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Copy Protection On CDs Is 'Worthless'
zotler writes "NewScientist.com has an article about how copy protection on audio CDs is worthless. I thought this was funny since I just read this earlier Slashdot article 'BMG copy protecting all CDs'." The article also neatly sums up the technology behind current fair-use-inhibition stratagems.
It's quite helpful in pissing off paying customers, and driving them underground to pirate...
Seriously though... If it can be played, it can be copied... no matter what kind of protection they use... Why waste the money and resources to 'secure' the CD, and piss off and lose customers?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
from the article:
Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
amen!
R.I.P.
The majority of tracks on the CD are also often *worthless*. Just let me download the songs I like and pay a reasonable amount per song!
Boom Shanka
...they didn't mean to say "The music on copy protected audio CDs is worthless"?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
a black sharpie pen is priceless.
$cat
Leave it to the british to add up to ~140% on a poll graph.
It amazes me how intelligent and qualified individuals can show time and time again how copy protections are at best a short to mid term solution to unwanted copying. On the otherhand, you have Macrovision snapping up competitors in a race to stay ahead of consumers. It is just a war of attrition which will be around long after we're all gone.
What one man can hide, another can find.
Cheers,
VonKraken
There's a lot of "well, duh" moments in this article:
Such as:
the idea of CD copy-prevention is "fundamentally misguided".
And:
To ban upgrades, he argues, would lead to "buggy software and poor hardware."
And best of all:
Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
Are you listening Ms. Rosen?
I go into the Best Buy and look at those new CD's and I look over them and look over them and I can't tell if it's one of those copy protected CD's. To heck with it, I am not going to buy a CD I can't play on my computer and I can't tell if it's copy protected or not so I'm not buying any CD's now. Copy protect this.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
One thing that a lot of people seem to ignore is that most people are pretty clueless about the relatively easy methods of circumvention.
Then again, for a while now those people are also the least likely to try to copy a CD so I guess there is some truthfulness to the original claim.
Either way, we all know that there's an industry model change on the way. That's easy to predict. Knowing what it is or when it will hit, that's the hard part (always has been, always will be). It reminds me of Warren Buffet's comments about the invention of the automobile -- (paraphrased) nobody could have predicted how it would develop with any kind of guaranteed accuracy, but it would be fairly obvious that buggy-whip manufacturers were on the way out.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
will his report on how the hardware/software can be updated to read the correct TOC fall under the aegis of the DCMA?
The article mentions that the Table of Contents on copy protected CD's is geared to multi-session CD's that are otherwise burned on your home PC. I wonder if this just makes it a little easier for piracy....
This sig no verb.
I always understood that *any* copy protection of media such as this is useless, because at some point the content has to be decoded to analog so that the speakers can physically create the sound. At this point you can capture the analog signal and encode it in any digital format you like.
A simple (and ineffective due to quality issues) example is connecting a line-in cable from your CD player's head phones jack to your PC's line-in, and then recording and encoding to ogg.
What's stopping people doing this?
"Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
is this man insane??? doesn't he know that making an audio CD is a horribly expensive thing and the HUGE royalties given to the artist forbids such tactics?
Oh wait... someone hit me in the head with a 2 by 4 again..... sorry, my bad... I lost my mind for a minute there...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It obviously didn't work to prevent all of the Britney Spears and New Kids on the Block copycats.
The never ending game of copy protection and "crackers" will end one side gives up. I think we all know the crackers aren't going to. Is there ANY proof that these copy protection schemes have saved any company any money? I can pull up a lot of "research-data" that says they have lost money, but it occurs to me that these protection schemes are quite a waste of money. Does anyone have an argument as to why companies should continue to develop such technologies?
With sound cards having gone completely digital, you wouldn't even HAVE to rip the CD to get a damn decent copy. Just port the digital-out on the cd-rom to the digital-in on a sound card (as most do, now) and then record. Slow, yes, but high-quality and could probably be made faster. As the previous poster put it...if it can be played, it can be copied. Duh.
The author is making a classic mistake,
thinking that the security must be perfect
in order to be effective.
The systems do not have to be perfectly
secure to be effective. They just have to
encourage most consumers to follow the
rules set down by the copyright holders.
--
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.
As expected there is nothing the RIAA can do to stop this rabid army of "pirate downloaders" that i PROUDLY call myself a member of!! hear that, eat me METALLICA!!!!! and that old bitch can suck on some redhotdonkeynutz!! woohoo hahahahahahaha
can anyone explain how these are still considered redbook cds? or still hold the 'cd' label?
take a look at this Tom's Hardware Guide article on CD-RW drives and what copy protection they could get by out of the box by using blindread/blindwrite:o m/storage/02q2/020617/i ndex.html
http://www6.tomshardware.c
Three out of four were successfully copied (two versions of safedisc, cactus data shield, and the one they couldn't get by: TAGES, which is used in games).
So do any firmware upgrades for just such a purpose exist for any drives yet? No such love for my Plextor 12/10/32A so far.
Can anyone confirm *any* newer drive being shipped with the ability to ignore "weird" TOCs beyond the first one on audio CDs?
If people want to copy CDs, they will.
/. I'm sure you can find something to do for an hour.
No matter what they do to CDs, if you can play them at all (whether it is in a Car stereo, home stereo, computer, discman, whatever) you can always feed your line out to the line in on your computer.
Obviously this is a pain in the ass. But if you're set on not buying a CD nothing "they" can do can keep you from making copies.
As far as signal degradation goes, your line in can [theoretically] be of the same quality as your stereo's line out, which is as good as your going to hear it anyway. So while it's not a purely digital transfer (although it could be with a high end stereo/soundcard) you shouldn't really notice the difference.
If you're an Audiophile that can notice the difference, you're probably not going to be copying CDs/Making MP3s anyway.
I know, I know, you read all this and you're saying, but what about the time it takes.... Yeah you're right, but you gotta deal with that. Start it and walk away, or check your email, or read
My two cents
(Read this 999 more times and you can afford one CD)
The multinational media corporations believe that music is a product to be squeezed of every last vestige of profit without any need to invest in new talent or to enable musicians to experiment. They do this by seeking to enforce property rights in copyright law that give them ownership of the music created by musicians in perpetuity. But they go much further in their attempts to control every derivative of the music, including samples, lyrics, melodies, rythmns and imagery. Anybody breaking their copyright is dealt with harshly and ruthlessly in the courts. When these companies have finally acheived their aims of preventing us from being able to create our own music we will live in a corporate world where we can be only consumers of music. In contrast, we at LOCA believe that creativity requires that musicians reappropriate and reinterpret music and sounds to enable them to create truly innovative music.
LOCA believes that the fight over Open Content and Open Media is a struggle over the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech, radically opening up the possibilities of media. To this end LOCA is attempting to release music under so-called copyleft, a license that enables music writers to develop music collaboratively and equitably and then release it into the public domain. Using either the Open Audio license (from EFF) or the LOCA Public License, a derivative of the GNU Public License (GPL), LOCA hopes to provide the control necessary to prevent further commercialisation of work that is released and to encourage others to do the same. We hope that musicians who contemplate using the work released in this manner will honour the license and release their work under a public license resulting in a radical rejection of the whole capitalist ethos of these multinational media corporations.
Unfortunately we don't have the resources and people only seem to buy music from the aforementioned multinationals with the huge billboard adverts... hence we will probably go under.... oh well...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Oh, so you can actually BUY cds from the store without having to download them from the internet for free?? Wow, Its so hard to keep up with current technology these days.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but seriously, why don't the record companies do something productive like adding more content to CDs if they're not willing to lower the price? Recently I've seen a few cd's on the shelves (the one that comes to mind is the Nick Carter CD > ) that include a DVD with videos and stuff for the same price as a regular cd. If more labels did that, offering video content at DVD resolution, I would gladly plunk down the $16 for a new cd!
Romeo & Juliet for 1337 hax0rz! http://www.redcoat.net/pics/romjul.swf
The point of the music industry putting their ineffective and badly done copy protection on their CDs is not to prevent someone who wants to make a copy from doing so. It's so that they can make people afraid of going to jail for violating the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA. We've legislated that any technology intended to prevent the theft of intellectual property can not be circumvented. No matter how ineffectual, badly done, or downright broken it is. If you buy a CD-ROM drive for your computer that will play the copy protected CD, you have definitively broken the law and can be criminally prosecuted. THAT is the point.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
There's no such thing as copy-protected CD's! If I buy a 2$ cable from Radio Shack, I can record it onto my computer! The only copy-protected CD is one that can't be played.
Kick out the jams, motherf*beep*cker!
This is one very bad article. It states copy protection is worthless. Then, supposedly in an effort to back up that claim, it says that the copy protection schemes the author of the article examined can be circumvented by updating software used in CD players. IANAL, but I think such `updating' is illegal in the USA (think DMCA).
I do think that [some] future computer CD players will be made such that they correctly play those mangled CDs, which would indeed make _this_ form of copy protection useless (if not backed up by laws like the DMCA). However, that does not port to copy protection in general, which is what I initially thought the article was about. Plus the copy protection works against current technology, and that's all that can be expected of it. (Although I recall something about a German magazine detailing how one could disable the copy protection using a felt-tipped pen.)
The author ends his article by saying that selling CDs for cheap would be a solution for the record companies, as it people would find it too much trouble to find their music online and burn it on CD. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I find finding [ack] music online and downloading it less of an effort than going to the store, searching for the CD, and paying for it. Besides, does the author _really_ believe that reducing prices by an order of magnitude would _solve_ the record industy's problem??? I think it would rather create a currently percieved but nonexistent problem...
Rant off.
---
The more laws and order are made prominent,
the more thieves and robbers there will be.
-- Lao Tsu
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I've yet to be unable to copy a new cd. I'm sure I'm just lucky though. I've bought more music recently though than I have in the past several months. Out of the last two months I'll say I've bought maybe eight or ten cds and I've burned them all to my hard drive with no problems at all.
Question for the gurus though, regarding some of the content of the article: is the ability (or rather, inability) of a pc cd-rom drive to read these protected cds strictly a hardware issue, a driver issue, or would something like Nero be able to rip an ISO of the disk correctly?
Spread the RC luvin'
Dudes, it's easy, and yes you can do it with a lot of the new crop of "copy protected" CDs. The secret is *shh! don't tell anyone!* Old crappy hardware. Some of the new tricks to protect against copying assumes your equipment, like your CD drive, is relatively new. Pick up an old 4x CD ROM drive. You'd be surprised how well all of a sudden things like the supposedly protected Shakira album just play... and as we all know, if it plays, it can be copied.... ;)
However, it's more fun to implement this with a microwave than to buy them pre-destroyed.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Music sales are down for the simple reason that there is very little music these days that inspires folks to run out and get the album. I mean come on, I remember when U2's The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree came out and everybody I knew HAD to go out and purchase the album because it was a new sound and soooo well put together. Same held true for Peter Gabriel's solo albums, Bob Mould's solo stuff, Rush etc...etc...etc.... These limited examples of 80's music were albums that were crafted with heart and soul and lots of work. Now we get "engineered" bands and artists who rarely if ever write their own material and the artists on the discs are commonly studio musicians. All because the large corporate studios wanted a bigger cut of the pie than they already were getting. Because of this stranglehold, musicians like Jen TryninJen Trynin [jentrynin.com] were forced out of the music biz despite being very talented. Check out United Musicians [unitedmusicians.com] or QDivision [qdivision.com] for other smaller labels with real talent.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online.
So true. The record companies have to lower the bar. The urge to take is much too high compared with the prices of CD's right now. They're going to have to find a balance.
I mean, say most teenagers have a joe-job at maybe $6.00 an hour. To buy a CD, they have to work two hours flipping burgers or delivering papers.
OR they can spend 20 minutes downloading the same album from the internet. What do you think they're going to do?
The RIAA is going to HAVE to change their model if they want to survive.
$15.00 CD's * Angry customers who leave = $0.
$5.00 CD's * Happy customers who stay = More than $0.
=-Jippy
The copy protection schemes are created to force consumers to *buy* legit copies of the CDs, as opposed to stealing the MP3 versions. So Mr. Honest Consumer with lots of discretionary income:
1) Goes to the store and buys a new copy of some Top-40 Fluff band of the minute.
2) Tries to play it in his new "Super Fancy 500 feature Play-Any-Format CD player", but it can't play the new CD because the CD thinks his player is a PC player.
3)Tries it in his similar car CD player, with similar results.
4) Says "screw this", D/Ls his favorite songs for free, burns them to CD, and lives happily ever after, perfectingly *WILLING* to pay for new CDs, but he can't, because they won't work with any of his "Advanced" stereo eqpt.
Hats off to the file sharing companies for coming up with this brilliant scheme to deprive record companies of their most secure source of income, the Honest Customer! Wait, they ARE the ones who came up with this copy protection scheme, aren't they? No? Hmmm.....
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
So, in other words, the RIAA should respond to supply and demand.
Nothing.
his suggestion to the music industry is to make cds a couple dollars... i think the idea of 15 bundled songs is the problem. make a SONG $1... and then tell your artists to make good songs.
riaamusic.com... sign up today and get 50 free credits when you buy 50... then log in and download any song you want for 1 credit... WHY IS THIS SO HARD FOR THEM TO GRASP?! i haven't bought a CD in yyyyyeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrsssss after all mine were stolen some time ago. i don't want to rely on the physical disc anymore, so i don't buy them. BUT if you let me download for a dollar, i WOULD. god damn this pisses me off... almost as much as copy prevention... if i can HEAR it, i can RECORD it.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
You know, I checked out that "Corrupt CD" site for the list.... 95% of the music being protected I consider at best "inadequate". "Our crap has been hermetically sealed for our protection..."
Now that the Congress is Republican controlled, it is going to be interesting to see how that affects the "Hollywood/music/**AA" cabal's efforts. Before you sneer, recall that most of the key anti-consumer, anti-privacy, pro-dmca congresscritters are Democrat. I will not buy any CDs unless it has been clearly established to be not corrupted in format. Since I buy mostly folk, classical, ethnic... sound quality is critical.
Caveat: by 2004 we may all be screaming "give us Green, give us Libertarian, out with the Corporati Demopublicans").
I have just reported you to TIPS.
Please sit quitely with your hands folded until the investigatory agents arrive from the Secret Service.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A suggestion to the music industry: stop producing CDs and bring back the vinyl records.
Mirror of article (printable version)
Provided by Mr HOSTBOT
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
Now, why has not anyone in the music industry come up with this yet. Clearly, after every 30 seconds of CD-listening, the copy-protection contained should ask (with a sexy female voice) guestions like : "On page 3, of the pamphlet that came with CD you purchased, which one of the following ten options best describes the hair color of Britney Spears, punch ff>> 1-10 times to enter your answer". Simple as that, copy-protection re-inveted!
There are many levels of people who wish to copy music. These range from casual copier to hobbyist to professional pirate. The copy protection barely needs to exist to keep the causual copier from copying on his own. No amount of copy protection will keep the professional pirate away, but laws are pretty effective at keeping him at bay.
It's the hobbyist that the content producers need to look out for. There are far too many of them to lock up, and all it takes is a few to put the music on the internet so all of the casual copiers no longer have a barrier to copying. I've seen completely non-technical people who are afraid of computers figure out how to use Kazaa or Napster and start downloading music.
So copy protection needs to be effective enough that even the hobbyist decides it's not worth it to copy, and that's a pretty high barrier, most likely impossible.
-Alison
When I want to play a game or listen to music I don't like having the CD in my drive. The new slim-tops don't even have CD drives(fancy cupholders). I don't bother trying to copy protected games so i can play my brother, I just get a no-cd crack. Its easier on me and my CD drive. The same will and does happen with CDs. Most geeks(like me) listen to varieties of music for long stretches at a time. I would hate to change the CD every hour and interrupt my coding. I much prefer to listen to my ripped Dave or B-52s.
Im just saying that cds are annoying to use, and people like the music not the CD itself. We don't pay for the cd's, we pay for the music. It shouldn't be tied to the medium.This also mean I can find my music. My room is very messy, and finding my cd bag takes time. With MP3s, I can point, click, and play. simple.
As long as you can play the audio back, you can record it.
Nowadays, most audio systems come with digital audio out capabilities and most PC sound cards come with digital audio IN capabilities.
So you can get the music with no loss of quality onto your PC. Once it's on your PC, you can make mp3s, oggs, mix it...whatever.
The only thing it's really blocking is the retrieval of CDDB info. Even the tracks can be split up from the track lengths as the data comes in. And guess what? It hardly takes a few minutes to get the track info off the web given the CD name and then copy-paste into your favorite tag editor.
So what is all this copy-protection accomplishing? Nothing but irritation. It's not preventing ANYONE from copying music. Also, I am curious to know whether the law about making a personal backup would apply here? If it does, would that not make copy prevention illegal?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Who ya'll callin a cracker, darkie?
Not only do I think this will be ineffective, I think in many cases it'll be self-defeating.
I've got a toddler in the house, which means that CD cases left in the open get opened and covered in peanut butter fingerprints. C'est la vie, so I went ahead and ripped my library via iTunes to a pair of 80 GB drives, and now I've got a wonderful, searchable, kid-proof music library.
I simply can't imagine going back to having to deal with physical CD media anymore. I'm happy to rip the disc when I get it and put it in the storage room, but that's about it.
So, if I really wanted music that was on a copy-protected format that was effective, I'd HAVE to pirate it to listen to it.
Other folks are in the same boat - everyone who listens to music on systems not compatible with this protection. The presumption behind this copy protection is that users will replace their in-dash CD players with a compatible one. Instead, I think it is MUCH more likely users will return the CD to the store, and download the tracks from a P2P site.
It only takes one user to crack the copy protection to make the content available online. But EVERY case where the copy protection works is a lost sale for the record company.
They need to understand that the effectiveness of a copyright protection scheme is inverse proportion with how difficult the copy protected version is to use compared to a cracked version.
This is one of the reasons dongles have been disappearing in the software industry - users would crack a legit copy just to use the software on a laptop!
My video compression blog
This is one of the few intelligent suggestions I've heard for stopping music piracy. Production costs, printing costs, and royalties to the artist amount to less than $1.50 for most CDs. If the music industry was willing to cut some of the fat out of the middle man they might be dealing with more honest customers. But, clearly that's not their main concern.
Copy protection is alive and well in the game industry. In fact the last time I checked there are two copy protection schemes for computer games that no one has broken yet.
This doesn't necessarily translate to the music CD market. A music CD is basically just data, and it must continue to work with some extremely old devices. This eliminates many of the hooks that a software protection scheme can use.
I used to listen to them in the early 80's. Boy, were they good.
What amazes me is that you can buy an average DVD for $20. With this, you get an entire movie that required much more money to produce. You also get other things like extra materials, or deleted scenes, music videos, interviews, alternate audio commentary, etc, etc. The average CD will cost you somewhere around $14. With this you get 10 to 14 songs, 80% of which suck, and nothing else. Now how in the world can the MPAA produce a DVD with so much material, and something that is so much more costly to produce(meaning the filming budget) for barely more than what you would pay for a CD with a dozen songs. This makes no sense to me.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
This is an article I have put on my site as well. Because I am a DJ I am very dissapointed in the decision of BMG.
:)
Bertelsmann (BMG Music) will stop to sell uncrippled CD's. This means such cd's will not play at certain older & newer CD players, certain car players and will not play in your computer. This for the price of 20US$ to 22US$ per CD !
As DJ I am very worried because one scratch crashes my CD into oblivion. The copyprotection does not let me play half of my cd's on my old cd players in my house (and I have three of those).
The protection on these cd's is the Cactus Data Shield from Midbar. The protection is currently only being used on EUROPEAN cd's. A lot of the cd's being used in Europe are not available in the US what leaves only one option, buying them here and praying they do not get damaged + work in the CD players you use at that time.
The error is in your player, not in our copyprotected cd's.
---
BMG distributes a lot of the cd's that are currently being used by me as DJ and shows no respect for their customers whatsoever by creating CD's that work on only 80% of the home/pro audio equipment. Additionally they say "the error is your player's, and not in our CD's".
I am at a very moral dillemma because every time I buy music I first search the MP3's and then write down the titles I want to find. Some of these titles are only to be found on CD's and some of 'm are only to be found on vinyl.
legally bought music is working against me now!
---
I used to go to the recordstore and get about 20-30 records whereof 1 or 2 where usable. Whenever I go to the recordstore now I give 20 titles and get 15 useful numbers out of it. I currently have over 800 CD's and over 22.000 records of vinyl. Currently I am buying more on CD because carrying all the vinyl is breaking my back
Since I cannot use the cd's wherever I want and 1 scratch can kill the CD because of this lousy copy protection I need to buy the CD *and* burn the same MP3's to seperate CD's to be sure I can keep using the music I want to play legally!
The secret agent not working everywhere!
I have bought the CD of James Bond (Universal) and it seems not to work in my PC (where I play the most of my music, my PC speakers are the best in my house!) and they seem not to work in my old cd players of my own DJ equipment! Next to that the shop does not want to take the Bond CD back. With the line of defence BMG has by saying "their cd's are fully redbook compliant and it's your player's fault" they also tell you you can bugger off by bringing it back to the shop where you bought your precious CD.
I have bought several other CD's like "Solid Sounds" which is giving me errors as well. Currently I am trying to recover one of the legally bought CD's by searching the MP3's and burning them in the same order on another CD because I cannot just copy it and the CD is damaged by (over)usage as DJ.
BMG's reply of one of their CD's
---
Whenever you send a note to BMG you get the following mail back (unaltered):
"we are sorry you have troubles with our copy protection technology. The copy protection reacts on the special new technology that is build in in burners. Unfortunately htis technics was built in many new CD players, even if they can't copy a cd.
"The copy protection yet does not recognize wheather that burner technics is build in a cd player or in a burner. That's why the cd playern might not play a copy protected CD. Since burner technics are also built in car radios, this may be the reason, why you can't listen to a copyprotected cd in your car.
"As far as we were adviced, our copy protection is according to the Red Book Standart as well as all labelling on the cd.
"A standart home CD player is one that has no burner technics built in. Our Cds play on all Cd players without burner technics.
"There will be no cd manufactured without copyprotection any more."
This seems to limit a lot of options and costs me a lot more to find the numbers, import these from wherever possible and find them on mp3 to have a backup CD of my original CD! Of'course they tell "we are sorry" though they also tell us "the fault is in our bought players and there will be no cd's manufactured without protection anymore"... I wish I should not have read this blasphamy towards a lot of customers!
Moral dillema, I am for the music, not against!
---
Because I am a DJ I cannot tolerate (for myself) to be using illegal material! I live by the music and I live FOR the music and not AGAINST. Seems to be BMG has the same reason but not only FOR the music but to protect their precious wallet!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Correction : The parent post's subject should correctly be stated above. Tells the whole story.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Seriously, I've never purchased many CD's in my lifetime (10-20), but if CD's were only $3-4, I would be buying them impulsively with little regard as to whether I would even listen to it.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Looks like they have pissed off audiophiles as well...'no digital outputs are being put on SACD/DVD-AUDIO Players until they can secure the digital audio stream'...wtf is the point of higher quality sound on a disc if the output will be even worse?
And this is relevant... how? New Scientist is a UK-based publication read around the world; why should the backwards laws of a backwards country limit their discussions?
