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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 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
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?
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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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'
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.
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 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.
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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!
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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
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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!
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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..
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?
What gets me is that the same companies went through this will VHS tapes.
First made them high priced, then copy protected them (anyone remember, i think it was called, macrovision) and then dropped the price low enough to where it just wasn't worth a person's time to copy the tape.
But most consumers do follow the rules. Forgive me for making this admission here, but I don't download music. I do play CDs on my computer. They aren't asking me to follow the rules, they are changing the rules to make it impossible for me to use their product in the way I am accustomed to using it. They are making me not want to buy anything from them. I would rather enjoy my current CD collection, which would take me many days to play in it's entirety, than support these crooks. At one point I would buy 1-2 CDs per month, when they were releasing music I liked. I think I purchased 1-2 commercial CDs this year. I purchase many from independent artists that I like, especially when they actually get all or most of the profits from the CD, rather than a few percent.
You are the one making the mistake, since it only takes one person willing to break the security, and put the file online to break it. The people who download that music don't have to go to any effort, which rather defeats the whole idea of trying to make it hard for them to copy the CD, which they don't even have.
I can't remember where I read it, but years ago I heard this described as the paperback effect. Nobody copies paperback books because it's cheaper and easier to just buy your own. Might have been Negroponte; it sounds like something he'd say.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time imagining a price for CDs that's sufficiently cheap that copying them becomes unappealing. On my computer, I can copy a CD in about five minutes (drive to drive), and I can rip one in about three, depending on how much music is on it. I don't generally steal music, but that's because I hardly ever find music that somebody else has that I would like to have but that I don't already have. (Did that make sense?) Even at $3 each, it'd still be possible to copy a CD-- or even download it, if you can find it on the Internet-- faster and less expensively than you could drive to the store and buy it.
I write in my journal
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
"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.
"..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."
Heck, I'd settle for a "send us a list of MP3s you have and we'll send you a fair priced bill for digital use" service.
The RIAA would make a few bucks off me that way.
Ah yes, but then I will patent the process of soaking the paper in ordinary bleach and then drying it, thus rendering the paper white and the ink blue. Muahaha.
Yes, this really does work.
If you want to get rid of the bathwater, you've got to throw out a few babies.
I only buy used CDs.
Don't forget that they would love to stop that, too. After all, buying a used CD is an unlicensed activity.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
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
You're only entitled to making royalties off your music if someone else makes money from it.
Wrong. Even if you give away a copy of your own CD for free, you still have to pay royalties for the recorded songs that are on it. You also still have to pay royalties if the live convert that your ban plays at is free.
Might be different in your country, then. Here in Germany, cover bands pay royalties for the songs they perform live. (Actually not the cover band, but the guy who organized the concert and hired the band.)
Without losing their shorts? Of course, the royalties you pay are within a reasonable price range, and leaves more than enough money for the live performers to still make money from their concerts. The more people listen to the band, the more money you make as a band but also the higher the royalty cut you have to pay.
It's perfectly fair when it comes to live music, yet incredibly buerocratic.
Although, I don't like the royalties you have to pay (in Germany, might be different in your country) for playing recorded music to the public, even when it's a free venue.
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You may like my a cappella music
Mmkay.
I also work in technical support and own a corporation doing same on the side. I charge $75 per hour (which is less than CompUSA) to clients. Friends never have to pay. Oh, I might accept lunch from someone for doing say $100 worth of work, but I have a rule - no bill if you are a friend. Friends can refer clients, whom I will charge, but if our relationship began as social, it remains primarily social.
Note that I may occassionally ask professional friends their opinion/advice in like manner.
Otherwise, you can be sure you have no friends. Everyone will consider you a business acquaintance. How could they think otherwise?
Yeah, I feel the same way. The last time I bought a CD (bought about 4 of them), I had to persuade the the Circuit City assistants to let me listen to the CD's on one of the display computers and then I'd buy them. They looked at me like I was from an escaped loonatic, and I'll admit it is nuts, but they agreed. Since it's either buying them blindly, finding out one doesn't work with my PC and get stuck with it, or look like a fool, I've stopped buying CD's.
- Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
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.
Computer and burner to copy CDs with. $600
50 Blank CDRs. $30
Time to burn 50 CD's and photo copy Inserts at copy store. (8 Hours @ $15/hour) $120
Total = $750
Buy 50 CDs in the store ($20 each). $1000
Christ, one could hire the kid next door at $15 and hour, buy them a computer and burn your piritated CD's for cheaper then it is to buy them. Does this mean anything to you? It sure does to me. CDs are overpriced.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
This reminds me of a DVD my better half bought recently (I am Dina, fairly ok movie). DVD's have a feture so that it can be made impossible to fast forward past the warning (if the player respects it, I assume you can get modified players to skip the warning). The little bastards that made the dvd had used this to add a commercial that had to play before you cot to the menu, no way to skip it. I mean we paid full price for it, when I buy a product I expect it to be free of this stuff, at the least there should have been a warning on the box so people can decide not to buy the shit
/me gets off soapbox
Now that felt good, thank you all for listenenig
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
Really, shouldn't the things cost less now than they did in 1983? Not only has inflation in cost of raw materials been more than offset by the combined effects of advancing technology and economies of scale, but they've even eliminated altogether certain costs CDs used to have (does anyone else here remember those long cardboard boxes most CDs used to come in? Those things added a dollar or so to the cost of CDs all by themselves. When they were discontinued around '93 or '94 many people assumed CD prices would immediately drop by a dollar or so across the board... yeah, right).
There are some very significant costs associated with making CDs, but a lot of the price of a new CD has to simply be going to line the pockets of some suit at the label or the RIAA.