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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
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 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 don't think they are worried about this type of copying. It isn't bit for bit perfect.
Recording analog to digital will always introduce noise to the signal. Remember all those old CD's that sounded worse then the original tapes? (Say, like AC/DC, Back in Black). That's because transferring analog to digital sounds like crap.
I don't have a sig...Do you??
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 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."
Isn't it clever how they dodge the question my not repeating the word compliant in the response, but instead using a similar word, compatible? I guess one must be on one's toes all the time these days, even technical FAQs are no longer a haven from sneaky public relations propaganda.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
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.
...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
So, in other words, the RIAA should respond to supply and demand.
No one cares about quality or else 128k rips from audiogalaxy would never be traded! The loss from a decent analog cable and gear is miniscule compared to what most encoders do to the music. Besides people did tape to tape dubs and that is about like a 56k mp3 =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
"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."
The point being missed is that the cost of a CD has to cover much more than just the manufacturing and distribution of that disk. It has to cover the expenses in finding and developing talent, recording and touring, marketing and advertising. These expenses far exceed the costs of pressing a CD.
Most bands are commercial failures, too, so the few successful acts have to be priced high enough to cover the money lost on the others. It's like the oil business where you have to drill 20 dry holes for every one that hits the black gold.
I don't see anyone, not indy labels, not bands selling their own music, who sells CDs for a few bucks each. If the big, corrupt labels were engaging in profiteering, then everyone else would sell their disks for three bucks, right? Well, that's not happening. I think this shows that the people who think this would be a reasonable price for a CD are missing some basic economics.
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.
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
U2, Peter Gabriel, and Rush have all had new albums in the past 18 months. Indeed, Gabriel has had 3 new albums since the millennium, though only one is a classic studio album (Ovo, the soundtrack to the millennium celebrations, which I think is at best overwrought; The Long Walk Home, the soundtrack to The Rabbit-Proof Fence, which is quite good, maybe as good as Passion, and Up, which is spectacularly good in places - e.g., Signal to Noise and Sky Blue). U2's new album was also quite good, if not quite up to the quality of say Achtung Baby or Joshua Tree.
The problem isn't the music, it's the marketing: the record companies only want to sell pablum to teenagers. There are good bands out there, the old ones still doing their stuff and new ones with real quality (Radiohead obviously isn't a "new" band, but they are a nineties - oughts band, and their work is head and shoulders above most of the stuff you find in your local record store, just to mention the most obviously commercial example). But the money is spent pushing JLo and Justin Timberlake and American Idol because the record companies have *created* the bands and can *control* them from start to finish.
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
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
And why should I subsidize their failed business ventures^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hartists?
If they lose money on the others, too bad. They need to be more careful with their money instead of flying everybody around the country in jets and dispensing payola to ClearChannel (gross trollish overgeneralization, so sowwy)
"Piter, too, is dead."
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)
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
OK, point noted. But pray, tell me how is it that audio cassettes (that costs more to produce) are actually cheaper than CDs?
So now it's up to the consumers to cushion the costs of the recording industry's "commercial failures"?
Anyway, your comparison with the oil business is irrelevant. Let's say someone discovers a way to make vehicles run on water, consumers will ditch petrol in a blink of an eye. And don't be suprised if OPEC (or any other oil-centric associations) engage in a campaign to halt production of water-powered engines.
But for now, they are still unchallenged, whereas the RIAA is.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
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.
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
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."
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.