I want to buy the music of an artist, but find that the music is on a copy-protected disc. So, instead of paying for the music that I can't play on my computer (my primary CD listening place) and can't rip (to enable me to use it with an iPod), I go online and download the tracks, because I know that there are clever people who know the ways around the technology, even if I don't.
And the rules set down by the copyright holders via copy-protection violate the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the consumer.
Yep, its stupid to waste millions on something which is ultimately ineffective.
It'll only take a few very very simple modifications to make computer CD drives play these "copy protected" CDs. Once a computer can play the protected CD, then you can just use your favorite wave recorder and set the input to "what you hear" (the exact digital output). This creates a perfect-quality copy.
My guess is that CD manufacturers will release such patches very soon. Not only to allow the playing of crippled CD's on computers, but also to allow for the salvation of damaged CDs. If one lookup table on a multi-session CD is damaged, it stalls there, which is a problem.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I, for one, refuse to buy new CDs anymore, but that doesn't mean that the dozens of people who turn to me as their local geek don't. The lil ole lady who lives next to me got sent some CDs from her son (who's overseas ATM), and couldn't figure out why they wouldn't play in her new(ish) CD player. You try explaining to a 90 year old luddite the intricacies of CD TOC practices and Redbook.
BTW, how does having a corrupt TOC adhere to the Redbook? Just curious how they managed that.
So, anyways, I end up bringing the f*cking things over to my place to burn off onto *real* CDs for her, which unfortunately ends up with her seeing my setup when she brings me over homemade cookies to say thanks. Next thing I know, I'm putting every bit of music she owns to CD... and I mean *every*, considering I have a turntable, cassette, CD (old-skool, to read those f-ing cds), and 8-Track all on my line-in. So I end up spending all day and night pulling off all this music (it took days and days of 24 hour play to get this stuff in), and more days and nights of doing some rudimentary cleaning on pops and crackles. She ends up so happy with it, she tells everyone else in the complex about it during the monthly condo meeting... I now have a computer slaved to nothing more than audio reads, and literally SHELVES of cookies and cakes and preserves and everything else you can think of. If you consider the average phono/tape/8-track/cd to be roughly 1 hour in length, it's going to take me over 3 months just to read this shit in.... and it still hasn't stopped. They don't even say hi anymore, just leave a stack of music at the door with a bag of something homemade on top... the guy from the other end of the complex left his DVD player and a bunch of out-of-region DVDs for me last week (he's maxxed his region changes). And every time I say I'm too busy for this crap, whatever sweet lil grannie it is this time looks up (wayyy up, I'm 6'4") and says "Don't worry dear, whenever you get to it. I kind of like the silence."
Therefore, based on the imperical evidence of the growing hell life is becoming, coupled with the expected dentist bills I'll get soon from all the cavities I'm sure to develop, I'm forced to conclude not only that copy protection == PAIN, but also that CP==EVIL. And, based on this, I'm lead to the conclusion that Hillary Rosen must be the bane of my existance.
It's time for it to end. I can't take another day of "The Beach Boys greatest hits!". Someone tell me where the bitch lives. It's time to go give her a cookie.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
1a) CD + Ripping software = ripped songs. Problem, not many people have ripping software.
1b) CD + Ripping software + CDR = custom CD's and potential of small but wide scale pirating of music. Problem, not many people have CDR's and the media sucks.
Event: CD-R's grow in speed and drop in price, leading to large scale adoption of them as well as the closely tied-in technology like ripping.
2) File sharing begins to grow outside of the 1337 warez sites and into a more robust underground network. Problem, most people have crappy modems still.
3) Kiosks show how some can turn the inevitable change into fiscal opportunity. Problem, this cuts out the middle man, and the middle man has a very big hammer of lawerying handy.
4) Record sales actually begin to go up many can now sample their own custom mixes with CD quality rather than crappy tape. Problem, you gotta know the right people.
Event: Broadband becomes even more popular...
5) Low and behold the mighty uprising of P2P file sharing. Problem... well none if you like stealing stuff but this is not a moral lesson.
6) Record companies respond to this by wasting hoards of tax payer dollars to police an unpolicable force. Problem, they are stupid.
7) Audio CD's are now appearing with "protection" which causes as much hysteria as it does damage to devices. Problem, how do I know if this CD will work, much less not trash my system?
8) The freedom of mixing your own music (as in what you PAID for) is disappearing rapidly. Problem, well you USED to be able to do it and now even the CD's themselves are an expensive gamble.
Caveat: The recording industry, instead of operating in the free market fashion that made it so much money in the first place will now institute socialist methods of reducing competition and change... again ignoring the implausability of policing this reliably and cheaply.
9) It occurs to many that if they cannot legally obtain music that will not fry their system or require foolish measures to circumvent in order to use that PAID FOR merchandise like they want will remember how easy it is to get it for free.
Sum of problem: The RIAA and friends should work the system to their benefit instead of crying to the government to fix the problems they themselves created. They see themselves rightly as doomed because soon they will no longer be needed. What do you call the overpaid shit for brains that makes decisions about things he doesn't understand to the detriment of the organization? Manager!
No matter what you do, no matter how much money you spend with copy protection resources, once digitally inside a computer there's no way to control what users do with the information.
Once digitally inside the computer the data can be shared, copied, divided, multiplied, whatever the USER wants.
So, developers involved in copyright protection devices, keep this in mind, or even better, consider this as a fact, once digitalized there's no way to control what users do whith the information.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
could ya show me how to do that on a windows machine with "signed drivers".
thanks!
... hi bingo
Very few consumer-grade sound cards are "completely digital"...
Hmmm...Once I tried to read a multisession CD from an older CD driver in my computer. Only saw the TOC from the first session. The burner (newer) saw the current TOC. So, would I be able to see the proper TOC on my old drive? Can anybody suggest a CD that has this multiple TOC "copy protection". As I have not bought any CDs in years, my collection does not have this problem.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Clueless multinational fortune 500 music companies keep paying for them, and they have cash to burn when they are selling millions of albums for $17.99.
Being an engineer at a company doing DRM, I can tell you not all CD copy protection schemes mess up the TOC. The DRM scheme we've implemented works, and it works much better than midbar or macrovisions offerings (they were easy to hack and didn't work on all players). The discs we create have 99% playability (same playability as a normal CD). In fact, they are truely normal redbook CDs. That was a requirement of the project. AFAIK we are the only company doing DRM right now that can claim that.
o wait i forgot f.u.c.k.u
Bingo! If CDs were even $10 I'd probably buy twice as many.
if you copyprotect music on CD, then it is no more audio CD, it is data CD. And as we know, data CDs are more friendlier to computer CD drives than to audio CD players. As such, it will cause more harm playing on non-upgradable audio CD players, while computer CD drive manufacturers would issue a simple patch.
Nothing, but this is not copying. It is playing, then recording.
Playing, then recording is still "copying" under copyright law because the same music is fixed in the .ogg file that was fixed in the CD. Even if you perform a "cover" of a song, that is, you record your own performance, you still copy the original musical work.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What the music industry executives don't quite get, yet, is that it only takes one successful rip of a CD to spread like wildfire over sharing networks (which incidentally are digging deeper and deeper underground).
Given the quality level of a lot of music out there now, it's clear to me that absolute CD perfection is not the desire of the masses. Back when piracy was done (more slowly) by multiple generation analog re-recording, the quality level would drop each generation. It didn't take long before it totally sucked, and even then people often would put up with music 4 or 5 generations deep, just because it was free. Digital basically eliminates the generation problem, completely. Therefore a semi-sucky rip is actually good enough for the masses because it won't get any worse from there. And all it takes is for someone to rip it by playing it on a device that can play the copy protected CD and recording it via a sound card input. And if the device has no electrical analog output (permanently wired headphones, for example), it can still be captured by other means (some player will have to be able to play it for big home sound systems or else the music industry will be cutting out more market than piracy). It might suck to have to record music with microphones propped up against speakers (possibly with filters and noise generators to mask watermarking), but the quality of that won't be any worse than 2nd or 3rd generation analog was, and will probably still be better, anyway. The "analog hole" does exist, and it means that people can rip the music and swap it online, anyway.
