn't dropped at all and 5% is LITTLE compared to the bankruptcies that other industries had to deal with.
(It's amazing that restaurants don't blame home cooks for the recession, stealing the recipes that they use, and using them free at home! can you see the analogy?)
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
But if you don't TELL them you've stopped buying their products, they assume it's just a sales slump, and devote more time, energy, and most of all MONEY to passing bad laws and trying to enforce copy-protection. After all, they already KNOW what causes sales slumps -- piracy and P2P applications. (Never mind the facts, they know the truth.)
So as I've said before (and nobody, apparently, was listening), it's not enough to just stop buying. You have to tell them about it, too.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Big problem, for the same reason they won't play in cdrom's these new cd's won't play in a spdif enabled cd audio player. The goal for the media companies is to keep us from having "perfect digital copies" What they fail to realize is 90+% of people don't care about perfect. If they did they wouldn't be trading 128 or 192 mp3's. The loss from a good analog audio cable is much less then the loss from a 128k mp3. Besides people used to copy tape to tape back in the day, if people find that level of quality exceptable then anything else should be fine. What the do end up doing is pissing off people like me who want to stick the cd they bought into the cdrom, have it ripped and tagged and then send it to our portable. I personally have an iPod and I rip everything at ~220k VBR using LAME, not something I can get off of kazaa or whatever.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Let's make this more than I joke. I just wrote to BMG and said, because of your stance I will not buy your product. I want a fully versatile CD and you are committed not to deliver.
And I will back this up with actions. Eventually I suspect I will have to transition to all independent producers. When I do so I will let them know why I decided to start investigating their product base. If something I want to purchase comes out on BMG I will contact the artist and tell them why they lost a sale.
The major recording labels see lost sales in unencumbered CDs. Whether this is ultimately true or not is not relevant. Unless they start seeing and hearing about lost sales because of Digital Rights Management they will continue on this course.
Universal got the same letter from me a year ago. I haven't purchased a product from them since.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
... leading to ... show me this ogg-vorbis stuff you've been talking about!), "This is strange, I can't play the CD in the car but it works fine at home" (ah, you bought a crippled CD. Welcome to the future the Recording Cartels have planned for us ... you're only allowed to play that CD in specially authorized players), and so on.
You are right, our outraged ranting on slashdot won't make it otherwise.
However, our outraged ranting to our families, our friends, our coworkers, and our business associates (over beer, after work, etc.) will make all the difference in the world.
I have already shocked, appalled, and outraged numerous people simply by telling them what has been going on. It is particularly effective when it is done in response to "I think my PC is broken, it no longer plays my music" (oops, you saved your music in windoze media format and didn't unclick the DRM option. You won't be able to forget to do that in the next version of windows, because there won't be an option to unclick, everything will be 'protected.'
I have educated a pretty large number of non-savvy people about what is going on with the DMCA (Sklyrov, etc.), the RIAA (Janis Ian, Prince, etc. al documenting the recording industry's rape of artists AND consumers, etc.), and the MPAA (Fritz Disney Hollings et al), and they are pissed. Not at me, for ranting about technical issues they don't care about, but at these organizations and our hopelessly corrupt, wicked government. They are pissed because it has become painfully obvious that we do live under the tyranny of evil men, with apparently no way out, and they are sick of giving money to such.
So now they buy less CDs, attend less concerts, and go to less movies than before. Not a complete boycott like myself, but they are spending less and they are much, much more aware.
Which brings me to the the point of all this: there is one way in which WE, not THEY, can and should win:
Simply stop buying their crap.
Like music? Listen to independent artists ONLY. Do not buy any CDs from any record company, buy them direct from the artist or not at all. And if they are crippled, return them and publicly blacklist the artist for what they've done.
Like movies? Go see independent films only. If you cannot get over your pathetic addiction to the mindless bread and circuses of Hollywood, at least avoid seeing movies during the first two weeks of release (when most of the revninue goes to the studios), instead wait and see the movies in third or fourt weeks (when most of the revinue goes to the local thatre). Not as good as a proper boycott, but better than following the stampede.
In the end, though, is to simply be unforgiving of such people. Don't buy their stuff now, and don't ever buy it again. Get enough of your friends to feel likewise, and they will falter, even ultimately perish.
No one likes losing their freedom, and everyone sees it happening. Until now, they've only had the vague notion that 'the government' is taking away their freedoms and 'it doesn't seem to matter who we elect.'
Now there is a specific target for that ire, for that anger, a specific, relatively small group of companies that are actively, methodically, and deliberately stripping us of our freedoms, and use government collussion or, at best, apathy go do it.
And, unlike (most) governments, companies are something we as individuals can topple.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy