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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."
The correct term is "differently abled CD's"
: )
Don't read this!
No wonder they complain about decreasing CD sales if they stop shipping CDs...
False Advertising...
How about BMG create their own standards and call it something else?
I am sure this will lead to more sales, because everyone knows when you spit in the customers eye and take away their ability to do that which they did before, they always reward you for it.
--Joey
Your scrambled ToC is no match for my superior patch cable and audio in!
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
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!
Is this the same group that I occasionaly get SPAM mail about buying 12 CDs for one penny (plus outrageous shipping charges)?
If so, then all of a sudden I suppose my e-mail program will now be unable to display their message (even though it's just a standard e-mail).
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.
How can you claim a device not able to play Red Book compliant disks is a CD player?
... if it doesn't play in my one and only CD player (my computer) then it will go back to the store and they will hear my complaints. I have also taken up writing (paper version) letters to these companies when something like this doesn't work. I guess I wont be buying any music from BMG from now on, should save me some effort. Although I will write them a letter about it.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
"BMG attaches great importance to assuring that the copy protection used does not lead to restrictions for consumers with respect to listening pleasure. Those who play back their purchased product on a standard home CD Audio player will not notice any difference at all."
... New trends and
talents can only emerge if music is bought..."
Does this mean that I cannot listen to CDs on my computer without being concidered a consumer without respect to listening pleasure?
"In the long term, massive copying deprives music-makers of their very livelihood.
I prefer listening to musicians who play music because they enjoy it, not for the money. As for the veri livelihood, I'd say that the ability to sample non-mainstream artists without having to stand in line at my local music store has made me by more CDs than ever before. I suggest that this assumption is down right wrong.
"...this decline is attributed to a large extent to unauthorised CD-R copying."
Or perhaps due to a downwards tendency of the entire economy. Sales will fluctuate, so don't blame the customers, make new and better products.
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. :-(
"All out books are completely normal and qualify for Library of Congress cataloging... we've simply removed the text as a precautionary measure to defeat the thieving scum of the world." says spokesman Yanash Smythe.
A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
I suspect they're engaged on some wacko conspiracy: "Do as much as we can to lose money and then blame it on customers. And then, once we've reached bottom, we'll ... um ... well, we haven't figured that part out yet. Our goal is to simply piss off consumers, hit bottom, and then blame folks."
What's interesting is that three years ago I was an active CD buyer. I was constantly buying stuff at Best Buy, was a member of all the CD clubs (even though that wasn't making anyone much money), and buying CDs on-line weekly.
Now, I've stopped. I won't buy another CD because I have no idea whether or not it will play in what I want to play it in, and I have absolutely no desire to try to bring it back to a place like Best Buy or send it back to a place like CDNOW or Amazon.com.
Instead, I'm enjoying my "old" CDs, installed my old Technics phonograph, and actively search out obscure stuff -- mostly CDs, some vinyl -- in local record stores. My music listening experience has gone way, way up, and I'm spending less than ever -- but finding stuff I like.
And I'll occasionally drop into Kazaa to listen to new stuff and try and determine, say, why Justine Timberlake is putting out new albums that sound like vintage Michael Jackson or why U2 and Aerosmith insist on putting out a new greatest hits album every other week or why Bob Dylan's *old* stuff is far and away better than anything he's put out since Infidels (which was, IMHO, the last good Dylan album). But that's about it.
So, yes, to the RIAA I say this: if your goal is to piss-off customers and lose them permanently -- congratulations!
If it does not work, take them back to the store. Demand your money back.
I was under the assumption that Sony and Phillips owned all the rights to the use of the CD Logo and the right to claim that a CD is Red Book compliant. I'm sure Phillips will file suit against this.
This is all just an attempt by a dying industry to save itself. With the advent of P2P file sharing services and the now defunct Napster, people don't NEED record companies any more to distrinute their music or to give them their music.
In my ideal world, the music would be available for download from some web site by an artist and then a CD/DVD is made with lots of value add stuff, such as 5.1 surround mixes, possible music videos, etc.
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?
Watch as a new generation of young people (ages 6 through 16) hit Kazaa. Then Gnutella when Kazaa shuts down. When Peekabooty when P2P is getting hammered by **IA.
It's great news! I'm not being sarcastic. When they have to go to such lengts to protect a dead business model, all we have to do is sit back and laugh. And teach our familes how to use WinAmp or iTunes.
They FUNNY SHIT is this... I'd gladly pay PER SONG for an OGG download. But $20 for crap on an obsolete medium (CD's)? HA! Never...
Again, in short, they are dying and this is the first sign. enjoy the ride, you'll tell your grandkids about this.
nt
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
How does it come that some contries get the page in their native language (Germany, Poland, Italy, etc.) while some get it in English (Sweden, Spain, Austria (a german speaking country!), France, etc.) And since all sites look the same except for the map-picture and the contact info, why not spare us the hazzle of a choice, simply put all in english on one site and supply different contacts.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
And make it very clear in writing ( polite, paper mail ) why its being done.
If they continue with the plan, I guess we all just have to find a way to rip them onto a cdR that isnt crippled so we can use what we own in the car, at work, etc..
If we dont stop it, then the others will follow suit shortly afterwards.
I wonder what Phillips has to say about this whole thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Phillips/Sony Red Book Standard states that and Compact Disc that is created with this standard format will be compatible will nearly all CD players. BMG and thier false claim that thier "crippled" CD are Red Book compliant is outrageous. Once again this is just another reason why people use P2P servers to get thier music fix.
Furthermore, does BMG really think that producing "crippled" CDs will bring an end to CD burning and ripping. I for one have a Sony audio CD player connected to my sound card and if I cannot rip or burn a CD due to "crippling" I just pop that CD into the Sony player and rip it from there. It works great and has not flawed yet.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Us consumers in the US can look to our government to stand up to this overt attack on our rights! Politicians in Washington aren't going to let these big record companies galavant about stomping on our rights!
After all, this is our culture that we're talking about. Surely the music of the time belongs to the people, right!? It's ours to share, the same as our wisdom and our stories, with each other freely. We all know that the progression of culture depends on the constant cycle of old becoming new, new artists seeking inspiration from those that went before.
I'm confident that the new government in Washington will honor these sacred things. We're all in good hands now!
Let's all have a glass of Victory Gin!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
An analogy. You try to get a restraining order against some guy. The judge throws it out of court for lack of grounds. So you keep crank calling him, and egging his car, until he is so ticked off that you actually do need the protection.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Just because a program compiles, it doesn't mean it will work. It simply means it complies with the language specification and it's syntactially correct. The program itself might not work at all.
The same goes for CDs. The specification doesn't neccessarily mean that the CD will be playable - only that it has certain features and is encoded in a certain way.
Nick...
"CD" is a registered trademark and represents a standard. ( ok ok, so its the abberviation of compact disc, but same thing applies )
Once you break that standard you cant use the term, thus they arent "CD's" anylonger.
Donno what you call them.. besides incompatible garbage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I know we'll eventually find a way around this copy-protection, I have no worries about that. What bothers me is the "Suck It Down!"(c) attitude BMG is taking on forcing people to buy new hardware if the disc doesn't work. I think they have the relationship between consumer and manufacturer switched. It's not like they are gracing our lowly presence, the hoi polloi, with goods they toss to us like slop to pigs.
"Here, this should be good enough for all of you. Too bad if you don't like it. Sooooooooooouuuuuuuiiiiiiiii!"
And yet they seem to act that way when trying to herd us all into something like this. I am a consumer, dagnabbit! I should be telling these companies what I want, and make sure they give it to me. It is the consumers who should be dictating where the market goes. But who is still listening to us? When did things change? Consumers have rights, use them!
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
Ford has no intention of "stopping production of cars" - it simply intends to make them with two wheels and instead steering wheel they use handlebars.
... felt tip marker sales soar through the roof
The solution is simple: don't buy their stuff. Or, if you do, just capture it into a more convenient format through an analog channel--even with a simple setup, you get quality that is basically indistinguishable from the original. And I wonder how many people will end up returning the CD after making a copy...
This is just getting more and more stupid. I'm not going to go download stuff from Kazaa just get, for one the effort it'd take to get it going in Wine combined with the general nastyness of the software and illegallity of it has put me off until now. I'm waiting for (and soon hopefully doing something about) the gift economy as a new model for music distribution, but there are quite a few technical and social hurdles to overcome first.
How long can the music industry keep this up though before what happened to Microsoft with Linux happens to the RIAA - the little people come out of the woodwork and come up with something new? Not long at this rate. Not long at all.
As well as taking the CD back and explaining why you are returning it, why not write to the artist themselves. I know if i had mail from fans saying they returned the discs because they wouldn't play I'd be making some phone calls.
If I like an artist's music, I will buy the CD. I always have done. However, I have no Audio CD player at home, only the CDROM in my PC. So if all these news CD's coming out are not playable on my CDROM then I won't buy them. And I'll have to go elsewhere for my music. No prizes for guessing where...
Exactly. This will only hurt online sales as I can guarantee 99% of the buying public has no idea what redbook means. All they know is it does not play and they want their money back. Mailing back a CD will frustrate many users. Not to meantion tech support not knowing what the hell is wrong.
BMG will NEVER do this.
This is what intel tried with RDRAM. The market corrected them quickly and they suffered tremendously for it.
that Aerosmith's "just push play" is listed on the "known corrupt cd's" list on fat chuck's?
(link on register site, near the bottom)
A quote from BMG's website:
Two years ago, on a worldwide basis, one digital copy was made for every three music CDs sold. Last year, that ratio had shrunk dramatically to one-to-two. In 2001, for every CD album sold, one copy was burned.
Actually the statistic I read is that in 2001 for every CD album sold, one CD-R disc was sold. Obviously we can't assume that every single CD-R disc sold in the world was used to copy a copyrighted CD. Based on my experience in statistics and research methods regarding sampling and surveys(Psych major),I'm fairly confident that no one will ever be able to claim how many CD-R's were actually used to copy copyrighted material, so any numbers they throw at us should not be believed.
My personal theory is that the surge of independent music(which is easily accesible on the internet)is really why the major labels sales are down. Not only is independent music usually better, but it's available for free on P2P's all the time(which is why killing Kazaa/Gnucleus/etc. would seriously hurt the independent musician, and give more power back to major labels). I guess I'm preaching to choir here at slashdot though.
Most of the time, I boycot the large CD-stores, such as the Free Record Shop, because their prices are ridiculous (say, $20-$22 for a stupid CD? Come on!)
When I buy a CD, I explicitly ask if it will play on my computer because I don't even *have* a regular CD player (because I don't need it, and I'm a student so don't want to spend money on things I don't even need..). Usually I directly rip 'em to ogg, nowadays.
If they tell me it will play but it doesn't I return it and ask my money back (btw. the smaller music stores usually don't lie about this anyway, so it's not a problem). Before I buy an album I usually have listened to it on MP3 anyway, so though luck for the artists I wanted to sponsor...
If they tell me it won't play, I don't buy it, but download it instead - you get what you deserve, after all, Record Labels!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
It's probably a waste of time, but what the hey. There were only 1734 signers when I signed today - let's /. it! SIGN HERE!
the music i buy is not distributed by any of the major labels so this doesnt affect me at all.
:)
maybe all the idiots listening to britney spears and all the other teen hookers (hello christina aguilera) though will get annoyed enough and stop buying their CDs.
maybe we should start a movement or sth.: buy any copy protected cd, 30minutes later return it saying it doesnt play in your car player. take another copy protected cd instead, and 30minutes do the same. come again the next day, and the day after and maybe someday your friendly clerk will be annoyed enough and will stop ordering them.
buy then why should we have the work when it seems that BGM has already dug their own grave! relax everyone, soon everything is over
keep it simple.
"...One scratch could literally kill your CD."
Sounds like they want stem piracy and to increase cash flow by resales because of "SCRATCHED" CDs. That's what they liked about vinyl. When you just can't stand the POPS & SKIPS on "Dark Side Of The Moon" any more, you buy another copy. How did you think it stayed on the Billboard Top 100 for over 10 YEARS! Damn those seeds!!!
It also reduces the second-hand CD sales like Half.com. Some indipendent music stores were being pressured by the record companies not handle "Used CDs" (...or is it Perviously Owned?).
Any way you look at it, increased cash flow is the main motive. Buy once, buy often.
>> Practice Safe Hex
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.
There's about 200 of them all told. This is a HUGE company. The major subdivisions (just in the record division, they own a lot in other areas too) are Arista, J Records, RCA Music Group, and BMG Asia, Latin, Europe, Music Publishing, and Distribution. I couldn't find a thorough listing of their 200+ front labels, but I think that if you look at the fine print they'll all say something about being associated with Arista, J Records, RCA, or BMG something or other...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I agree, but to me it appears complex on the part of the buying public than that. Will John Q. Buyincds decide that he doesn't want to buy the new Avril Lavigne CD because it won't work in his existing CD player? Or will they buy another brand just to have the ability to get that new CD later on if they want it, just because some rogue music publisher asserts that their existing player is faulty (I say rogue meaning against the grain, they are certainly not an upstart)? In a perfect world, people would see the social responsibility involved, and would keep their existing, non-BMG-compliant readers or buy new ones, and just not buy BMG crippled CDs. Unfortunately, people nowadays tend to shrug off social responsibility in favor of convenience, so they might keep their Phillips player for now, but all external forces aside, probably buy a Sony or Kenwood CD player next time (assuming that those companies adhere to BMG standards).
--- What
That's the beauty of the DMCA. You're absolutely right -- the copy protection stops you from using your fair use rights. However, the DMCA clecerly makes any effort to get around copy protection illegal, even if said copy protection prevents you from exercising your fair use rights.
I can't really go on further without using a steam of expletives.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
Look at this press release just two days ago:
Listen.com Secures CD Burning License From BMG for Rhapsody Music Subscription Service
BMG Becomes Third Major Label to Offer Its Catalog for Burning Through Rhapsody; Subscribers Can Now Burn More Than 90,000 Tracks for 99 Cents Each
Coincidence?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I have a bunch of CD's and cassetes from good bands that you can no longer buy (many of these bands no longer exist). I've put some of them on my computer as mp3. For the cassete ones you can STILL put it into mp3 format. It takes more work and time. But honestly the quality is super.
I've also taken concert mp3 and put them on minidisc. Analog. Again it sounds fine.
I do use the fiber cable to take cds-> mini-disc. I don't think the copy prevention stops that.
No matter how they try, it's difficult to stop us from using the music we buy the way we like to, especially audio. I think they should concentrate on those that republish copywrited work and stop worrying about those that are still buying product.
I think it's ok that BMG jumps into the deadpool.
This is kinda an example how CD protection is going to fail, because now ppl don't have to inform themselves which CDs are nonfunctional, just look out for the BMG logo and you'll know.
Since BMG is a huge company they won't crash and burn because of this, but I'm sure they'll get their scars, and if not BMG itself maybe other labels/publishers will learn from this lesson.
So, go protection go!
Let's see how the sales go down...
I made the mistake of buying the new Foo Fighters album without reading the small print (...contains copy control technology, will play on a PC (windows) using software contained on the disc...). So I feared the worst by the time I got it home. However, it plays fine in WinAmp, rips without problems with Audiograbber, and plays fine in XMMS under linux. So either their copy control technology is useless, or they're trying something sneaky, whatever that may be.
Incidentally, the Compact Disc logo doesn't appear on any of the packaging or the disc itself.
-hgavin
If they can pull it off in Europe (the hardest place to do it, thanks to EU governments being less friendly), they can pull it off anywhere.
Better than deciding your scheme works in the US and hitting a brick wall in Europe.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
Remember when they used to print black text on a dark black background for game "code books" to keep people from photocopying them (And then being able to copy and run the game without owning it)?
Exactly how does this work, slashdot wants to know. Do you lose part of the first track, and just how wide does the marking have to be? If I can read between the lines, the "crippling" involves munging the TOC data in some way? If it can't read this bogus data, I guess the player just starts playing tracks at the point it can read, thus treating it as a read error, and recovering the stream if it can. Is that about right?
Doesn't this also mean that you can still read off the disk as data (computer CD player), and ignore the bogus TOC data? Windows probably won't cooperate, but other OSs should, right?
This is not going to stop a song from appearing on your favorite P2P app.. All it takes for that is ONE person to rip it digitally or via analog inputs and share it out or post on usenet. What this MAY curb is the average computer USER like Sally burning a copy of the CD she bought for Jill at the office or for a friend after school. Obviously someone feels that is a major threat also and they are trying to find a way to prevent that.
Maybe I'm wrong and they honestly think this will prevent the songs from showing up in mp3 format somewhere..
I rip all of my cd's to MP3 to play in my enabled car stereo, dvd unit, portable, and my lan. I will not buy a cd that will not allow me to do that. I will simply wait till I find it with KaZaa.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I buy maybe ten CDs a year and extract the audio to listen to like I want. If they do this I won't be buying any because it would be easier to download them instead. Actually I probably won't be doing that either because there is almost no good music being released any more
Sig is taking a break!
The record companies are complaining about dropping sales... Well, what do you think will happen when buying a CD is like spinning a roulette wheel, and you can't be sure it'll play on your stereo, much less your computer? Will people be willing to pay money for discs that may or may not work, and for which they probably won't be allowed to return if it doesn't?
They're shooting at thieves, but hitting themselves in the foot.
Heh jokes on them, I know exactly where to find the label. Look on the back of the case, if the BMG logo is there, it's crippleware.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I'd like to point everyone to cdbaby.com.
It's the best record store I've found anywhere. It's full of independent artists in every genre you could want. They have a sweet feature where you search for a band you like, say Limp Bizkit or POD, and it gives you independent artists like Stink!#Bug or Burning Edge. All the albums for sale have at least half of their tracks available to listen to before you buy.
If you aren't happy you can send your CD back for a full refund.
They even have a wide selection of jazz and classical performances.
I guess the artists get a pretty fat percentage of the profits from the CD. Much more than they would get if they were signed with a major label.
I'm not affiliated with CD Baby in anyway except as a very happy customer. Super happy. Happy happy happy. I've never been so happy about my relationship with a business.
If you are like me, you love music but don't support the rape of artists by major labels. CD Baby is the best place I've found to satisfy my cravings for great tunes. All of the CDs I've purchased from them played on my computer just fine, and ripped to ogg with no problems.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Will John Q. Buyincds decide that he doesn't want to buy the new Avril Lavigne
I guess I'm not John Q. Public, because I didn't know that Avril Lavinge had an old cd. Who the fuck is Avril Laninge?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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?)
From now on, the "BMG" label tells enough: avoid this CD.
Software giant Microsoft has announced that documentation for its Visual Studio family of products will now be available in printed form, using rich jet-black ink on a glossy dark purple paper.
"This is a printing idea we got from old copy protection symbol cards in the 1980's. It worked great for them, so it should keep people from illegally copying or using our documentation too!"
I have a stash of about 1000 CDs bought in the 80's and early 90s, and I haven't bought a new CD in years. I have plenty of music to listen to for years to come, and all the CDs happily rip to MP3. Besides, good music died along with the 70s. All the new stuff coming out is just new tricks, and I'm such an old dog.
...this is a desaster ! Especially since many DJs I know have migrated to MP3, with me currently archiving my collection to Ogg Vorbis... lifting one PC is easier than several hundred CDs (and you get cool search functionality and beatmixing with some programs, too).
;-)
:-)
I've found one CD so far that I'm pretty sure is copy protected (Genesis.1 single from VNV Nation), because it plays in normal CD players but not in the CD drive at my work. So I can't currently rip it (yes, I know that there are ways to circumvent that, but since it's just a single I don't care
But the real problem is that some friends of mine already had real problems with copyrighted CDs: they seem to get "jumpy" even with just slight scratches (which just occur when using them, even when being careful). It's always bad when people are dancing and suddenly get irritated because the music just stopped due to a bad CD (it's always the DJ's fault, mind you !
"On the other hand, independent Music City Records released a copy-protected CD by Charley Pride with no sticker to warn users of possible problems. That led to a lawsuit by a Marin County, Calif., woman who discovered the disc wouldn't work on her PC. Music City settled the case without paying damages and agreed to label copyprotected CDs. More significant, Philip$-the company that co-owns patents on the CD and licenses that ubiquitous "CD audio" logo-says it is considering yanking the logo from all copy-protected CDs."
-Time Canada, 6/3/2002
Avril Lavignes CD rips just fine, now the CD is collecting dust in a box, and my xmms playlist is another few songs longer.
Will the other distributors start shipping CDs with labels stating that they are not copy protected? This would effectively side-step the whole "is it a CD or not" debate and leave BMG screwed.
Dear Sir,
thankyou for clarifying the situation for me. My CD player cannot play the copy protected CD's and, due to poor labelling on CD's, I have had a lot of trouble knowing which CD's I shouldn't buy.
Now that I know all BMG produced CD's in Europe are to be copy-protected, it makes my purchasing easier; I'll stop buying CD's altogether. It's no hardship really, as the content on most of these CD's is not worth losing sleep over.
Yours sincerely
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.
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.
I haven't bought many CDs in recent years, but I was just about to start again. I probably will buy one or two in the next weeks.
When I'm buying my CD, I will explain to them about this, and I want to know for sure that my computer can read it (it's the only CD player I have). I want a money back guarantee from them, or at least the right to swap my CD for another if it doesn't work. And if they refuse, I'll take my business elsewhere. It's not much, but there aren't many stores that don't care about selling stuff.
I want the stores to know that they're missing revenue and exactly why that's happening. They might ask their distributor for non-crippled CDs. That way at least my 'boycott' just might make some people aware of the quality of this idea.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
A better solution would be to change the business model instead of trying to prevent people to copy CD's.
What are the reasons people currently make illegal copies of music:
1) CD's are too expensive.
2) The artist only sees a fraction of the price of a CD.
3) It is illegal, which makes it more attractive.
4) It is possible.
CD manufactures currently try to attack only the fourth reason instead of focusing on the other three (well, perhaps the third reason is hard to remove). Besides, when my ordinary CD player can read the disk, the CD player in my computer can do it as well, but maybe it requires a firmware upgrade.
A better solution would be to focus on the other reasons and change the business model used to sell CD's. For instance, I think it would be really great to surf the net, download music from the artist's website, pay a honest fee for it and burn it to CD myself. I believe there are many other people who download music in this fassion if a fair price was asked.
Of course, you still have the problem that music can be copied, but it is impossible to change that. The only thing that can be done is make it more difficult, but once someone circumvents the copy protection, it is totally worthless. Instead, music makers should focus on bringing the prices of music down and improve the experience people get while buying music.
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.
"Sounds like they want stem piracy and to increase cash flow by resales because of "SCRATCHED" CDs."
That's ok with me, just so long as they remain consistant with their policies on CDs. According to the music industry, I don't own that CD, only a license to listen to the music it contains. Therefore, if my disc becomes unusable, I demand an immediate replacement so I may continue to exercise my rightfully purchased license. To demand further payments so I may exercise rights already granted to me sounds like extortion to me.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
BMG has already done some experiments with crippled 'protected' CD's. This decision just means that sales of those discs did not that much decline, so BMG is going to risk the jump. And that means that we are wasting our time here on Slashdot. Not only geeks should care about this! Make this headline TV news! It sounds ridiculous, but from now on, even your grandmother should be aware not to buy those fake discs by BMG, Virgin, V2 and its evil sublabels! Our rights as customers are more than ever going to be violated. Discs we legally pay for (in Europe, a full price album is 22 euro) will not be valid in many CD drives. Boycot them!
How many of you idiots actually try this half-baked advice? Any normal music store will just say the-rules-are-the-rules-we-don't-do-refunds. The previous poster has the right idea. Don't buy these crippled discs.
Also, if they stop selling CDs, then I guess I'll have to get all my music through Gnutella. My computer *is* my stereo. I don't have a lot of physical space to work with, so instead of a normal system I got a decent soundcard and some nice speakers. (SB Live 5.1 and a Koss 4.1 surround set. Yes, I know full well it's not audiophile quality, but it's within my budget, so bite me.)
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
i've bought 3 or 4 copies of some of my cd's just becuase they fuck up, but i haven't had to do tha tin years thanks to p2p services.. i just re-download the song in flawless digital formats and make myself a new disk at a fraction of the cost (roughly 3 1/2 minutes and what a quarter for the cd?)
i hope phillips rapes them for all their worth for their trademark infringement and then they will learn that not only will they not increase their marginal revenue at all by spending more to sell disks that no one wants but they will lose business instead and maybe companies thsi fucked up will be taken out of the loop the natural way: Bankruptcy
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
1. Piss off customers.
2.
3. Profit.
Why don't they just punch themselves in the balls now and get the pain over with? Producing a music CD that won't play on most music CD playing equipment out in the wild is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Sell your stock in these companies, fols, 'cause they're doomed.
But this is all so silly. Look, most people know the following..(you didn't? ok, now you do.)
The audio degradation experienced by ripping a CD via analog means (by either plugging in a cable into the line-out of the CD player and recording with any PC recording application, or using the 'Rip to Analog" feature of Musicmatch) is far less than the degradation produced by MP3 compression.
Since six years of MP3 has shown us that for the vast majority of people, even 160kbps MP3 encoding is "good enough," how will this stop their music from being pirated?
Very few people actually rip and upload...Gartner and Forrester both agree that 95% of mp3 content on P2P and other filesharing systems comes from less than 10% of the community. All you need is one guy to rip the content to analog, then upload. BMG will see no net reduction of pirating of their content.
