Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Introduces Its Own CD Copy-Inhibition Scheme
M.C. Hampster writes "MSNBC is carrying a Reuters story about Microsoft's new CD protection technology. At the heart of the technology is the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.""
Can I download a version for linux?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Wait a minute, could the evil and fearless RIAA/MPAA take on the mighty Microsoft?
This reminds me of something ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Since the music industry is probably going to try stuff like this anyway, (as a consumer) I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything. As an individual, I'm still annoyed that they're trying this shit, but I'm glad Microsoft is in on it because of their "amazing" security track record.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
If that's all it is, it's not going to stop anyone from ripping it on pre-Palladium systems, nor from CD players with digital I/O (although that'll only work at single speed).
And what does the article mean by "layered"? Surely not an actual multilayered disk like a DVD? Is that backwards compatible?
More details anyone?
Jon
Where is the protection if the cd can still be played on a stereo, or PC?
Can someone explain this further? What does multiple layers have to do with protecting the CD if it can be played regardless?
user@host$ diff
I could care less. It's good that it will play in normal players and computers. But I'm still going to mp3 it through the analog hole, so they can go fudge themselves.
They could have spent that $1/2 billion buying out senators,buying a win in court, or even...dare i say... redesigning Windows!!!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
When (if ever) will it come out? Does anyone know?
They are doing more to encourage Linux use than anyone, in a way that no one else could! Thank you, Microsoft! =P
>one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.
Uh-huh. That's nice dear. Well done. I'm sure we'll all be using it in 3 years time.
Morons.
So now M$ can crash my Hi-Fi as well as pc? Oh dear.
:(
It'll be like the whole Celine Dion scenario again... only everywhere
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
Couldn't eject CDs from the drive. Ha. You'll wish for those days...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The last copy protection scheme was broken using a simple sharpie marker. I wonder how this one will be broken, I can bet you one thing though. There'll be a 'fix' for this one week before the protected cds come out.
probably not.
windows xp anti-piracy was cracked.
so was most of the other anti-piracy software.
I think these companies need to wake up and realise that the reason noone is buying their products is because they are trash.
not because of piracy....
piracy is a scapegoat they use with the shareholders to avoid the 'your products are trash, fix them!' response from shareholders.
I found it interesting that when M$ said it may pay a dividend, and that it beat the streets expectations, the stock price dropped.
looks like consumers are watching.
If the submitter is right, you can't play it anywhere. Uh... whoops
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I'm all for them making the money that is due them, but if the labels want to make CDs that I'll return to the store as defective, that's up to them.
if they could played back on any PC they would have to be capable of being played back on a virtual sound driver designed for the purpose.
.. impossible - NO
And products like totalrecorder will take them in.
Harder to copy ? yes
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
So, this is a copy protection method that allows/organizes/manages other copy protection approaches?
I'm thoroughly confused. This article does little to explain how this 'exciting' new technology even works, much less performs. Then again, this was posted on MSNBC....
The idea of a copy-protected CD won't work. The only feasible way would to have your computer control everything you do on it (kinda like Soviet Russia), which is what Pallidiam is trying to do.
If you can play a CD, you can get the raw sound data off of it. From that raw data, you can make an MP3. If the CD is playable anywhere, you can copy it. What's to say someone won't modify their PC CD-ROM drive so it reads the "normal" data that isn't copy-protected. Someone would figure it out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. And if copy-protection is implemented in Pallidiam, then it probably won't be long before someone finds a way around it, knowing Microsoft's record on security.
You are being reasonable and logical.
But there thousands of clueless buyers out there.
I suppose Microsoft has $500 million lying around they can throw into the fireplace. Just seems like such a waste.
This is said in every copy protection related story on Slashdot, and I'll be the first to say it this time. Eventually music and video will be analog. How do they think it's possible that, one way or another, the people who want unauthorized copies of multimedia won't be able to make it?
<:
i have a feeling that the layer that allows playback in a pc will somehow be bound to the digital licensing features in windows media player, thus forcing all of us to make mp3's (well, wma actually) with microsoft technology.
but that's just me, and i could be wrong.... so think what you like.
I have a copy inhibition scheme too - Sell Crappy Music.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is a very dumb move by Microsoft. Digital media is one of the biggest reasons people are upgrading their computers and operating systems.
You can run a Word Processor on a PII with Windows 95 without any problems. Ripping and burning CDs are a different story.
So why on earth would they cave-in to DRM pressure? They shouldn't give a darn what the music industry thinks. Technology is the lifeblood of our economy, both directly and indirectly. The Music industry is a bunch of annoying, overpayed execs and stars. In a PR battle technology would win hands down, especially if the battle was over taking rights away from the consumers.
My guess is Microsoft wants to monopolize the music and movie industry. They want the next CD you buy to only be playable in a Microsoft OS. Sure they may release some half-hearted buggy specs (for a price).
Brian Ellenberger
Yes, copying music is sweet because it is free.. but what's even better than it being free is the convenience.. that you can have everything at one place instantly accecible.. now, limit me to an hours' worth of music from one artist per one shiny silver disc, and that becomes a showstopper. I want big playlists of thousands of songs at my convenience instantly playable, nothing else is good enough. That's where they should start.. I still buy CDs, but that is simply because I like to encode my songs myself, as I please. Now, take away my ability to rip these CDs, and what am I left with? That I can play them whenever I want to on my stereo, or even PC?? What good does that do me when I haven't actually played a cd off a cd player in years. It's a BIG HASSLE.
Whoa there! How about the fact that people are sick of proprietary software vendors and their expensive update/release cycles? Or in the case of audio media, prices have doubled in 15 years of being on the market, and being forced to lower prices by the justice department (having been shown guilty of essentially collusion and price-fixing).
Until these companies start listening to the consumers, they'll continue to write their own stories explaining the industries problems that allow them to justify witch-hunts (remember the RIAA seeking authority to hack computers suspected of carrying illegal media?).
Something tells me that history will repeat itself here...
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
At the heart of the technology is the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.""
And this is going to keep us from recording and copying the music steam how?
This will be broken, too. Ultimately, you have to create an audio signal or an accurate binary (in the case of CDROM)
Copy protection is lame and a waste of time.
$G
-- $G
Ummm...
XP's anti piracy wasn't cracked. There were a half a dozen volume activation keys that were leaked, those got shut down with XP SP1. And someone reverse engineered the code in setup that validates the CD key - which is NOT the same thing as cracking the anti piracy. All that does is allow someone who already has a stolen CD to come up with a CD key of their own, after about 4 hours of crunching on their computer. Once they activate the computer with that key, the key is worthless to anyone else, since it won't work on another computer.