What the copy protection is targeting most effectively is not the online trading, but rather, the casual CD duplicating. Many people do buy CDs then make copies for their friends. And with holidays approaching, the reverse will be common, too (buy CDs, duplicate or rip them, and send the original to your cousin for a gift).
Because of the fact that online music swapping is already virtually ubiquitous, it won't be much of a stretch to engage in that practice even more in the future. As more and more CDs fail to be playable on equipment that people paid good money to buy, be that an actual stereo system, or a custom made personal computer system running the latest Debian Linux, people will more often explore getting their music for free from the internet instead of buying CDs that don't work. They aren't going to just trash their stereo systems, and they aren't giving up on computer systems that still do other functions well. They will just get music in other forms instead of the store bought CD. And it's not because they necessarily want free music (those that do are already swapping anyway); it's that they want music that works, and swapped music may eventually be all that does. And to the extent the music industry doesn't want to serve this market, the more they drive this market away from buying any CDs at all.
Yes, there is a lot of piracy going on, and probably a lot more than there ever was. But it's the music industry itself, that will effectively destroy the CD format as we know it today. You just watch. They will do it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I read over the article headline and read "tasteless" instead of "worthless". Suits for me.
;-)
I don't by Racoon CD's because I can't play "Here we go, stereo" on PC/ Mac. (I first thought the warning was some sort of a joke, considering the LP image on the front of the album.) I would buy them if I could play them on my PC.
Strangely enough, though, Gnutella queries show that at least some people got to play "stereo" on their PC's. Oh well, suits for me
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
haiku...
/haiku
at the planned conference,
Mr. Halderman's Sharpie
is displayed; he leaves.
This space for rent.
Well kinda.
If they turn out ot be copy protected, back they go.
mmm...Sale of Goods act (UK)
This issue has spread through several DJ-related email lists since many DJ's with large collections like to reduce the number of CD's they have to carry by burning just the tracks they want to CD-R. Again, what is the likelihood of a "copy-protected CD" getting airplay?
Third, many DJ's record their shows in advance on a PC and burn them to CD-R. Once again what is the likelihood of a "copy-protected CD" getting airplay?
(quoting Tom Lehrer) "Now let's not see all the same hands!"
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I am working on my new website, which deals with cd copy protection. I am trying to make it a collection of everyone's experiences in dealing with record labels. I wrote to many labels. and i only got one back, many months after my initial email.
I also want to collect a set of email addresses so it would be easy for anyone to email multiple record labels their feelings on copy protection. If anyone wants to send me their experiences, you can email me at cristiana@cloud13.com
All the above-$15 ones that I've seen are. You don't have to have digital inputs and outputs on the faceplate on the back. All you need is a digital CD input, and almost all sound cards have one.
To whom it may concern:
This spring, I heard that the band Kent was to release a new album. I like them, and promptly went to my Audiogalaxy page to download some tunes since a recording of a concert was available. Sure enough, the song "Dom Andra" was available and I downloaded it. An excellent song, I really liked it. This resulted in the buying of their album "Vapen och Ammunition" in a store down town. I was excited to hear the whole album and slammed up the volume to enjoy this record.
But the record had copy "protection".
This resulted in pops and skips on my Harman / Kardon player and an inferior music experience not worthy of this otherwise excellent album.
You state on your web page that you are wiling to help if the record is not able to play. I don't want your help. It is not more difficult than downloading the latest circumvention device on the 'net, rip the files and burn a CD, not a bastard digital laser disc (BDLD).
After looking at my bank statments [They pissed me off so much I actually did some research!], I noticed that I used approx. 400 NOK less a month after mid june this year. Guess what happened then? I case you don't know, Audiogalaxy was crippled and forced to shut down access to most of their songs. After I lost the ability to discover new commercial artists through Audiogalaxy, my spending on CDs has been cut by 50%. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!
Kent was the last BMG album I bought, I'd rather not listen to music than listen to cracks and pops on a BDLD.
Sincerely,
Pål Unanue-Zahl
for free instead of buying it in the store, right?
Make you want to pound your head into the wall?
It's really so simple: If a person can see it or hear it, it can be copied. So the only solution is...
BREAKING NEWS!! The RIAA and the MPAA, in conjunction with all major media publishing groups, have announced a radical new strategy to deal with the copyig and "theft" of audio and video entertainment. Hilary Rosen of the RIAA explains, "We realized that the only way to stop people from copying our intellectual property was to stop producing copiable works.
Programmers and consumers, in their role as digital theives, were just too persistent in their efforts to circumvent our various copy protection schemes. As a result, we've stopped producing all forms of audio and visual entertainment."
sarcasm...
/end sarcasm
BMG announced release of a new media format called Polygraph Analog Disc or PAD for short. The new format will develop pops and crackles over time, however, it is a superior media because it has less distortion than the "bastard digital laser disc (BDLD)."
It was also announced that the PAD format allows playing at different speeds (33, 45, and an additional experimental 73) and is highly portable; it can fit in a flat shelving unit and is approximately one foot square.
"We feel that analog is the best since the sound quality of digital is regressing."
This space for rent.
If copy protection is a useless waste of RIAA resources, then why are so many people here complaining about it? Seriously, if anyone can easily defeat it, then what's there to discuss? Are we really worried about the RIAA throwing away their money? (No.) Copy protection, even if it is defeatable, is still a hassle, and therefore a deterrant, and is therefore a reasonable use of resources if the RIAA wants to stop copying.
(Note I'm not claiming it is the right thing to do, but it's certainly not worthless to them)
When I think of my habits in buying CDs, I *always* listen to samples of the whole album to know if it is worth purchasing. If not, I don't buy it. My standards aren't too high for that, so I will end up buying songs that don't hit me as great at first, but strike me as potentially enjoyable. If I only had to pay 30-50 for the borderline song, it would be like buying a candy bar. No biggie. Besides, if certain songs don't sell, it communicates a more precise message to the artist of what is enjoyed and what isn't. He or she can then write better music.
It's arguable that there is pressure on artists to produce enough songs (some of which may be subpar by virtue of being rushed) for an album before they release *any* of their music. I think it would free up creativity and make for better music if the album format were ditched.
Just my experience and thoughts....
Boom Shanka
Very simple, grab a Linux CD, put it in the drive and boot...follow on screen instructions.
Sig is on vacation
"The record industry could lose a fortune if people stop buying CDs and make their own copies. Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online.""
So Halderman believes that record companies must price their music at a low enough cost to remove the incentive to pirate? Aside from the obvious moral issues this statement presents (you should appease the people who would steal your property, rather than preventing them from doing so), I think this plan is doomed anyway, since as technology improves, It will become easier to download all the tracks of a cd and burn them than to go to the store and buy them, given no preventitive measures are taken. So the bottom line is, piracy is paving the way for cd encryption. If you don't like it, blame the pirates, not the recording industry.
Vote for Pedro
This reminds me of what has happened when countries tax the snot out of cigarettes. It usually drives people to underground markets to avoid paying the taxes on them. The market will only bear a certain price before people resort to various illegal methods of skirting around that price.
The answer to this "problem" is fairly straight forward. Either you increase spending in the area of law enforcement (which seems to be the direction we're going in the U.S.) or the market has to lower the price.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
First of all, I'm with you on the crappy artists thing, but not on the price. I personally will not buy CDs that cost over $12. That's my mental limit; that's what they're worth to me. Not a cent more. Frankly, I think they'd still make a killing at $10/CD for all new releases. They're sales would jump so high initially they'd have to backorder some stuff while people went nuts.
;+) It may take 20 years more for this to happen, but I'll be right there in the crowd at 50+ years old with all the young kids wearing a friggin tie-dye t-shirt or something wishing I could just forget the last 20 years of commercialism.