Irnonically, the only ones to suffer from this inane decision are those who legitimately purchased the "CD." They will be plagued with a hobbled, limited-use product, which may actually convince them that P2P is actually a more convenient choice. No one else will even notice, as they will continue to download the content.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
...of course, they are entitled to charge a "replacement cost"....you pay for 2-way shipping + handling...which will undoubtedly come to about $15.
Bastards.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I think we all know what the next step is - basically, some variant of DVD audio. Hello region codes, compression, and tight control over hardware manufacturers. When that happens, we're really screwed.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The law is the law. Citizens should just allow themselves to be taken advantage of and tolerate the situation quietly. If a merchant won't accept your refund, take him to court.
It's time to put guerilla litigation to good use.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It is a widely recommended practice for parents with a small child to burn and use copies of their CDs, and keep the 'master' (the original CD) in a safe place.
I never thought I'd say that! /me checks the weather reports for hell...
I hope Phillips sues their asses off.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
To make matters worse, if what you say is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), I won't even be able to play the songs on my music system as the CD player clearly isn't 'standard' (though I fail to see what's more 'standard' than a mid-range Sony deck).
This leaves me with two options:
- Buy a new (crappier) CD player that only has analogue out. Copy my lovely digital CDs via analogue to my portable MD/computer thus loosing all the crispness of the original music.
- Skip buying the CD and just download the tracks via KazaaLite/Gnucleus. I get the same quality as 1) but save 12 quid each time!
What a brilliant business move! They'll be depriving me of high quality music, and themselves of any revenue! I wish I had an MBA and could think of such award winning ways of increasing shareholder value!instead there's a label claiming that the CD is fully Red Book-compliant.
Good. So we just need to look for a label on a CD assuring us that the CD is "fully Red-Book compliant" and we will know that it is crippled. Perhaps all manufacturers should standardize this label and use a common graphic, such as a picture of a CD player catching on fire.
I have a sony in car cd player, the one that can play mp3s but not copy protected cds. I was a little annoyed until I found that my old pioneer 6 disc scsi cdrom drive drm624x that I used to run on my amiga (its 4.4x not 24x speed btw) could rip copy protected cds flawlessly when used with cdparanoia (linux cd ripper utill made by the same people as ogg vorbis). Ebay has these units for $15 each. They can be got elsewhere I suspect that Google may be able to help there.
what can philips do? can they force them to not use the cd logo?
philips should give them the shaft.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You know, this "not a CD player" and "not a CD" spiel came off as propoganda at first, but it's pretty legitimate.
I've never purchased an audio CD in my life -- I don't own a single one (well, except for a hybrid CD, Marathon I, that also has the game music in Red Book).
I was thinking, recently, about possibly purchasing one, though I'd lose my reputation, but the rapid elimination of CDs has solved this at two levels -- I have far less interest in a CD-like device with no error correction, and even in the unlikely case I did purchase one, it wouldn't be a CD.
May we never see th
What do you mean, encoding?
Actually there is some encoding done, but not for protection reasons. EFM (Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation) represents every byte as a 14-bit number. The bits are arranged to maximize bandwidth usage and more evenly distribute the bits (so you don't have stretches where there are no pits/bumps on the disc).
The encoding is as simple as a lookup table, and is again designed only to maximize bandwidth. You can actually fit more data using 14 bits representing each byte than you can with 8, simply due to the physical characteristics of the media. Found a link with a bit of info. I guess technically Modulation is the word, but it is a form of encoding.
And there is some error correction in this (CIRC), also described at the link (not in much detail though).
I agree with your other points, though. These CDs can't be redbook compliant. I believe the redbook standard covers all aspects of the CD, from the data itself to the physical medium, though I haven't researched that in quite some time...
On that note, some newer Sony car stereos (two I have experience with, one from 1997 and one 2001) still have a very difficult time with burned CDs (yet I can play an audio CDRW in my $25 portable). Only if I burn at 2x and on particular brands of media (oddly, Sony CD-R's aren't one of them) will they play reliably.
I'm sure these "copy-protected" CDs would have trouble with these Sony units as well. I would have thought Sony of all people would have more robust CD units by now, but apparenlty they're using cheap (out-dated?) components... most CD/DVD players sold these days will read anything you can throw at them.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Let me get out my calculator for this one... Aw, F. it, lets just do the global picture: If sales of units fall more than the value of those sales, units must have gotten more expensive.
So... Might it just be that the already inflated prices (22 euros/mainstream CD) being pushed higher combined with economic down-turn have anything to do with this?
These greedy bastards should be thoroughly thankfull people apparantly like music so much that they haven't stopped buying CD's at all in favour of buying food, paying their phonebills or anything else that for most people rates higher on their list than CD's.
Sheesh.
Karma? What's that again?
How the hell is this going to work? If I'm pissed now, I'll be even more pissed when they pass laws. How is this going to cause me to GIVE THEM MY MONEY?! What exactly do they expect, something like this?
Me: "I'm pissed. I can't play CDs in my computer anymore!"
BMG: "FOAD, you worthless consumer. I've bought out politicians who will make your entire computer ILLEGAL!"
Me: "Gee, I really really want a CD now!"
In a recent public letter, the Rolling Stone disses the record company executives totally over this kind of crap.
Excerpts from the letter:
"Because of you, my kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands."
"No more harmful exposure of thousands of bands through Internet radio, either."
"Don't worry, computers are just a fad anyway, and the Internet is just plain stupid."
"Okay, CD sales are down. Suggestions?"
"I know!! Let's lock up our CDs so that the customers buying them can't do what they want with them. That'll recoup our losses!"
It's probably not a DMCA violation, because they're only using technical means to violate the trademark, not the copyright, unless of course the CD logo is copyrighted as well as trademarked....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is why I'm buying my music on Vinyl... try it analog.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
If someone asks me why I don't buy them, I'll say it's because they're crap & they just don't function like they should. That speaks a lot louder than making it political.
(Pardon the rambling - do you see my point, tho'?)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Let's see... lots of people have been laid off. Those who have found new jobs probably took substantial cuts in pay in the process. Some of these people still have not found new jobs.
Many of those who did not loose their jobs are saving money in case they DO lose their jobs.
Do people buy food and pay the rent or blow my cash on CDs? Hmnnn......
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
This is especially true if they cripple *ALL* CD's. Now there is zero incentive because there isn't even a chance the CD will work.
Also crippling *ALL* CD's, or even a majority, will mean hardware will appear that will read them, because of the demand. It will just read all the bits, including the error correction bits. This hardware will be impossible to fool without making the disk unplayable in the majority of CD players. They will thus defeat their entire scheme.
They should have stuck with placing *minor* noise into the data with bad error correction bits, so you get a usable copy but there is an incentive to buy the "clean" disk.