The ONLY keys that have any worth to pirates are the volume activation keys (since the work on multiple computers), and (as I said above) those keys haven't been cracked. Until someone cracks the algorithm to generate the volume activation keys, it hasn't been really cracked.
And M$ has NEVER EVER EVER said that the anti piracy stuff in XP was uncrackable. They've just said that it was harder than was worth the effort for most people.
Let me guess.. this layer will have to be read, parsed and then the file run with some controls deactivated in Microsoft Windows Media Player(tm) and nothing else. Any other software will gladly ignore it (unless MS intercepts this at the OS level) and burn it just fine. If Windows stops you, go Linux. And then reburn as a 100% plain CD Audio disk. Would be a rather nice thing to add to the "Things Linux do that you can't do on Windows"-list. It's not a very long one really...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This sounds like some of the things Microsoft has been kicking around for a while...
Wonder if they're somehow making it WMA based on top of the whole layering thing... crazy old Microsoft.
Can someone explain to me how an industry that reports record profits, year and year, can be called ailing?? That's like calling Microsoft an "ailing software company" because they have the minor inconvenience of the Justice Department. It's just not relevent.
Oh wait, I'm not a pirate, because I've never illegally sold someone elses art, and in fact, I am not bound by any agreement with the recording industry with regard to music that I've downloaded off the Internet, any more than I would be for music I taped off the radio!
Grrr.
The ultimate solution to revive the recording industry is NOT copy-protection. Ultimately, the industry must figure out how to serve the consumer's desires (this is the basis of all business and economics practices, something that the RIAA among others must have forgotten). What other industry can produce a product that is 90% crap and 10% okay, and expect the consumer to willingly pay for all 100% of it? If this were the standard business model, our Dell computers would be running P4-2.5 GHz processors with 64K RAM and 50 MB hard drives, and we would pay $3000 for them! The recording industry must acknowledge that if consumers are not willing to pay for its product, there is something wrong with (a) the product or (b) the distribution strategy (the 90%/10% ratio). I would have no problems shelling out $20 for a CD if it had more than one or two good songs on it.
By the way, the recording industry in Canada has managed to lobby a 20% levy on each blank CD-R that is sold (21 cents on a $1 CD). That eliminated the last moral reservations I had with copying music (now that the artists get my money anyway), and I bet one could mount a substantive legal defense if one were ever charged with copyright infringement based on that fee.
Although the article skimped on any sort of technical details (beyond describing it as some sort of multi-layered CD), you won't *need* to crack the protection on such CDs.
They should rip just fine in any machine that doesn't support Palladium. You don't need to circumvent the DRM, just don't use it at all.
With whatever the next format of DVDs uses, we may lose the ability to play on untrusted devices, since they don't care about backward compatibility. With audio CDs, however, not making something backward compatible guarrantees it as DOA (look at DVD audio or SACDs... Or more to the point, try to find one to actually purchase).
People don't care about quality, above a certain point. People don't care about physical form, as long as they can carry one in their pocket. People care about *convenience*. Want to know why *I* first switched from tapes to CDs? One reason, and one reason only - The ability to (nearly) instantly seek any track. And I *do* care about the improvement in quality, very much so, but in the reverse situation (if tapes could seek tracks and CDs only played in-order), I would never have switched.
So, any attempt to copy protect an audio CD will fail, as long as they try to maintaining backward compatibility. And if they abandon backward compatibility, plain ol' market pressures will doom such an effort to a rapid demise.
Oh, as an aside, I just checked MS's site, and they don't seem to have any better info than what the article mentioned. Guess we'll just have to wait on this one, or hope another Slashdotter digs up and links to something juicy...
We have now successfully slashdotted MSNBC.com - on a weekend afternoon!!!
"It enables music labels to lay songs onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC"
s/PC/PC running Windoze/
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Iunno... sounds to me like the Empire (TM) is trying to shut Linux/*nix users out of playing Cd's on our computers. It sounds suspiciously like having a program to decode a CD made by Microsoft. I'm just wondering how long it will take them to realize that in order to make any CD copy proof, you can't sell that CD to any one with a stereo (any EE can rig it up to take the analog out put and feed it through his computer off a mini-system). Oh well, let them waste their money, no skin off my nose.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
1. Lock the recording industry into the Redmond One-Ring (TM) licensing system. ...
2.
3. Profit!
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
From the makers of Things You Cant Do in Windowscomes Things You Can't Do in Linux You Can Do in Windows:
With chapters such as, Playing games without a Athlon XP 2200 emulation runner, Running a 21th century GUI!, and free time!! Thats right folks, with our guide to Things You Can't Do In Linux you can actually install programs without scheduling the time to do so! Install a new camera without restarting 6 times to find the right driver! Even use the latest video card without scrambling for seventy-two kernel patches!
All for the price of only thirty-nine ninety-five.
No... kinda like X-Box.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned such a scheme doesn't do anything for newer CD player playback, Car CD playback, or Linux playback, or Mac playback, and (of course) still doesn't allow you to consolidate your music collection onto one computer or bring it with you on a Rio (solid state music being essential for certain activities, such as jogging or mountain biking).
So, in essence, Microsoft has offered a solution that would increase the reliance upon Microsoft products, and would increase the cost of transitioning away from them. TBNT.
(Hmmm... now where did that old single-speed CD ROM without error checking go?)
- C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
DVD Audio and SACD are currently most used in classical music recordings. On the local public classical station, they always talk about this or that concert hall recording in full 5.1 sound on SACD or DVD-A.
A solution to the problem with music today
If 95+% of all PCs are running Windows, it's pretty safe to say "PC" when you mean "Windows PC".