Remember, these people aren't really selling you a CD - they're selling you art. And that art shapes you. It contributes to making you someone to whom they can market additional services and products down the road more easily. Because of those CD sales, they will also be able to sell you through tertiary cultural forces: concert tickets, cable subscriptions (and that opens a whole nuther level of marketing capabilities), shoes (gotta look like Eminem, can't just listen to him you know), and the list goes on and on.
Think about it. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay through the nose for their marketing machine.
If they continue screwing up, what the record companies will do longer term is create a somewhat more de-commercialized generation of consumers. If that ever happens in a big way, these big media companies can kiss their asses goodbye. People will finally see this racket for what it is, stop being so materialistic, and tell these companies to take a flying leap.
Personally, I can't wait.
YMMV on that scenario, but I'm definitely ready for people to stop wanting their MTV so much (metaphorically speaking).
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
As long as you don't have a SBLive or SBAudigy running under windows.
The latest drivers for these cards have automatic DRM support. That's right, they DISABLE the digital interface if any copyrighted data is transmitted over it.
Fortunately the linux drivers are not so crippled.
We can't get too complacent and say "we'll always be able to make copies". Our degrees of freedom are slowly closing in. Think about it. In a few years there will be no analogue speakers or signal lines; it will be digital (with DRM) all the way.
All the RIAA has to do is make a fully red-book incompatible technology (eg encrypted RIAA-filesystem CD slightly larger than current ones) and flood the market with machines that can play them. Suddenly all our "illegal circumvention" devices such as midi systems and car CD players will be useless.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You say that it costs you less than $3 to copy a CD, but you are ignoring a bit of the "overhead", in both time and money, that enable you to copy the audio in the first place.
If we just ignore the cost of the broadband connection that allows you to download songs so fast (and hell, even the *computer* you're using), and simply count the time taken out of your day to track down your desired songs through all the porn and pop, I'd bet it would come to some figure higher than $3.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this; finding and burning music that you like has certain costs associated with it, so I don't think it's entirely true to say that you can pirate music for "next to nothing."
for great justice, this sig has been moved
If an artist/band/whatever insists on putting out copy-protected cd's, Boycott Them for a while.
Of course, they often have little control in how their music is published, but the tide of consumer anger has to start somewhere.
If enough music buyers held on to their $$$ for say, three months, it ought to make the point. Artists could then use the data to go back to their publishers and say "look, this isn't working!"
A grassroots website listing known-copy protected cd's would be helpful.
If your time was so valuable that you would really ask people to pay you to advise them, then would you advise everybody on Slashdot for free?
No!
And why do you do advise us for free?
Simply because your time is not worth that much!
So stop the crap.
From the postscript paper Linux + CDParanoia + Plextor Drive can copy every CD whatever copy protection scheme used.
m 20 02_pp.ps
See Page 13.
http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/halderman_dr
I'd no sooner buy a copy protected CD than light a $20 bill on fire. Right now, I buy most of the music I listen to. But if I can't make compilations, keep the original in my 200-disc carousel, and listen to copies on my computer and car, I have no inclination to purchase the music, and will retrieve it using a P2P client.
It also isn't going to take the majority of labels to start copy protecting music to cause me to stop buying CDs. If I happen to purchase just one unmarked copy protected CD from a sizable label, I imagine it will be the last CD I purchase for quite some time, until I am 100% confident that future purchases will not be copy protected.
I think that most people will feel the same way. As the old addage goes,"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." People don't like getting screwed on their purchases, and when they do, they are very unlikely to make the same mistake again.
Of course, as this happens, the RIAA will notice the increase in piracy, and phrase it in a manner to support further digital restrictions. They will deliberately remain ignorant of the cause, as they have done for so long now.
If youve got a reasonable sound card ie audigy i'm sure you could use optical out from a stereo to an optical input on a soundcard, another way of doing it ... kinda long winded but copying to net minidisc from optical out then import then convert to your format of choice, but we should have to go to these extremities in the first place, i bought the foo fighters new album while i was on holiday in sweden, tried to play it in our rental car (vauxhall vectra 2.2) and much to my disgust it didnt work. I got back to the hotel, tried it in my laptop and they've got a built in player that launches on autoplay (in windows) havent even considered trying to use it in my linux box, you can only play it in 126kbit .. bit of a random bitrate i know, but the audio tracks are inaccessable and the 126kbit files arent on the disc at all i'm confused to how its done, there is an 800meg file on the disc tho, i would have returned it.... but the swedish woman behind the counter was cute :)
Didn't the Treaty of Versailles already do just that?
Great! Here's a $100. Now defrag my drive, mop the floor, cook my some dinner and have your GF "fix" me up nice in the bedroom while you finish sorting my OGG files.
Dude... your personal time should be valued MUCH more than your professional time. Think about it.
And the offer still stands... $100 baby!
Yeah, there's lots of ways to do this.
My 4 year old Marantz CD player has a digital SPDIF out. My M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card has a digital SPDIF in. They work perfectly together.
Soooooo.... if my old CD player can play it, I can make a perfect digital copy. And I will.
The only thing the record companies achieve by attempting to copy-protect stuff is annoying me, which will make me buy less new stuff, and more likely to give copies of music to my friends.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Why don't they just start selling CD-Rs instead - these 'statistics' show that CD-R sales are rising, and if there's nothing on the CD, it can't be copied!
For my technical presentations class, I'm doing a persuasive speech about why CD copy protection is bad and what we can do about it. I was wondering if anyone has any points of interest they think I should include (aside from the obvious no MP3 ripping, doesn't work in some CD players, etc.). Also, I am suggesting that in order to combat this we should boycott copy protected CDs. Anyone have any other suggestions as to what can be done about it. (I'm talking to college students and I doubt I'll be able to convince them to do any letter writing, so you can rule anything involving that out.)
So despite all this talk about how "worthless" copy protection is on audio CDs, I still can't play a protected audio CD on my Linux box.
There are a couple of apps for MS which will make an exact copy of an audio CD but if the original won't play on my PC then the copy won't either. It's all very well if I want to make a copy to give to my friend to play on his hi-fi but that's not what I want to do.
What I do want to do is make a playable audio CD for my PC from the unplayable one that I've bought?
So far, I haven't been able to find a Linux app that can be configured to ignore corrupted TOCs and read only the first session, or one that ignores the TOC and reads as instructed.
hey man, all change that results in change that is positive is usually a struggle. the american revolution and the civil war turned out alright (american independence, the end of slavery). these were probably all accompanied by lawyers screaming about illegal activities. i think of napster, the riaa, mpaa, dmca, kazaa, etc., as the birthing pains concerning a new understanding of intellectual property, all of which wrought by the introduction of the internet.
;-P
look, there are 3 things you can "steal":
1. atoms
2. data about atoms
3. data for its own sake.
1. atoms: you steal a car. a car is a thing. you stole it. end of story. the way it is and the way it should be.
2. data about atoms. amalgamated incorporated's secret formula 51x to fix male pattern baldness. if you steal that data and use the information to make your own hair growth formula for purchase, then you have stolen. stealing the information itself wasn't bad, because scientists were already using the information freely about formula 51x to research formula 52x, which grows beards on women. stealing formula 51x to make money off your own version is the badness here, not simply sharing the information for the betterment of us all.
the way it is today is that amalgamated incorporated does try to call just using that information a crime, even though it stops scientific progress. see this slashdot story.
the way it should be is that use of formula 51x should be free for research, illegal for capital production of products derived from that information. we have a long way to go to fix this mess. intellectual property law should exist for only one reason: to promote progress, economic, and scientific. currently though, companies are hiring legions of lawyers to stifle progress. the problem is, if the company makes another $million because their legal department found a loophole and shoved an elephant through it, good for them. except that $million they made comes at the expense of the $billion society lost in all sorts of related progress: real, imagined, potential or otherwise. you do the math with your own example.