They could also have watermarked the data (not the "watermark" that prevents a player from playing, as that gives the ripper an easy test to see if they removed the watermark, but a watermark that affects sound very little but can be detected by their own software that they do not let anybody have), this would allow searches to immediately locate all "illegal copies" in any P2P system and thus give them some legal force because they can prove they are being used for copyright violations. You could even make a "legit" P2P system that checks all the data to see if it is watermarked, though this has to be done carefully so that nobody that shouldn't can get ahold of the testing software,
There are a lot of things they could do. Some good, some bad, but all a lot more effective than this. I think this is going to make things worse for them and reduce sales.
Of course this could be a plan. When this fails to stop "piracy" they may have the ammunition to get legal help and actually outlaw all recording devices. This will stop piracy, and conviently stop all competition to the established companies.
There is a pastel shade of blue that photocopiers do not reproduce.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
There was a time when Amazon.com was on everybodies shitlist, that there was a site where you could register all the online purchases you didn't make with Amazon, as a way of telling them how much they lost in sales.
BMG? I don't want to buy from them or from the companies that they own. This f*ck the consumer crap is ridiculous.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Now, I'm to the point where going out and buying a CD is a waste of time and money. As a hobbled wage-slave, I don't give a rat's ass about the fsckin' problems the music industry says they have. The bastards have been making obscene amounts of money for decades, and if the nipple isn't quite as sweet as it once was for them, then maybe they need to try the bottle.
Personally, I'm tired of all the we are in control, do not attempt to back up your media or play it on anything we have not blessed strategies and crappy laws. They don't matter when in the privacy of my home I can break copy protections at whim and blow the crap on drives or play it on hacked players. The industry needs to quit wasting their time thinking they can stop a technically superior consumer-base, just because you didn't hire us doesn't mean we're incapable of completely owning your corporate asses. We will own any format, any player, anything that doesn't blow us into tiny bits when tampered with will be defeated at whim, and the only thing they're doing is hobbling themselves, and then complaining that they have to spend too much to control us. Ahahahah...P.T. Barnum is still the man.
If there's anyone from BMG or any of the other wannabe in control media companies out there reading, I have just one final thing to say: I want to buy your product, but if and only if I can put it in player X and it will play, and then I can put it in player Xn and it will play, and if player X supports Video and Audio, then I want both, and I don't want Ads, I don't want the number of the beast tatooed on my ass, and I don't want to use only non-free OS's in order to enjoy the media I've legally purchased from some peddler. I want DVD capacities and I want some real freakin value for my buck...add hard-copy materials and packaging that make buying your product worth the time and effort. Oh yeah, and I'm not the only one--we are legion.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
If you really believe what you wrote, I feel you might be deluding yourself.
The facts are:
- Microsoft has completely dominated the OS market for years.
- Microsoft has BILLIONS to defend its position.
Microsoft will give Windows away for free before it lets Linux win on the desktop (they could make money on their other software programs, like Office, and on selling services, hardware, etc).
If you think Linux can win just because it's open source, you are burying your head in the sand.
"And like that
Actually on the same day another announcement came in. Rhapsody to allow users burn BMG tracks to CD . For 99 cents a pop on top of what Rhapsody charges for monthly access it might a little bit too expensive, on the other hand, you don't have to burn the songs from the album that you don't like, and I am assuming they're using MP3 format, and that tracks do not contain any DRM 'features'.
If you open the wrapper, they no longer allow you to return it for any reason whatsoever - they automagically assume that you copied it and brought the orginal back. Yes, you could take your player to the store and PROVE that it does not work; but that may not be feasible with some stereo setups. I often wonder how many people that DON'T copy or don't even have computers to rip music or store it on a fileserver arrangement for playback in the home or on portable MP3 devices get discouraged hearing about the recording industry's newest anti fair use tactics and stop buying music in the stores too. [I guess I can't blame satellite radio though since they seem to be struggling themselves]. Could we just be disgusted or discouraged; regardless of the technology (or lack thereof) in our homes? I know places in rural Virginia that don't even have CD players in their homes. If they can't find it on cassette, they don't buy; and don't bother ordering it either.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Just wait until they announce that you MUST use a TCPA-computer to even decode their CD:s.
What burns my britches is that this decision is in direct contradiction with well-established consumer rights in some countries.
For instance, in Cananda, I have the right to make verbatim copies of any media I want, as long as I am the owner of the original and do not allow more than one copy to be used at the same time. I'm pretty sure that I could legally burn 10,000 copies of any BMG title and use them to shingle my roof if I so desired (I wouldn't, but I could).
I'm also pretty sure that BMG is not allowed to restrict these rights.
The problem is that even though we have these pretty strong consumer rights in Canada, interest in protecting these rights by the government has eroded to the point where it is just a funny funny joke.
Another problem I have is that I do not buy CDs at the "big" stores. I purchase from a local music dealer who I have a good relationship with. If it was HMV I'd just return the CD and say "it don't work". I don't give a shit if BMG isn't going to reimburse HMV, because I'll stand there and power pout until I get my fscking way. I won't feel so good about doing that to a smaller retailer.
This actually happened recently when I picked up the latest "Queens of the Stone Age" and the CD wouldn't mount in my iBook. I wasn't even ripping or burning it. I was fscking trying to listen to the CD at the coffee shop. No, we can't have that, so it locks up the iBook CDRom player so hard I have to reboot to read any CD. I want to return it, but I'd feel bad going back to this great music store I found.
If I was feeling paranoid, I'd suggest that this tactic also has the effect of hurting smaller retailers more, leaving BMG, HMV &etc. with an even bigger share of the CD retailer market.
Reading this article has reminded me how much people suck. Grumble. Bitch. Complain.
-- clvrmnky
It is time for everyone in Europe to boycott BMG, and put them out of business. They will probably try to sell these corrupt CDs to the rest of the world as well, even thoght the article doesn't say so. Any business that presumes its customers are thieves deserves to be out of business. Dont buy CDs, especially not from BMG.
How ya like dat?
Return the CD because it's defective and won't play in your CD player.
Honestly, I'm thinking this is the correct approach to the problem, not to copy the CDs, mind you, becausen that's wrong and stuff (legal disclaimer); but I can't help but think if we buy the CDs and return them because they are broken, then the record companies will lose money. Maybe if they get enough "playable" CDs returned because they are in fact not playable on the devices that their consumers wish to use they'll get the message.
Has anyone else out there tried this?