Don't forget that if you're a Linux (or whatever) user, you're in the vast minority, and you really can't expect the mass media to pay you any mind. For the media's purposes (and 95% of computer users' purposes), PC == Windows PC.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I mean, using "Microsoft" & "protection" together in one sentence, c'mon guys, get crackin'
later
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
While my better instincts counsel me to follow a policy of laissez-faire, there are a couple of Microsoft's statements I feel I cannot let pass. First things first: Microsoft is willing to promote truth and justice when it's convenient. But when it threatens its creature comforts, Microsoft throws principle to the wind. Microsoft can fool some of the people all of the time. It can fool all of the people some of the time. But it can't fool all of the people all of the time. The long and short of it is that corrupt Neanderthals are unable to see that one could argue that unconscionable litterbugs have traditionally tried to piggyback on substantive issues to gain legitimacy for themselves. That's self-evident, and even Microsoft would probably agree with me on that. Even so, I do not have the time, in one sitting, to go into the long answer as to why behind its mask of benevolence stands a complete plan for world government, world power, world conquest, and the promotion of nefarious negativism. But the short answer is that it is doing everything in its power to make me fall into the trap of thinking that all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "insiders". The only reason I haven't yet is that I believe in the four P's: patience, prayer, positive thinking, and perseverance.
It is hard to decide what is stronger in Microsoft: its incredible stupidity as far as any real knowledge or ability is concerned, or the gormless insolence of its behavior. Microsoft will defy the rules of logic long before it can convert me into one of its assistants. As I mentioned before, fatuous clericalism is one of the most effective tools of tyranny. But let me add that I cannot promise not to be angry at it. I do promise, however, to try to keep my anger under control, to keep it from leading me -- as it leads Microsoft -- to borrow money and spend it on programs that turn us into easy prey for clumsy Microsoft clones.
We must expose Microsoft's machinations for what they really are. Only then can a society free of its salacious hatchet jobs blossom forth from the roots of the past. And only then will people come to understand that it uses the word "flocinauinihilipilification" without ever having taken the time to look it up in the dictionary. Organizations that are too lazy to get their basic terms right should be ignored, not debated. At first, Microsoft just wanted to con us into believing that it is the one who will lead us to our great shining future. Then, it tried to corrupt our youth. Who knows what it'll do next? It's an interesting question, and its examination will help us understand how Microsoft's policies work. Let me start by providing evidence that when Microsoft tells us that the most foolish louts I've ever seen are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive, it somehow fails to mention that anger is contagious. It fails to mention that all it wants is to demonstrate an outright hostility to law enforcement. And it fails to mention that it is reluctant to resolve problems. It always just looks the other way and hopes no one will notice that I'm willing to accept that its worshippers are in league with unbridled kooks who portray meretricious wackos as spoilsports. I'm even willing to accept that it contributes nothing to society. But its hypocrisy is transparent. Even the least discerning among us can see right through it.
It is imperative that all of us in this community provide people the wherewithal to stand up and fight for our heritage, traditions, and values. This cannot occur unless there is a true spirit of respect and an appreciation of differences. Throughout history, there has been a clash between those who wish to announce that we may need to picket, demonstrate, march, or strike to stop Microsoft before it can stretch credulity beyond the breaking point and those who wish to seize control of the power structure. Naturally, Microsoft belongs to the latter category.
I don't want to overstate this point, but if Microsoft gets its way, I might very well lose my temper. Microsoft is too vulgar to read the writing on the wall. This writing warns that I've heard of unambitious things like diabolism and racism. But I've also heard of things like nonviolence, higher moralities, and treating all beings as ends in and of themselves -- ideas which its ignorant, unthinking, pea-brained brain is too small to understand. In closing, all that I ask is that you join me to stop Microsoft and turn Microsoft's sinister drug-induced ravings to our advantage.
Ok, we know that a significant percentage of MP3s online did not come from a ripped CD that someone purchased, but rather, from an advance copy, studio DAT, recording studio leak, label leak, manufacturing leak or other non-consumer source. That's no surprise to anyone, and nicely illustrated by unmastered advances (3 months early) of the last Korn and Pearl Jam CDs.
So, exactly how is this expensive MS technology going to affect that content stream? It won't. All it will do is complicate matters for people who actually are honest and purchase the CD.
Also, as someone else mentioned, if the playback device has 2 RCA jacks or a pair of cannon connectors, anyone can get a great copy via analog. Hey, there are already "Analog Rip" options in many major media applications, so what's the point here?
Rule 1: the audio degradation caused by analog copying is LESS than that caused by MP3 compression. So...I don't care what fancy DRM they bring out, if you can hear it, you can copy and distribute it.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Its not like microsoft is selling music or anything (yet).. but isnt this along the same lines?
Besides the M$ goal of owning the world, what do they have to benefit from this? And isnt this just asking for more court trouble>
Does this mean I'll have to renew the license on my music CDs every two years?
And will there be a logo on my CD that says "Designed for MusicXP"?
that's kbyu.org/fm, not kbyu.org/fb...
A solution to the problem with music today
Someone came up with an ingenious way to circumvent the new copy protection scheme. Rumor has it you can buy a strand of copper, and push one end of it in a special socket labelled "Audio Out", and then take the other end of this same strand of copper and connect it up to the "Audio In" socket on the recording device.
Apparently, the theory is, the electrons inside the strand of copper get so excited that they begin to affect neighboring atoms in sort of a cascading fashion.. This happens zillions of times per second, as fluctuations in signal level travel through the copper core of the strand. In order to prevent this power from getting out of hand, they've even got stuff in development right now that uses a vinyl plastic or rubberized outer coating.
Totally fucking awesome. I want one!
No word yet on how much these strange "copper strands" are going to cost (probably hundreds of thousands of dollars considering how difficult it is to create a long, thin, flexible piece of copper in the lab, but, i'm sure the price will go down with time. Regardless, Microsoft aught to be shaking in their boots by now!
Bowie J. Poag
1: If it can be played it can be copied.
2: Even if they force hardware manufacturers to remove digital outputs and inputs from all CD players and audio card (veeeery unlikely), a good -not necessarily high end- CD player/audio card pair will produce a digital track virtually identical to a 100% digital rip.
In my opinion that's plain BS.
I'm really pissed....It's been a week of bad news...the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case, DRM in AMI BIOS, and now this...what's wrong with these motherfuckers?
Well, just burnin' karma...
Haha. What's even more sad is the denial people live in. "Why do people even USE windows? Linux is sooooooo much b3+3r!@##!"
You go ahead and laugh at the security advisories Windows users have, while I laugh that you spent a week to be able to burn CDs (and only at the console when the moon is full, and you bang the side of your computer just right).
That it'll work with all stereos and Macs and PCs... Except those that run Linux?
I'll buy that!
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
I can understand that these music artists want to prevent illegal copying of their music cause they're losing money but anyone who spends lots of money to try to foil bootleggers is WASTING THEIR DAMN TIME AND MONEY!! I must say that they are f*ckin retarded. I mean, come on. You cannot prevent people from copying music! Fricken wake up people! If people can HEAR your music, they can COPY it. If they really want to copy it, they will. DUH! Enough already!