3. data for its own sake. music, books, etc. we are not in gutenberg's time anymore. we live in a world where information like music and books is as transmuteable as water. in a way, information wants to be free. entropy naturally leads to the release and spread of information. trying to contain information is a losing game like trying to fight gravity is a losing game. this point is a little too geekoid, so rather than wax and wane philosophical, suffice it to say that you ain't gonna stop the good word, no way, no how, if the good word wants to spread. where there is a will, there is a way.
music is not like formula 51x. it is about nothing specifically, and is enjoyed for it's own sake. this should be free. this is what the promise of the internet is all about! i mean come on people, weren't we getting excited about exactly this kind of dreamy stuff ten years ago? and now we want to put the genie back in the bottle? the internet is pandora's box, my lawyerly friend. litigate all you want, you can't reverse the flow of time. why would we want less convenience? should we throw out all of our cds too and go back to vinyl while we are at it? these lawyers are fighting simple, obvious progress that a kindergartner can understand.
the RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, etc. guards a world that existed before the internet. they are attempting to reverse history. let them go on with their bad selves, they can't possibly win. pandora's box is already open.
but who will make money off of music! no one will!???
so the future is about the status quo? things change dramatically sometimes because of new discoveries. just ask the aztecs or the incans. besides, there are always alternative models for turning a dime. someone will learn how to stand at the internet portals that tell people what they might want to listen to, and artists or the groups that represent the artists will pay them to put their name on that portal. i think radio has been handing out free music for decades, and we don't see them worrying about their economic model. nor do i see the publishing industry quaking in their boots over the existence of libraries with free books on loan. i think barnes and noble found out that if you let people sit around and browse their book selection for free, you make more money. on it's face, this is antithetical, but it is a centuries-old well-established business practice that handing out freebies leads to customers who feel obliged to patronize your wares.
the artists will make money the old fashioned way, by working for it. live concerts. or they won't make money. they will do it because they love to do it. teen age boys will still try to play guitar or scratch vinyl or fiddle around with 808s even if they know they will never be millionaires... it was always about getting the chicks anyways! see?
i have ranted my rant for this day.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bitwise perfection has never been the goal. MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, i.e. it compromises the original digital recording (which itself was compromised by being discretely sampled). What's important to online distribution and consumption is that encoding a track to mp3 is a ONE TIME TRANSFORMATION, after which every copy will be a perfect copy of that transformed data. This applies equally well to analog signals which are digitized as they come out of a speaker wire. Heck, I've even heard some digitized vinyl records; excellent listening experience.
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Man, you guys are like a bunch of broken reco...umm, wait a sec.
Really? I didn't know that it cost $10,000,000 to record a mildly successful song. Do they burn down the recording studio when they're done? The problem that most people have with RIAA et. al. is that the current system pads the wallets of executives in addition to the primadonna artists who don skimpy outfits and wiggle around for our enjoyment (What's that? They sing too?).
Seriously, if my $1.50 per song went straight to the artist, with just a small percentage skimmed off the top to pay some audio and computer geeks to maintain the production/distribution infrastructure, I bet that the artists _and_ the geeks would be happy. The RIAA would lose their meal ticket though, and they're trying to use their monopoly-like powers to protect their out-of-date business model. Let's sick judge T.P. Jackson on them!
Dupe posts are
This article is what's worthless. There's absolutely no insight here, and every idea here has been presented before. We're banging the same old drum. The question now is do we sit around and whine about things or do we do something to change them? How about this: just don't buy CDs that are copy protected. If record companies go out of business because they're not making any sales then we win. If they continue to do OK, then it means that most people don't care about copy protection so it's a non-issue. Let's not just keep whining about the same things over and over again.
A coworker of mine just got back from India with a stack of CDs he bought new for 100 or 150 rupees each, which is two or three dollars. These were both classic recordings of Indian greats and new albums by India's hottest pop stars. The classical CDs would have been no less than $13 new here in Virginia, USA. The pop would have been at least $15. Some of these had the HMV logo on them, indicating that they were produced by one of the larger labels in Europe and the East. (HMV is RCA/Victor iirc.)
-M
burnt sig
Simply make pre-recorded CDs cost less than the blank ones! This isn't as silly as it sounds; pre-recorded CDs can be stamped out a lot cheaper then recordable ones can. How much do you think AOL spends per CD shipped out?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I don't see Sears blaming "pirates" on lower washing machine and refrigerator sales.
Nor are airlines complaining about stowaways causing ridership to be down.
RIAA: Charge me a decent price for a CD (lets say, 1hr at minimum wage) and I'll buy them. Oh, and perhaps promote more than your top 15 bands to me.
Check out the RIAA's official line on CD costs. There's a lot of overhead, much of it advertising. Like many other products, the consumer pays for a lot in products that don't at all improve the product, but make it popular (which ironically makes it cheaper).
The costs of producing the music are nearly beside the point, as are the media costs. The other stuff sets the price.
Emphatically, I think a more efficient model can be created, but as with books the transition to the internet has been slow. But eventually I am certain will be plenty of $1 songs, and that the artists will be better off -- esp. the small-market ones not blessed by the marketing focus of a major label. In fact, it may be the big names that produce mediocre music who suffer.
"And how many people ever saw ANY promotional material at all for Roger Water's "Amused to Death" when it was released"
I saw a TV ad for it, it said:
"Are you sick to death of 'that whiny bastard' from Pink Floyd? You know, the one who's so hung up on his father's death in WWII and keeps writing songs about it ? Do you sigh with relief that you can't hear the pathetic teen angst of 'The Wall' and 'The Final Cut' any more? If so, then 'Amused to death' is not for you ! But you know you'll buy it anyway just because you have vague good memories of a really good track Syd Barrett wrote in 1967!"
graspee
I hope Rosen and the other high mucky mucks at the RIAA and record companies get an eye full of this article.
Can you come over and wipe my ass for me? I figure that if you take 2 minutes to do it, you'll earn a whopping $1.66.
I'll even throw in a tip. So you'll walk away with $2.00.
Whatta' you say? I'm digesting 4:00 cheeseburgers and beer right now. Feels like it should be ready to come out at 10:00pm. (Coffee has speed up the process).
Come on by.
If you'd like to make the full $50.00 you can scrub my bathtub, mop my batroom floor and clean my garbage pails too.
I prefer to buy CDs because they sound better than mp3s. I like to download tracks to see if I like it first, then I go out to the store and buy the album. I've also really been enjoying the Rhapsody music service: www.listen.com. They have a constantly growing collection of music and the system is always up. I don't have to hope that someone connected to Kazaa has the tracks I want to listen to at the moment.
This is just so google will index www.telespot.pt
Yeah, but for the 3 miuntes that it'll take him to come, the poor girl (guy?) will only be able to charge $2.50.
This is why Diddyon can't get a date. It's not worth his potential partner's time.
Huh?
- Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
It seems to me any copy protection ever conceived (for audio at least) will be worthless.
As long as you have a headphone jack or line out on your copy-protected-CD-reading stereo, you can plug that right into the line in of your sound card, and rip away.
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
If people go to the extent of video taping movies in the theater, what makes record companies think that crippling a cd in such a way a cd-rom won't be able to play it stop piracy.
Nickelback
Matchbox 20
Creed
Govt. Mule
Dream Theater (OK, not so new)
Spock's Beard
Counting Crows
Maybe you don't like my taste, but I can tell you that I look forward to these bands' new releases much the same way I looked forward to new Rush, Judas Priest, Metallica & U2 albums in the 80's.
Yeah, a lot of new stuff is crap. But no matter what genre you enjoy, there IS good stuff to be found.
Huh?
Yet strangely enough they work in my pc. My car CD player seems to have trouble reading the TOC. Burned CD's or older legit CDs work fine. I'm not sure if it's copy protection causing my woes, but being as they are all new CDs, I'm inclinded to think it is.
Now if I buy a CD I have to burn it to play it in my car. If I have to burn it, why am I buying it?