Not buying something something you would have otherwise bought can be a boycott. Not buying something because you can't even make use of it in the first place is not a boycott. For example, the fact that I haven't bought any motorcycle helmets isn't that I'm boycotting them - it's that I don't own a motorcycle, so there'd be no point.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
Unless someone is prepared to spend lots of money on amp and speakers they might well not notice much difference anyway.
To me, $15 is very reasonable for music of this quality.
BTW, a couple other cool things about CD Baby is they are an all Open Source shop: no Microsoft with OpenBSD, MySQL, PHP, and Apache running the website. They have a great privacy policy, and treat your CC# like every business should. Check 'em out.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
CDDA is a trademarked logo (owned by Philips?). If you have a non-defective CD with CDDA logo and a player with CDDA logo but not compatible with each other, then sue Philips. Trademark laws in USA says that either you protect your trademark or lose it. Either Philips have to publicly announce that CDDA logo doesn't guarantee compatibility or they would lose the trademark (for allowing improper usage).
Forget getting a soundcard w/ digital in, if you don't have one already. Just pay ~$100 for a USB digital in/out connector that sports both coax AND fiber connectors (something I haven't seen on any soundcards). Complies with the USB audio spec, if I recall, so should even work in Linux.
Company is Edirol, they make a ton of other USB audio hardware - take a look around their site if you're interested. Here's the link to the UA-1D, the device I talked about above.
http://www.edirol.com/products/info/ua1d.html
Cheers.
I'm not sure that this is entirely correct. Its pretty difficult to get a consumer-level system these days w/o any digital output. My fiancee's 2-3yr old Aiwa shelf-top system that recently crapped out (standard 3-cd changer, two tape decks, AM/FM, maybe even Karaoke, not sure - dolby prologic, etc.) had an SPDIF output for the CD player. It couldn't have cost more than ~$200, with 5 speakers (left/right/center/rear surrounds).
My new Panasonic shelf-top system, which cost ~$250 at Circuit City, probably less elsewhere, supports dolby digital and has two digital inputs as well as a digital output, far as I know. Also came with 5 speakers, has a 5-cd changer, one tape deck, prologic, etc.
Both of these systems seem pretty "bare bones" - even "bottom of the barrel" - nothing hi-fi going on here. If these BMG CDs don't play in this type of equipment, then the only thing they'll play in is boom-boxes. Not a realistic business decision, I would think.
Cheers.
Make sure to shop with a credit card. Take the CD back, if they won't accept it, drop it on the counter and walk out. Call your bank and find out what you need to do to contest the charge (usually write a letter explaining why). The issuing bank will block payment of the charge and you won't have to pay for it. Technically they can take you to court but:
1) They aren't going to over $18 and more importantly
2) You gave the product back so they don't have a case.
Credit cards provide a great deal of protection, and the ability to block charges is one of them.
Well part of it was repeat sales but also because Darkside of the Moon rocked. It's rare to find music that good by modern bands.
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.
I tried a CDS-protected CD in my player (an aging Marantz CD-63 with both optical and digital outputs) - works fine. YMMV of course...
[BMG owns] RCA Records
Strange. BMG, a major record label, owns RCA Records. Thomson Multimedia owns the rest of the RCA brand, and Thomson is also the exclusive USA sublicensor of the MP3 patents. Does that point toward a new method of fighting "Music Piracy 3" (the first two were player-pianos and tape decks)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you stop paying for their products, the RIAA and MPAA won't have money to pay congressmen/women for laws like the DMCA.
I buy from members of the Big Nine media companies. But whenever I give $15 to (say) Interscope Records for the new Eminem album, I give an equal donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Consider analogies to Newton's Third Law of Motion: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, chances are he was referring to the group of four women who mix classical scores to dance beats and recently released a new CD. Their first one, "Born," was outstanding.
The key term here is "consumer" versus "customer". A consumer will consume something, largely no matter what. A customer is someone who must be convinced to buy their products.
They're assuming we're consumers instead of customers- and it shows.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yes, it's bond, the four ferociously hot women playing strings, not Bond, James Bond...
The first album got me hooked. The second one, Shine, is a little too much techno and not enough strings. At times, even the violins sound synthesized, which combined with the (loud) dead drummer takes away from how talented the quartet really is.
There's not even any ECC or EDC information in that scheme
You soooo don't know what you are talking about. Amazing how you got a +5.
Ever hear of Reed-Solomon? Look it up. It is the reason you can scratch a CD and usually it still plays without a hiccup.
You have a selective memory or defective reading skills. Children are mentioned as a reason for CD-R copies on almost every Slashdot story about fair-use and the MIAA.
Yay for the Floyd!
Off Topic Remark: I sincerely thought that the Smashing Pumpkins would go on to become the next Pink Floyd or U2, when their music matured a little bit more... but then they go and split up. Sigh.
Back on topic: any idea if these new Play-ably Challenged CDs will be used in Latin American markets soon? The music piracy here is a little bit worse than in the States, so I'd say they would love to give it a test try here, too.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
It's been said before, but:
1) BMG stops releasing "real" CDs in Europe.
2) Everyone and their brother discovers this cd won't play in their car, and can't be put into their collection by Microsoft Media Player. (Disclaimer: I run several OSes, but I know plenty of non-technical people who have digital music collections due to Media Player).
3) One persons somewhere in the world breaks the copy prevention, gets a pre-release copy (see: The Eminem Show), or RIPS IT OFF A US CD. Or even if all of these fail, one person makes a good D->A->D copy.
4) Everyone and their brother discovers that if they download music off the net, they can play it anywhere they want and make their own CDs.
5) CD sales plummet, copyright infringement skyrockets.
6) BMG says, "See? Piracy is up, sales are down, and here's a million dollars. SSSCA2 is a great idea!" Everyone forgets that this is only true in Europe, where the protected CDs are.
7) All hell breaks loose.
-Puk
How did I refrain from referring to a Republican congress in this post? Oops, I guess I didn't.
Well, it's not going to affect me much, because I don't plan on buying any of their "non-CDs" anyway.
If I need their music, I'll download uncorrupted versions from the 'net. Shame as I hate to have to download rather than buy legal versions, but if someone is knowingly trying to sell me defective merchandise, I don't have much choice do I?
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
One reason I never bought a slotloading CD player for my car was because all the mangled discs my friends had from their moblie playing. I've got too many irreplacable discs...
This sig intentionally left justified.
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)
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:
- The Art of Digital Audio by John Watkinson
- Principles of Digital Audio by Ken Pohlmann
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.And we all know it.
Let's pretend for a moment, nevermind how, that nobody can extract digital information from a CD anymore.
As everyone says, we will just make high quality analog recordings, and then turn those into the compressed music format-du-jour.