Do I own the cd? the content? both? If the RIAA has its way, I don't own anything I buy. Ridiculous.
I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything ...I'm glad Microsoft is in on it because of their "amazing" security track record.
Worse, you make the very rash assumption that this will work. M$ and friends could care less about your anoyances, after all they consider you some kind of criminal for wanting to make backups of the things you own. We've been here before.
This reminds me of M$'s entry into backup programs for floppy disk storage. They bought out everything that worked, such as Fith Generation Systems's Fast Back program, and shut it down. What they offered instead was M$ backup, which was slow and never worked. Needless to say, CDs came along and largely replaced the need for such things and you can now get free software that will break up work larger than a CD into volumes. No rampant "piracy" ever surfaced and no real pirate was ever discouraged. It's the whole thing all over again with CDs. It did not work for floppies and it won't work here.
Another $500,000,000 down the drain, nice work M$! Is that what you spent the last 15 years of dividens on?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The bbspot released an article about Microsoft's CDS initiative (cant do sh*t)... which i thought was pretty funny.. but seems to be coming true ;)
MS CDS initiative from BBspot
1. buy CD
2. take off plastic wrapper
3. peel off sticky thing on the top of CD
4. take out CD
5. put CD in PC
6. rip CD to OGG
7. take out CD
8. put CD back in case
9. put case in cabinet and forget it is there
MORTAR COMBAT!
Right, but a better measure of the 'time it takes to acquire the songs' is the time it takes to queue it up. I don't know about you, but I don't sit at the screen watching the file trickle in.
Even use the latest video card without scrambling for seventy-two kernel patches!
Pull your hair out because your ATI drivers for
windows are crap, and there is NOTHING you can do
to fix that! There is no enormous group of
developers donating free time to fix it immediately!
Install a new camera without restarting 6 times to find the right driver!
Deal with problems stemming from accidentally
clicking "YES" to remove an older working version
of a file when you install some new software and
end up breaking 5 other pieces of software!
you can actually install programs without scheduling the time to do so!
Sit for hours waiting for tech support that you
have to pay for if something does break! Get
the "It's not us, it's the vendor" run around
and end up calling all over the place all day
running up your long distance bill!
Oh, and..
Sit and cry because a word macro virus ate your
computer! Everything is gone! WOW what a product!
But seriously,
It's a little bit of time up front, whole heck of
a lot less time and problems later. I think it
took me about 25 seconds of actual work getting
an epson stylus c42ux working on Gentoo recently.
I had to install cups "emerge cups" and foomatic
"emerge foomatic". It pretty much did the rest.
I filled in a few blanks and pow, printer working.
I had to do an "emerge gtkam" to get my powershot
s200 working. As far as games, I have quake 1,2,3
UT, ut2003, wolfenstein, and many other working
just fine one click away in blackbox. My Geforce3
ti500 is getting around 176 frames per sec at
1280 by 1024 with all the goodies cranked up the
whole way in quake3 timedemo four. I'm using an
Athlon XP 2100+ with no issues. I haven't really
found anything that I want to do that I can't do.
Everything just works, and works better than any
alternative. Little bit of time up front, less
hassel and BS later on. Oh, and it's free.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
It's amazing how, in the face of lowered demand and lowered sales, the Music Industry response has been to make their product LESS valuable to an end consumer. $15 for 1 hour of music that can be used across all of the devices in my home, car, and at work is a lot more compelling than $15 dollars for 1 hour of music that can only be listened to in the living room.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC."
:-) Or is there a difference between "normal playback" and "copy" that I missed?
I guess we all need more technical information for this not to sound like a real dumbass copy protection.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
No, I think the intent is that an audio CD player sees one "layer" of bits, and a CD-ROM drive sees an entirely different "layer" of bits.
As they both only have one laser, operating at the same wavelength. If you want different layers, it'll have to be something like SACD, which has one SACD layer, and one normal CD layer. But SACD players require another laser for this. So unless you want to ban conventional CD-ROMs in favor of only CD-ROM+"DRM laser" players, that's not possible.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
-1 Futile
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Pardon me if i'm being a complete moron here, but i simply don't see how any copy protection scheme for any audio or video playback devide could ever succeed.
That was a big sentence, so i think i'm going to repeat it:
i simply do not see how copy protection on audio and video could ever work
My argument goes something like this - for playback of an audio file to happen, a digital signal (typical for CDs is 2 16b channels per song) is read by the device, and transformed into an analog signal, which is then piped to speakers. Similarly, an identical digital-to-analog conversion takes place when an image is displayed on your monitor or your tv or whatever.
there is nothing that prevents the interruption and recording of that analog signal before it hits the speakers - or even removing the speakers and replacing them with a recording device.
of course, my argument may be flawed, and i'm no electrical engineer... comments, corrections are welcome.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Once you've said PC, you've excluded those other electronic devices.
The sound quality of the copy done through the digital-to-analog then analog-to-digital connection will definitely be inferior to the original. I think the pirates want direct digital copies without the kludgey process I just mentioned.
May I suggest "In Soviet Russia, CDs copyprotect Micorosft!" or "In Soviet Russia, CD copyprotect YOU!"?
Sorry, you can't patent that... there's too much prior art...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
It's like car companies who spend millions to make a concept car and never produce them for the population to drive.
Spend the money on making a better OS.
Spend the money on the concept of not creating a rattle box after 5 years of ownership.
OK, as of this writing, it has been ~12 hours since the technology announcement, so it is more than safe to assume that the technology has been utterly and totally cracked in a way that make it trivial to copy. Now comes the hard part, and my plea to the crackers.
Dear Mr/Ms Evildoer,
While I am sure that you want to release the crack of this scheme now to get points in the warez community, and beat the other 12 teams of obviously less-smart anti-social geniuses, please, please, please do not. If you do release the crack, MS will reverse engineer it, and fix the holes.
This v1.01 version will be a complete reworking of the system from the ground up, and will fall in 16 hours as opposed to the 12 that v1.0 took. By the time they get to v1.06 or 1.07, they might have a workable scheme, and we all lose. We all know that if it takes more than a week to crack, it will be forgotten about, and all the releases will be nuked. Pleas don't fall into this trap.