I've got me a Chrysler, it seats about 20 so come along, and bring your jukebox money!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
By publishing the fact that CD protection is worthless, they are in blatant violation of the DMCA. So if they visit the USA, they are in danger of being treated like Dmitry Sklyarov was.
Note that he wasn't arrested for breaking an encoding scheme; his crime was publicising the fact that the scheme was weak. The New Scientist has done the same sort of thing.
Publicising the fact that a company's product is shoddy and breaks easily is a crime in the USA.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
How is is that I can buy a CD at a show out of an artists hand for 10$, but the major record companies mass producing hundred-thousands of CD's can't do the same? These are CD's that the artists took the time out of their own life to produce artwork for, record, and burn...but a CD mass-produced off some CD press needs to cost US15$+.
Someone should mention that to ESRI! I know a guy who has cases of their parallel and USB dongles to manage and distribute to support our enterprise licensing for ArcGIS.
The last paragraph in the article says it all.. The record industry could lose a fortune if people stop buying CDs and make their own copies. Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
>In a few years there will be no analogue speakers...
Er...how were you planning on hearing the sound, then? At some point, the digital signal must be transformed into waves passing through the air in order to by heard by the human ear. Unless the RIAA somehow persuades people to all get digital jacks implanted in themselves (as far as people will let things slide, I don't think even the masses will go quite that far), there will always be analog.
The RIAA has spoken in the past about "plugging the analog hole", and trying to find ways to disallow recording of copyrighted materials, but I can't forsee this being possible in the near future (we're talking about analog recording devices that would somehow detect analog copyrighted content and only refuse to record that.)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
RIAA has actually said this the best; "All it takes is one digital copy." What most consumers do is irrelevant, this is an all-or-nothing affair. As soon as one person makes a digital transferable copy, that copy will live on the net.
And to illustrate the vanity of these childish copy-protection attempts, my favorite MP3 tale was when a band released a limited-edition mix, on vinyl only, in 25 copies. It was out on the net in two weeks. (Sorry for having lost the details here.) If people rip from vinyl, what's the point of trying to prevent from ripping from CD?
"I went ahead and ripped my library via iTunes to a pair of 80 GB drives, and now I've got a wonderful, searchable, kid-proof music library."
/* .
Wait until some kid in kindergarten teaches your little one how to type su and rm -rf
Make really gooood backups.
That's the argument to take with politicians. It's not pirates killing the music industry, it's Hollywood clobbering the music industry on price.
He is stating that it is the multisession CD format is used to copy protect the audio cd's. The solution seems simple: Use the first TOC that is valid in audio-cd players.
Is there software now that only read the sessions up to a point? (this also helps to retreive dat from cd's that were not correctly "finished")
I meant the speaker cones, while of course analogue, would be housed in sealed units which have only two inputs: PowerIn and DigitalSignalIn.
While it would be possible for an enthusiast to crack open the units and solder wires to the analogue speaker terminals and drive them to an analogue recorder (if they're still around) then it would be sufficiently impractal to deter most music thieves, as well as those of us who want to duplicate our music for legitimate purposes.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
There are many people here claiming that the main reason that CD sales are down is to do with the amount of crap music and the filler tracks on every album.
This has always been true, take the seventies. Most people remember Led Zeppelin, the good soul music, the good funk. There was loads of crap though, there was disco, there was the ill-fated attempt to turn gospel into the next big thing - complete with nightclubs handing out fake halos and tambourines to entrants. There were bands like Bad Company, which had a few good songs and lots of so-so ones. Or look at the early 90s, when the music industry devolved pouting hair bands.
I think the main reasons why music sales are down is that a lot of people aren't interested in music as music anymore, they want an aural background soundtrack to whatever activity they are presently involved in. Why are they not so interested in music ? Because they are spending their entertainment budget in other ways, on movies, on computer games (a business now bigger than the music and film industry combined). Most people only have a finite amount of money, if this increases at the same rate as GDP then all that double digit growth the game industry has experienced can only come by transferring spend around.
1. BMG: All our "CDs" will be "copy protected" in the future.
Result: I'll never buy a BMG "CD" again until they stop screwing their customers. I'll tell all my friends to boycott BMG.
2. Peter Gabriel, on the cover of the "Up" album: "This is an enhanced CD. Please put it in your computer."
Result: I bought the album.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Okay. I don't write for Wired, but I'm going to make a prediction anyway. In fact, what I just said is a prediction, and my giving of said prediction proves my ability to do so accurately. At any rate, here it is.
Most or all companies that make up the RIAA (and probably the MPA) will go belly up, and they will probably do it within our lifetime. Some will fight the new technology til the bitter end. Some will try to adapt and will fail anyway. Some may actually pull it off.
Then a new system for profiting from music will evolve, one that accepts file sharing as just part of the environment.
The RIAA faces one central problem today -- They don't own all the destro channels anymore. It's that simple. In the retail store world, one cannot execute a major release without going through the gatekeepers, the RIAA. It can't be done. It's easy to see why the RIAA wants to maintain the status quo. It guarantees revenue!
Literally any other method of distributing music is an enemy of the RIAA. But what we don't hear in the grand copyright/music argument is that there is no harm. Downloads, according to the numbers, have no affect right now on CD sales. It is, therefore by definition, harmless.
CD copy protection is a dumb idea. It's a limp attempt to hold onto the old ways, like Jack Horner refusing to shoot on videotape. The only way to curb piracy is to offer a fair deal for the product for which you create demand or to not put the product out at all.
In the UK we have a consumer protection laws that prevent shops from selling products that are 'not fit for purpose'. Checkout your local consumer protections laws, it is always good to know your local rights anyway.
IMHO 'not fit for purpose' is good quote anyway.
Visit the store when it is busy, the staff are feeling pressured and your have plenty of audience. If the staff refuse a refund, demand to see the manager, tell them the CD does not work, is not fit, tell them you want a functional replacement (he cannot provide it so he is must offer a refund). If he is unaware of the number of purchase you make, point it out explicitly, do not accept his 'RedBook claims' after all the only fact that matters is 'the CD does not work'. Generally kick up a noisy stink but without being agressive, do it so other customers hear, he will probably cave-in for a quiet life, to protect his reputation/image. If he claims he does not have the authority/discresion, insist on talking to speak to his manager. Ignore excuses, and esculate up his reporting lines, as needed. Do not do it quitely, make it easier on him to cave in, than hold out.
When you finally win reinforce the correct behaviour by being magnanimous, you know it is not his personal fault, it the 'evil' RIAA/BMG.
How is this author? who the heck does he think he is imploying logic in the CD Copy right issue? Music labels have been paying lawyers insane amount of billable hours to destroy commen sense and logic and this author is blatently using his head for logic conclusions, bastard!
:-)
VBG!!
Just because you CAN don't mean its a good idea...
You can drive with your feet but that don't mean it should be done.
Interestingly enough, this could be an issue that eventually brings Microsoft into the fray against these copy protection mechanisms. ./ articles, and lots of hype mention, MS are trying to put PCs at the heart of every home, and have them as the nexus of a standard music system.
As many
Now, given that the recording industry don't want anyone to be able to play their CDs in a PC player, what does this do for the plans of MS (and the console manufacturers) business plans for placing their products in this position?
If a console/PC becomes central to a home entertainment system, it needs to play CDs. And if it can, then it can be copied.
And if it can't be played in such a system.. Then it definately won't get much in the way of market penetration into the home music setup..
Methinks it'll be interesting when these two sets of 'Big Fish' realise they're on opposite sides of the war... And what will happen then...
Malk
A lot of the Indian Reserves will ship to you...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
That's really not a good deal. You can get people to mop your floor and cook your dinner for less than $15/hr. The only thing that may be close is the GF part, but $40 for a half hour will really do you.
after two days, thier server still appears to be unreachable.
Quality is job 2
To say that UNIX is doomed is pretty rabid, OS/2 will certainly play a role,
but you don't build a hundred million instructions per second multiprocessor
micro and then try to run it on OS/2. I mean, get serious.
-- William Zachmann, International Data Corp
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