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Sony Adds New Copyright Method to CDs in 2003
Natoi writes "Sony is leaving Mac and **nix users out in the cold with their new copyright method called Label Gate CD copyright system. You'd have to be running Windows and use a Sony developed proprietary software to listen to CD's published by Sony starting next year." This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?
If you read the article, you might see your questions answered.
This protection is to prevent unlimited ripping of CDs, it makes no mention of being unable to use CDs in other devices. The article says there are two formats on the disc, one of which can be read by a PC and requires a key to decode.
SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay.
Of course, since some car CD players work on the same principle as PC CD players, they would be unusable.
I normally play my CDs in the car. I have more or less stopped buying CDs altogether. Go Figure.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
http://ukcdr.org/
This is an active campaign to try to stop this kind of evil action by corporations who insist they are the injured party when charging ripoff pricing for their goods and using graft to stop anything at all ever falling out of copyright and into the public domain where all works finally belong.
Take a look at their site at least, consider joining the mailing list.
Didn't anyone even read the posting or article that it referred to before putting thisstuff up on slashdot???
1. This is not a copyright system, it's a copy protection system.
2. It doesn't prevent people from playing CD's in analog players altogether. The music available in two forms on the CD, one inteneded for traditional CD players in a copy protected format, and one for PC's, also copy protected.
3. This only applies to 12 cm CD singles produced in Japan.
RTFA. "All 12-centimeter CD singles by Japanese artists rolling out from SME's group record companies are expected to be Label Gate CDs from Jan. 22." NOT All Sony CDs, just some Japanese ones.
Cowboy Neal: "What about car stereos and high- fidelity CD players?"
RTFA: "SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay."
Maybe the audio data won't play on car and hifi CD players, but if not it's not by design.
If you use a product such a vmware, it's a simple matter to start up windows in a virtual machine with a virtual sound card i.e. vsound. I've used this method in the past to rip and burn music directly from rhapsody. You don't even have to go the analog route.
Started? That's the heart of the plan:
Copy protection on CDs isn't about stopping file sharing, its about creating new per-play revenue streams WHILE ALSO preserving obscenely high hard-media profits.
I.V.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
The ability to circumvent this "new" form of copy protection is already present in most PCs. A typical CD-ROM has a four-wire analog audio connector in the back next to the IDE cable. Connect that up to the Audio In port on a soundcard. Instead of ripping tracks via CDDA, you can rip tracks by hitting the often-ignored Play button on the front of your CD-ROM and running something simple like sndrec32 in Windows to record the results
Thats how we used to do it back in ye olden days before direct CDDA ripping was popular.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Here's yet another example. (I submitted this various forms to the /. editor gods 3 times in the last two days, but they don't seem to think it worthy of your attention) :
According to this article , Universal Vivendi will be making 43,000 tracks available for sale, at $0.99/track, on 28 different web sites (that will get commissions for the sales). In what can best be described as a monumental example of still not getting it, UMG will be selling the tracks in the proprietary DRM hobbled Liquid Audio format . A quote in the article from a UMG unit president demonstrates that years of listening to the kind of stuff big labels sell does indeed damage the hearing (and possibly the corporate brain) when he said (please try not to laugh too hard, folks) "We have listened to the public, and we are offering the music that people want at a reasonable price that fairly compensates the artists, songwriters and [other] individuals who make their living in the music industry". Apparently UMG thinks that a restricted format is what the public wants. As to "fairly compensating artists (and) songwriters", I have yet to hear any UMG artists announce that their contracts have been ripped up. Just to double check that last point, I looked outside - there is still only one moon in the sky.
Finally, for the 3 of you that don't also peruse the Register, here's an interesting item that the music industry should pay attention to: File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers
It seems that the harder the music industry tries to resist, the more likely it is that they're writing their own epitaphs.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Please be polite - sugar vs. vinegar, y'know
i c.com;o m s ic.com
feedback@sonyclassical.com;
SonyWonder@sonymus
thestore@sonymusic.com;
smsp@sonymusic.c
sonymusiconline@sonymusic.com feedback@columbiarecords.com
Epic_Records@sonymu
LegacyOnline@sonymusic.com
First let me state I bought it for the girlfriend :)
Anyway, like the acticle description of Sony's technique, the CD plays in a normal CD player, or a DVD player, however when put into a PC it autoruns and starts a little, quite good looking player, and plays the CD using this player.