You need patience and willpower. There needs to be 100 million disks and 1 million players out there supporting the v1.0 scheme, at the very least, before you release the crack. At this point, it will be impossible to release a v1.01 without pissing off the entire sheep-minded consumer public, and making them equate DRM/Designed for Windows/Copy Protection with pain, annoyance, and general papercut-level anguish.
When this happens, MS DRM will fail. If you crack it now, it actually has a better chance of suceeding. Remember, closed source is an advantage when it comes to MS, but the advantage is yours. Use it wisely, and sit on your crack for a few weeks.
-Charlie
which surely they won't, I might think about buying music that was produced by record companys with cash oozing out of their ass-cracks. But of course, that's not going to happen, so I guess I will have to download the songs I like, illegally, from people who have ripped these songs on to their computer and re-distribute them, also illegally. I would rather break the law and do what I want with music, rather than record-companys selling me crap that can only work on some kind of Palladium-like OS , or trusted players, which will be very few, which is increasing the chances of more monopolies. All of this just because they failed to look at their own problem, CDs are too damn expensive! Instead of blaming us for their own problems (the community who downloads music for only the price of their internet connection), why can't they see that their alledged money problems aren't do to the listeners?
You get super powers just by rubing that stuff in? You'd a thought you would have to freebase it
I'm gonna go ahead and say that it has been cracked already.
If you can hear it, it can be recorded, then encoded to mp3. It may take a step or two more to get the final mp3 product, but it'd defeat the copy protection. Its that simple.
Demographics yo. 'Record profits' are generally the result of sales hype, inflation, and overly simplistic accounting reports (read: people who look at the 'bottom line' profits and nothing else).
Now, I'm not in the music industry, but I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center, and we were doing some statistical analysis which was related to this topic. So, I'll give my 2 cents, and attempt to answer your question.
Anyhow, as I understand it, fewer and fewer CD/albums are generating positive returns on investment. At the same time, more and more CD/albums are being produced. The fact which seems to be keeping the industry alive is that when a CD/album does generate a return on investment, the return can be extremely large. In fact, the return on investment is increasing for those albums which do generate a positive return. (Mostly due to an increasing world-wide population, an increase in potential consumers, world-wide communication networks, and peer-to-peer network phenomenas. )
For example, consider Eminem. Selling more CDs than anybody else around. Who has ever heard of a CD selling over 1M copies, in its first week?! But he did it. Now then, I know my estimations are inexact, but figure that 1M x $20 = $20M in one week, from one product. That number (or a similar one) is what the industry reports as a record profit.
Behind that number (and similar numbers reported, which include record-label and industry-wide sums of sales/product) are tens of thousands of titles which are lucky to sell 1,000 copies per year. Over time, those tens of thousands of titles become part of the hundreds of thousands of titles which are lucky to sell 100 copies per year. Which then become part of the millions of titles which are lucky to sell 10 copies a year.
Now then, as to your question: The music recording industry actually is ailing (as an industry), because they've lost what economists call a 'moat'. That is, they don't have any protection from other competitors getting into the business. As an industry, they don't have something which protects them from Microsoft, Apple, or Linux competing with them (read: Independent Labels.)
Now, if the recording industry were not ailing, and were healthy, here would be the situation:
Every CD produced sold exactly N copies +/- 10% of N. For example, every CD would sell 90,000 to 110,000 copies. No more, no less. There would be approximately M titles produced per year. If a new employee was hired by the company, they would produce 'M + 10' or 'M + x' titles to offset the wages and cost of the new employee. In addition, the industry would use proprietary technology, which nobody had access to, and nobody else could produce compact disks. Those people in the CD industry would be the CD producers, and nobody else got to participate in the game. That is how the industry would be structured if it were healthy.
But, that's not the way it is, now is it?
All things considered, Microsoft getting into this business is very bad news for the recording industry. For the record labels, it just means another major player who wants a cut of the pie, which is already spread too thin as it is. It also means that anybody who buys a Microsoft Small Business Server license can start up not just an 'Independent Label' but, rather, a medium sized recording label. Put another way, the small fish have just gotten bigger.
I wonder if this system, like their e-book protection, will be broken before it's officially released?
You are absolutely right. With todays A/D equipment the quality loss is less than when converting from CD to mp3/ogg when tapping into the speakers. Many soundcards have a digital output that sounds like the original, no loss there.
Simply put there are no way to technically prevent pirating. Its just a waste of consumers money (altough many companies have forgot who pays their profits).
The only way to stop pirating is getting the public to like you enough to WANT to pay.
HTTP/1.1 400
I just cracked it...
"They should rip just fine in any machine that doesn't support Palladium. You don't need to circumvent the DRM, just don't use it at all."
Using a pre-Palladium machine will be seen as circumventing copy protection and will eventually be illegal.
One would think they had got the idea by now but no, lets keep trying to make that perpetual machine! The holy grail of the music industry is a bedtime story never to be fulfilled in real life.
1. If you can listen and see you can copy.
2. The quality isnt as important as the content.
3. Restrictions in use applies mostly to legit buyers since the not so legit users tends to use nonrestricted copies.
4. Pissing of legit customers tend to make them not pay for the goods.
5. If there are two versions of the same goods and one of them is unusable what do people choose?
They can never ever succeed in making a hackproof music or video format. All they can do is push their legit buyers over to pirating. I think that is a very stupid thing to do if you have a music business. Then again, not using the net to distribute music back in 1997 was a pretty stupid move too.
HTTP/1.1 400
*Note i'm recycling this post I made a few weeks back*
.5 owner of the zine. When we went to the different bay area wherehouse music stores today, we found out some alarming news.
At the bottom of my sig, you'll see the mag I donate my webmastering skills too. We're a local zine for the silicon valley music scene.
Before ppl ask "SV has a music scene?" remember, bands like green day come out of here. Our music scene is totally different than that of L.A.'s a.k.a. Hollywood. I can't describe it, because I see everything as data, but I can tell you what the musicians are fearing.
So today, i'm riding around delivering the latest issue of Zero with one of our big bosses. Boss delivering zines you ask? It's hard times, everyone is pulling double effort.
Anyways, this cat is a musician, and
All Wherehouse music stores around our area are shutting down... We have noticed a trend too, less people in other music stores.
So who's to blame? Napster? The economy? Pirates?
Well, my partner started asking questions about the technology. He's what I would call a reforming luddite (yeah strong words but he'd agree with me) "Isn't there some way they could make a CD so it's uncopyable?" he asked. I explained to him as long as there was some sort of digital, to a speaker coil coversion, the RIAA will never be able to stamp out piracy.
