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?

Comments

Read the article before posting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

If you read the article, you might see your questions answered.

Hi Fi Players are not affected by this

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

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.

Campaign for Digital Rights

[warmcat]

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.

Re:Read the story!

[rainwalker]

How is this +2, Informative? The article clearly states that the standard music tracks are also protected by DRM and are unplayable in computers, which also has been shown to mean that they don't work in any decent CD player. The point of this format is that Sony is "graciously" "allowing" people with computers to listed to their music on both their boombox AND their computer (for only an additional $1.64).

Incomprehensible

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:Incomprehensible

[jackbang]

And a few other points no one seems to be making (probably because they don't RTFA):

4) If there truly are two copies of the data, redbook and protected, not shared data, then the capacity will effectively be cut in half, meaning this approach could never be applied across the board to Sony's whole catalog since the average album is too long to fit twice on the same CD. Which raises two interesting questions - is the data duplicated or shared? And is the protected data uncompressed, or are you getting a lossy version?

5) You only get one free key to listen to your music. Subsequent keys must be purchased. So if your hard drive fails, or you wipe your drive and forget to backup your keys, you get to buy your music all over again. Not to mention that if you want to listen to your new "CD" in your home office and your computer at work, you will have to pay for two keys.

6) The copy protection system requires an Internet connection, making it even more burdensome than it already is

7) You have to use Sony's proprietary player, like it or not.

All around it sounds like a a great system that is exactly what consumers are asking for. Way to go Sony!

And this is the music industry's brain on drugs

[Snork Asaurus]

Another example of how the music industry seems bent on winning the battle at the expense of losing the war. One has to wonder exactly when they lost touch with reality. It must be the years of drug abuse. While they could provide open technology and profit, they would rather resist. I've been holding off for years, waiting for them to provide open flexible offerings so that I can satisfy my pent-up demand for music. I'm getting tired of waiting and although I continue to speak out (here and elsewhere) against violating copyright, the fools make it harder every day for me to do that.

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.