Now if I use Media Player, or Real to play the CD, it still works, but if I try to rip the CD, each track errors about 5 seconds in.
By the looks of things, the CD based player software has digital versions of the songs embedded in it. According to the player the tracks are encoded at 47kps.
It's clearly labelled as "Copy Controlled" on the front and back of the CD. It is not described anywhere on the media as a "CD", nor does the Phillip's logo appear. Minimum listed specs are Windows 95, Pentium II, 4Mb RAM. But as you can still play it using your normal computer, I guess those specs are for their little specific player.
The point of all this? None really, it does stop you ripping the music, but it's still playable from everywhere else, your CD player, your DVD, or your own player software. Almost seems reasonable when you think about it.
How many Joe Schmo consumers do you know who have mod-chipped their set-top DVD players with DeCCS?
Not a single one, because it's not necessary.
Most cheap DVD players sold nowadays are region free and play whatever you feed them.
See this paper. Modern CD-ROM drives currently have low-level access to the CD data. The hardest part is finding a CD-ROM drive that doesn't have buggy firmware.
I control the time!
I don't know -- the folks who posted it prominently got quiet very fast. It was dramatic. They could do the same thing to these other sites until ISP's and universities wanted it off their servers even faster than kiddie porn. Note than I'm not endorsing any of this.
... the crime won't always be so trivial or safe to commit. Either fix the law or somehow make the crime unnecessary. Piracy will never go away, but it can and should be corralled, without destroying innocent fair use.
And DeCSS is laughably simple. I liked the guys who put it on T-shirts, and there's even a haiku. Some scary precedent is getting set down. Don't even ask me to say where the line between protected free speech and unprotected illegal code is drawn, considering we've been pointedly calling them computer languages all these years. I'm a lawyer, not an oracle, but I do know the first amendment doesn't protect everything in writing (copyright for example; trade secrets, espionage, blackmail, obscenity, etc.).
The more complex solutions will be harder to spread around anonymously, and won't look as innocent or amusing as a haiku or T-shirt. (These folks are practicing civil disobedience and rubbing the industry's face in it, which I think is just fine, and probably illegal or it wouldn't be civil disobedience.) Public sympathy will be less, and that's important. Look how hard they came down on Sklarov! He is fortunate to attract a lot of sympathy, and to be a fairly innocent looking guy, an academic more than a black market profiteer. I was amazed, if you look at how lax the gov't is to enforce lots of other "economic harm" laws. I don't know many honest people will want to get involved inthis, and really it's the honest people who need to be won over to the cause.
So
Once again, the industry didn't realise that computers can already read LPs.
Besides, I already copied a bunch of my parents' old LPs to CD by running the connection from the amp output into my machine. The pops and scratches were cleaned out by a simple low-pass FFT filter in audacity and everything was good to go for CD burning.
(Note: I do recognise that the parent post is a joke.)
Anyone else remember this? Oh yeah, and there's that pesky audio in jack, but i assume that the RIAA will soon be coming door to door and filing those with putty, rendering the use of chisels, paper-clips and anythign else that could dig out the putty a felony under the DMCA.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
#1 Most of the music for starters. They need to make room for the compressed audio and DRM software. The article says these disks have 2 to 4 songs. A browse through my CD collection comes up with 8 to 19 songs per CD. That's removing 4 to 15 songs per disk.
A minor quibble here--the article states that these CDs are CD Singles--they normally only have 2-4 songs (2 songs and sometimes 2 off vocal/karaoke tracks). So there is no music being left off (these aren't full albums).
Hopefully this scheme will die before it reaches the US (this is SME--the Japanese arm). Actually, since I buy a lot of Japanese CDs, hopefully it will die quickly in Japan.