"Well who the fuck would want to download a shitty copy of a song then!" he chirped.
"The same fucks that would bring a camera into AOTC's, compress it to mpeg and share it over kazaa" I replied.
Stumped, he went back to his first question. After repeating that there had to be some way of doing it 3 times I answered..
"Yeah, if they could convince everyone to replace their ears with DRM enabled digital implants, then yeah the RIAA has a chance"
Well, he got the point after that. So he moved onto "How do you stamp out P2P?"
I put it into another analogy for him. Napster with it's central peer topology is much like a football team with 1 quarterback. You sack the quarterback.. You sack the network.
"So the RIAA can just sack kazaa right?"
"No, Kazaa would be the equivelent of every player on the team being both QB and reciever"
See, our zine stays alive by record lables having the money to buy adspace from us. If the record lables are losing money from P2P it affects us because they've yet to evolve to the net.
"What should they do?"
Personally, I think the record lables should ditch CD production altogether now. They should make songs freely downloadable. Fuck it, cut their losses.
But rather than look at it like a loss, the record industry should take a Las Vegas approach to it. Just use the music as a "comp" to milk money out of people in other ways.
For instance, that $50 dollar green day ticket, fuck it, if people won't buy the albums anymore, double it. I think people wouldn't care if they had to pay more for live performances. I'm biased because I do get in for free, and don't have any money to pay for tickets anyways. I'm 30 years old in feburary and am perfectly content to staying at home.
The market is really for 14-25 year olds. Those are the people with expendable cash. They live at home, don't have a mortgage, and can afford $100 bucks to see a live performance. With the rate of inflation over the last 10 years, $100 doesn't really seem like a lot to me to see a big headliner band if I had no financial obligations.
I'm the oldest of 6, my youngest siblings are more at home in the computer enviroment than I ever was at their age. The RIAA doesn't realize this yet, but their biggest age group has a huge understanding of internet distribution, and they will never be able to beat it. That's just an unfortunate fact about it.
So to recap the RIAA should...
Cut back CD production,
Raise the price of live performances
Focus on promotion more than CD distribution.
Well, it's 3:30, and after a night of bouncing 300lb pac islanders from my karaoke bar, I need some sleep. Slash you in the morning and I hope your friday was as fun as mine.
--Toq
The music industry will regain their market control; they have patience and take the long road while (literal) consumers generally take the short view (in other words, they buy whatever is sexy and cheap while they throw in some must have feature; putting chrome on the wheels perhaps?). But at that point, they have you again.
At some point, between DMCA, copy protection, copy bits, surcharges on discs, etc. they will narrow the online market. You are already screwed.
So...I don't care what fancy DRM they bring out, if you can hear it, you can copy and distribute it.
Until they put DRM in our ears.
What? You don't think they're working on that?
Rule 1: the audio degradation caused by analog copying is LESS than that caused by MP3 compression. So...I don't care what fancy DRM they bring out, if you can hear it, you can copy and distribute it.
Got any audio tests to back that up?
It depends on the bitrate and the encoder, the DAT and ADT specs, and how you are doing the copy, but in the average case, no, I don't think so.
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When are they going to finally understand that anything you can play can be copied, and anything you can't play won't make money??? Instead of every industry learning the hard way, they should all learn from Hollywood's example: initially, they fought VHS technology, but when they *finally* figured out that they could make money through rentals, they rolled with it and now make far more than they ever would have without VHS.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
Wait, you convince people to drop a good RDBMS (SQL Server) for a weak one (MySQL)? Either you're a really good salesman, or your customers are idiots (no offense intended, of course). Why not at least move them to something with similar capabilities, like PostgreSQL, or Oracle or DB2? For the latter, they're already paying licenses for SQL Server, so it shouldn't be a hard sell to get them to take that money and put it into a different database.
They think they are the only software/hardware engineers in town. Well, look around. So are we :D and we outnumber you :D
Think whatever you want to think, you audio-fucking-phile.
M$ has simply developed a method of putting two images on a CD - one readable by PC CD ROMs and one readable by CD players. I assume that's done by making the lower layer permeable by the laser wavelengths used by one device or the other. There is no actual copy protection scheme here. The record labels would simply use the protection scheme of their choice on the PC-readable layer.
The idea/technology here is actually kind of cool. It's unfortunate it was designed for evil purposes. I also wonder if such CDs will have the longevity of the standard single-layer aluminum CDs? I guess it depends what material they use for the semi-transparent layer.
Let's put it another way then:
The lossiness from an analog rip is not so bad that people won't put up with it, especially if the RIAAAAAHHAAHH's solution is to jack up prices. It's true that the sound off a CD is more dynamic than audio tape, and while this helped the adoption of CD's, I'd wager that regaining control of discrete tracks, the elimination of tape hiss and all the myriad ways that tapes lose sound had a lot more do with it. You can do all but the dynamic sound with an analog rip (and perhaps some post-rip cleanup).
No, now that people feel they can get music for free, mp3 sharing ain't going nowhere. It might well headed towards where porn is - people won't want to talk about doing it, but lot of them will anyway.
MS is only paying out about $1 billion in dividends. That's less than 1/3rd of 1 percent of their market capitalization (~300 billion). The stock should not have dropped by 10% because of that.
Next you won't even be able to use CD's unless you have a chip implanted into your hand or brain. What do yo think?
To my surprise he threw it into my oven and turned it on. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said, "Do not worry, it is unharmed."
After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said, "Take a close look at it."
To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I had ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth: "12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE820945092OF923A40EEl OE5IOCC98D444AA08E324"
"I cannot understand the fiery letters," I said in a timid voice.
"No, but I can," he said. "The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English, this is what it says:
"One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." It is only two lines from a verse long known in System lore: "Three OS's from corporate kings in their towers of glass, Seven from valley lords where orchards used to grow, Nine from dotcoms doomed to die, One from the Dark Lord Gates on his dark throne In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie. One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all And in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie."
~Just a cute little joke I found somewhere... Somewhat relavent to the topic... Smilingirl =)
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. - C.S. Lewis
Microsoft wants to always be at the top, well when people burn their software and give it to others, isn't that helping them stay on top? They have tried serial numbers, phone/net activation, all of that.. but somehow people keep getting copies of 2k and XP, GEE GOLLY! I wonder how! microsoft does not have the smartest minds working for them, this isn't AntiTrust the movie.. they have normal people (maybe?) who think up ideas after other normal people (dunno) have already figured out a way for x to beat y in their protection..
so it sounds software based, this will be cracked soon enough, if it hasn't been already! Someone with enough time on their hands will take care of it and then the rest of us lazy bastards can benefit from his/her work. Copy protection just annoys the user and doesn't actually keep the interested party from doing what they want with a CD,etc. When will the industry learn?