And people won't care. Digital copies will still be an issue, because once that digital master is made form the analog output, we can make perfect copies of that the world over.
It's all time and effort wasted.
Are you tired of old fashioned, un-copy-protected audio CDs which play in all your home-entertainement devices?
Well have BMG got a deal for you!
Now you don't have to put up with a single-use audio CD -- now there's the BMG Audio Coaster!
The BMGAC is a multi-purpose disk that you can use as a handy device for protecting your benchtop surfaces against those nasty, sticky rings left by coffee cups.
But wait, there's more!
You can also use the BMGAC to test all your CD players for faults! Just pop the disk into your player and within seconds you'll find out whether it's functioning correctly, or whether it has some severe design fault.
But wait, there's more!
Come the 4th of July, you can pop your BMGAC into the microwave and enjoy your own private fireworks display. Invite your neighbors over and celebrate with a BMGAC.
But wait, there's even more!
Young and old alike can get hours of pleasure and enjoyment from a BMGAC. Throw them like a frisbee and watch them soar.
Yes, throw away those tired old "regular CDs" and replace them with the new BMGAC today!
Disclaimer: Some customers may find that on placing a BMGAC into a compatible CD player, music may be heard. We apologize for this -- unfortunately our copy protection is not yet perfect and may not affect all playback equipment at this time.
If this problem affects a BMGAC by Britney Spears then we apologize double -- and warn that the noise that may issue forth could cause permanent damage your taste in music.
the only person who would call this a troll is a pirate themselves.
I make a point of the costs we all have to pay because of piracy and theft. It happened with software, music on records, tapes, and now CD. Copy protection add to the cost of products. Crime in general costs everyone when people have to spend more on security guards, tags, car alarms, and on and on.
Back to the music topic. I you don't like what a record company does, don't steal from them. Boycott their products, tell others to boycott them, support other record labels that don't use copy protection. Like or not in this country money is your best way to be heard. If a record company starts losing sales they will flinch. But two wrongs don't make a right.
In the last year I've bought hundreds of CD-Rs, but I haven't burned a single music CD. Most of them were for general archiving of stuff on my computer, my photos, downloaded software (mostly free/GPL), software and documentation I've created, and plain old backups.
Though I'm a big music lover, I'm not a big consumer of CDs. I have bought a few in the last year. It's easier to just go out and buy them than spend hours and hours looking for the stuff I want, none of which is mainstream anyway. Who has that kind of time except high school kids? Who, with that kind of time, has the money to buy CDs in the first place?
The bottom line is that they're "losing" a lot less business than they claim. Not all of us buying CD-Rs are putting music on them, and people "pirating" music probably weren't paying customers to begin with.
It's also not a troll. It's dead serious. Put that trout in your ass and smoke it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Instead of bitching individually (something that's pretty easy for BMG to ignore with canned replies), why don't we convince the manufacturers of "incompatible" CD players to enter the fray.
:-)
Why doesn't someone set up a website listing all the known CD players that *won't* handle BMG's copy-protected disks -- and stick a big "DON'T BUY -- FAULTY DESIGN (according to BMG)" tag alongside them.
The site can then be touted to the mainstream news media (who, if it's pitched appropriately) will eagerly make a lot of noise about it. The result will be some great "public education" and a lot of bad press for those manufacturers who appear on the list.
The next thing you know, BMG will have a hoard of angry corporate lawyers beating on their door, complaining that their client's products and reputation has been defamed by BMG's claims.
I suspect that companies like Alpine, Pioneer, etc have a lot more money, lawyers, and muscle to give BMG an "attitude adjustment" than a cluster of snivelling techie-nerds.
Let's not get angry, let's get smart!
It used MIDI (which I believe was used in-game). It also had Red Book audio for listening in your CD player.
Take a glance at the ridiculously in-depth Marathon Story Site's Music Page, which has some good background and coverage.
BTW, TA had some excellent Star Wars-esque music. I purchased it, lost the CD, and then downloaded oggs of their music. Love it.
May we never see th
How can you claim an unplayable disk is red-book compliant?
Apologies if someone's pointed this out before OR if it's utter rubbish: this is just what my own curiosity seems to have unearthed...
As I understand it, the red book standard for audio CDs uses the disc's TOC (table of contents) to determine what's on the CD. These protected discs contain a valid TOC which a red-book player will read and use to play the music correctly.
However, CD-ROM drives don't just use the red book TOC to determine a disc's contents: they support "multi-session", which takes into account any "updates" to the TOC subsequently found on the disc. (This is how CD writers can change the contents of a CD that already has a TOC, since obviously you can't overwrite the existing TOC.)
So to make a red-book compliant CD that only works in pure audio CD devices, you just give it a valid TOC, followed by an "update" that says "all files in the TOC have been deleted" (or, for greater confusion, is just full of illegal rubbish). Voila - your PC will see it as blank or incomprehensible.
Logically, though, I'm sure it shouldn't be impossible to write a ripping program that uses only the original TOC and ignores any multi-session data. In fact, I think it might exist this already - I have several hybrid CDs that my PC sees as pure data, but I can still rip the audio tracks with Nero. But I've yet to experience a CD that's actually deliberately crippled, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
:-) I haven't purchased any Apple products since their killing of the clones, a fair number of years back -- I swore I'd leave my much-loved Mac after that incident, and now I've been using x86 Linux for years. No iDisk available...
Hmm...my Marathon 1 CD is unfortunately at home, not at college with me. Post an email address where I can get in touch with you.
May we never see th
Actually, in all of history and folklore, she's probably the person who most famously didn't know what to do. So afraid you're probably not going to get +1, Informative for that. ;)
Please show me somewhere.. ANYwhere Microsoft has claimed Windows XP is the most stable OS ever.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Also, have you ever used XP? Do you have any basis for your comment?
slashdot!=valid HTML
As I understand it, all the TOC schemes can be defeated with current hardware, which I believe the programs you are talking about are now doing. But the errors in the music are not fixable unless they are all read. Of course a program can analyze the data and remove what it thinks are the errors, but this is not as nice as being able to reproduce what an analog CD does.
Or you could just make an "analog" CD player that has a lossless digital output tapped in after the error correction circuits but before the DAC...
Indeed it is. Hence shouldn't be apostrophised.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
It's a common usage, but not (strictly) grammatically correct. If you're being strict, it would be the computers memory was increased.
Fortunately, human languages are (mostly) more forgiving of incorrect punctuation than (say) Perl or Python. Human languages are also subject to evolution by usage, although less so than before the codification of the 18th century.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's