Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
--
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.
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
I guess I'm making more than you 'cause that 5 minutes to burn a CD would cost me more than $3.
Actually, friend, you spend considerably more than five minutes every day doing things like brushing your teeth and going to the bathroom. Pop the CD in optical drive 1, the blank in optical drive 2, click here and here, then forget about it while you take a shower or something.
Multitasking is the key insight.
Plus you are forgetting the other stuff that comes with a CD or are you printing out color pages of the CD covers....
Strangely enough, I've never given any thought at all to CD covers. If they're important to you, then that's between you and your God.
I write in my journal
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.