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
So what if the re-recordings are analogue... 'nuff said ?
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
All these copyright protection schemes do is prevent me, the consumer, using the copyrighted work in a way which is legally supported (at least here in Australia, where the DMCA isn't used as a catch-all...).
It's been said before, and'll be said again: if someone truly wants to violate copyright, there'll be a way to do it - so in the end, the only losers are Mum and Dad users.
Sigh.
Technology and media companies, such as Microsoft, Sony, Philips and Real Networks, are looking to build a business out of securing copyright protections across the Internet and other digital media.
Micrososft has discussed plans for an upcoming operating system, code-named "Palladium," that will seek to put user controls on all bits of information they store on a computer document, from medical records to billing information.
Interesting, while M$ is still denying any connection of DRM and Palladium, their own joint venture MSNBC is making the connection lightheartedly... Maybe they bypassed their marketing drones and read the truth on the net...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
gee, it will take me an extra 10 seconds to hook a cable from the audio outputs on my stereo to my audio inputs in my sound card...... when will MicroLame realize that if a sound can be heard, it can be recorded, no matter how much of their $$$ they throw at it.
-Cnik
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is always a way of copying a CD, no matter what protection it has on it... Put a microphone just in front of your speakers, or (with a bit of tweaking) just run the speaker cable straight through to your microphone plug.
:)
Always easy and it's always worked for me
-----
I prefer MS Windows to Linux
When Palladium was announced, Microsoft was at great pains to say, over and over, that Palladium had nothing to do with digital restrictions management. For example, here's Microsoft interviewing Microsoft on the topic:
"PressPass: How will Palladium differ from digital rights management (DRM)? Manferdelli: First off, Palladium will not require DRM, and DRM will not require Palladium. Palladium is a great complementary technology to the DRM solutions of tomorrow, but the two are separate technologies."
But MSNBC certainly thinks Palladium IS DRM:
"Microsoft has invested $500 million in digital rights management, or DRM, for music, Fester said....Microsoft is making a concerted push into DRM, a hotly contested new field.... Micrososft has discussed plans for an upcoming operating system, code-named 'Palladium,' that will seek to put user controls on all bits of information they store on a computer document, from medical records to billing information."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The reason that they (RIAA, MPAA, and MS) get away with this shit is that no one does anything other than complain on web sites. If people boycotted music and video stores, they would get the message pretty fucking quick. You have to send the message to them in a way that they will understand, through their wallets. bitching on slashdot has never, and will never accomplish dick. besides, most new music sucks anyway so i couldn't care less about copy protection on shit that I don't want. Just a thought. Fuck the United States, its DMCA, its war, and its oil, Im moving to canada.
Pleeeease email me. I can't believe there is a girl posting on Slashdot! I make 4 figures, can use vi, and know that BSD isn't dead. Call me for marriage, copulation, or some light-hearted touching.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
From what I remember of how this works, the "layers" they are talking about are simply different sessions on the CD. One audio session (which is twunted so that it won't play on your PC/PlayStation etc), and a data session which contains copies of all the tracks in WMA format.
The WMAs are protected with MSDRM (probably V7 rather than the Mac/Windows 95 "friendly" V1).
I believe that when you put the CD in, it will copy the WMAs to your PC and then issue you a license which will unlock them. I don't know how they limit the number of licenses (CD Key was one solution).
I think Sony are using a system very similar to this already that gives you access to the WMA tracks on a web site?
Couple of problems with the system:
1) You need enough space for WMA copies of all the tracks.. roughly 50Mb, which eats into available audio space.
2) Probably only works on Win98/WinME/Win2000/WinXP - although, before you Linux junkies go whining, you could club together and license the DRM and port it to Linux.
> Chaz
Well, I don't know what to do in Windows, but I have a similar situation and just dual boot the machine. I use tar to make backup volumes and Windows to write. Tar has a multivolume option, -M, and tape length option, -L that I have never used because I've just kludged my way through with directories. Looks like you can use cygwin if you want. Thanks for asking, it was interesting to read about. The machine mostly stays under linux, and I mount the windows drive with an entry in /etc/fstab. This makes it easy to move things around the local network with ftp and ssh, which might solve your problem of wanting those files on the next computer. When I'm ready to write something out, I copy it to Windose and boot over. Look, Slashdot did this a while back.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The way I see it there are three primary considerations here.
1. The first is whether or not your PC, running the OS of you choice (Linux, MacOS, Windows, Lindows, etc), will be able to read the disc in existing CD-ROM drives. I believe that the likely answer to that question is yes, because the music industry and Micro$oft have seen the results of violating the Redbook Standard and rendering CDs unreadable. This approach leads to widespread incompatibilities, confusion, and frustration on the part of consumers about which CDs will or will not work in which devices. Thus people refuse to buy them.
2. The second question is whether or not it is possible using multiple layers on the CD to render the CD-ROM drive capable of reading only the WMA digitally encoded tracks and not the standard audio tracks. I am not an expert in CD-ROM drive hardware and drivers so perhaps one of you other slashdot people know the answer to that for sure. Let us assume for the moment that CD-ROM drives can only read the WMA encoded data tracks and move on to point number three.
3. WMA is a proprietary file format which is readable only by Windows Media Player (as far as I understand it). Thus this constitutes a "security by obscurity" type system scheme because presumably Micro$oft will keep the file format secret and somebody will have to write a program which parses the file and extracts the audio. History has shown these types of "encryption" schemes to be vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before some information about the WMA format leaks or somebody cracks the format encoding (case in point the CSS scheme employed on DVDs).
In closing, the only other alternative for additional protection beyond proprietary files is to use a real cryptographic scheme. However, it is difficult in practice to operate a public key encryption scheme under these circumstances. Basically, the more people who have access to a decryption key, even though it may be buried or hidden in the Windows Media Software, the less secure the system becomes. This was a problem faced by DVD manufacturers in the early DeCSS days (As I understand it, the original program used a key which was leaked from a manufacturer, Xing technologies I think, to decode the mpeg streams). The problem became even worse when some enterprising hackers discovered that it was possible crack CSS and decode the DVD without a key. I will bet that even the hardware player manufacturers don't bother with the keys anymore because it is cheaper to put a DeCSS based decoder chip in the box instead. Thanks for reading.
Afterthought:
The only truley secure solution would be a single all in one device (speakers and everything) with end to end encryption. I dont believe anybody would accept that draconian of a solution and even if it were somehow forced onto people they could still record the sound coming out of the speakers. The music industry will only be happy when it becomes possible to pipe the music directly into your brain so that nobody else can hear it and you cannot copy it. Oh wait! what if I remember the song and it sticks in my head? did I violate the DMCA? lol friggen hillarious.
Any interference with the redbook standard (oh, notice that word standard) will have to have some interference on the audio, and no matter how small, it's still going to be negative. And surely this kind of defeats the original marketing of CD's as "The best audio quality available".
it's called humour. You may have burned a book about it in the 1930's.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
What I guess they're trying to prevent is people converting their CD's to mp3's, and that's when I get upset. I like mp3's. They play on my mp3-player, I can fit a whole lot of them on another CD to bring to work. This is what I want to do. This is my right, since I paid for the music. Why do they feel the urge to deny me my rights?
People live up, or down, to expectations. If they treat me like a criminal, perhaps I should start act like one too?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
They suck. Period.
- Wow, that feels better.
Anyone remember seeing what looked like $5 dvd's for sale at circuit city like 4-5 years ago? It ended up that you had to have a special player with a modem so you could give the nice people your credit card number every time you wanted to watch a movie. Boy, I sure hope that technology comes back again.
This is rediculous. If you can hear the music, it can be recorded. So you can't rip it on your 50x CD-ROM and it'll take an hour to get the tracks (15 minutes at 4x speed playback?) Someone out there with nothing to do will take the time to record the tracks and upload the MP3s.
This copy protection doesn't solve anything.
Instead of me getting on some moral crusade/bandwagon lets just look at it realistically. They want to wave around the flag of free market as high and as visible as possible yet then attempt to not be subject to the associated responsibilities, drawbacks and costs of doing business under that model. Vote with your feet and your wallet... don't bother trying to fight fire with fire (i.e. proactively introducing legislation that restricts their right (yes, their right) to do something so stupid and self destructive. Don't confuse that with any attempt on their part to legally (or through other direct intimidation methods) force hardware and software vendors to conform to their schemes.
Remember, vote with your feet and your wallet. It has the most power.
I always see the comments saying "DRM (copy protection) is not possible", "it is doomed to fail".
Don't you people get it? This is not about having a bullet-proof system. They just want to make it HARDER (not impossible) for the average guy to copy stuff.
Average guy uses Windows and Media Player. If you have a solution to prevent 75% of average people from copying without causing incompatibility, you have a product! You can market it for billions. (Remember how much piracy costs to RIAA, or they claim it does.)
Just my 2 cents.
Thats nice, I really like it. ...
However I'd like to point out that Linux isnt
the only operating system distributed with the source
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
The best way to stop piracy is to make the product worth buying, or make it free.
There is some absolutey beautiful FREE music at
http://www.modarchive.com, (they are MODS, tracked formats like midi except they contain the sound samples)They play fine in WinAMP
Download some or look at the top 10 or read the reviews, you'll find something you like there. One thing you won't have to wory about is DRM, or the RIAA busting down your door. These people create music for the love of it, and that is how is should be!
...I Can Rip It.
Haven't they gotten the idea yet? The only 100% sure-fire way to prevent music piracy is to prevent music. And that, my friends, is not happening. Any eight year old kid with a little patience isn't going to care that you can't copy a CD the most direct way if it's copy-protected. With the slightest bit of initiative and desire, anyone who wants to will find a way to copy it to their format of choice.
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
That seems great. I don't see how that could prevent copying though. If a normal player could read it, anything could copy it as well. At least these will work under linux if that is true :).
Gash, start using this wonderful idea soon: Street performer protocol. I think I would like it.
Which unfortunately the recording industry is yet to accept; If you can play it back, you can record it.
Go Microsoft! You show em. You'll be able to help the RIAA out! I mean, look at how good a job you've done with your own stuff. You've prevented soooo many people from pirating windows and office. I'm -sure- you can help them out!
anything else is a "PC Clone"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yeah...this'll work...
to get into a permanent arms race with crackers is potentially expensive.
/expensive for most people so we don't often see photocopied book at swap meets.
Media people want a reasonble barrier to copying.
Photocopying a whole book is too time consuming
The fact that one can rip it via analogue is an unescapable fact so spending millions on developing a foolproof anti-digital copying mechanism is generally a waste of time.
Rememebr the VHS-VHS anti-copying machanism where some sort of modulation is inserted so that the sounds & colour fades in and out when the modulated signal is introduced as aliasing?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Okay you can funk around and alter the hardware but then it's no longer really an XBox.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It seems funny that Microsoft should build MP3 ripping software into Media Player and win XP then do this. Even if they make somthing that works it still doesn't stop people from playing it in a stereo and then straight into the computer.
cat
I hope it's as successful as Windows Product Activation ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Lets say this is implimented. Since it's on the OS level, it'll be kinda hard to bypass and since there is nolonger a lower level OS like DOS running below XP, what if things moved to the hardware level?
Whats to stop peopel from creating a cheap PCI device, much akin to a PS2 mod chip (without the licensing shit), where it will intercept the CD-DA signal from the CD-ROM drive's Digital Audio cable, and create a WAV from it just as if it were captured from the Analog inputs, but without the DAC->ADC loss? Hell, all you really need is to reprogram a cheap soundcard and it'll do the trick.
Even better if you had a board that intercepts via the IDE cable.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I hate to say it, but that's pretty clever. It sucks that it took Microsoft to figure it out.
1. put CD into HiFi/CD player
2. connect audio output from HiFi into Mic socket of computer.
3. use software to encode audio input into mp3 format in realtime. (or save it in a raw format & encode later)
-- i would love to see the technology that stops this from happening!
+ btw this is how i mp3 all of my old vinyls... (& yes - i use a powermac & iMic)
Your thinking of Macrovision.
Its not a modulation, but a false colour burst in the composite video signal.
This works by fooling the Automatic Gain Control systems in VCRs so the gain of the recorded signal wobbles - on playback this produces the effects you see.
Its also in DVD player chipsets to stop you recording DVDs.
I had heard of it but didn't know what it was.
It's been so long since I tried VHS copying.
thanks
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