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Copy-Protected CDs Going Mainstream
bmarklein writes "According to this CNET article, Arista is going to start shipping copy-protected CDs in volume. Looks like the discs will include DRM'd Windows Media files in the second session. No mention of which titles will be affected, but Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G."
thats the exact opposite of what will happen, people want to put things onto a playlist on their pooter so they will return the cd "Wont work in my pc" and download it from people who have bypassed the protection somehow (either defeating the protection or analogue connection to a cd player). Meaning more stuff downloaded.
the RIAA and record labels are just bringing their demise on themselves
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Therefore I will not buy ANY of those titles.
Since I cannot back them up.
When no one buys their copy-protected law-breaking titles, they'll stop issuing them that way.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Oh dear... the recording industry simply never learns do they?
If they force copy-protection on us then I think they're quickly going to find:
1. lots of people bitching and returning disks because they won't play in there car player or on their DVD.
2. unskilled people being *forced* to download their MP3 rips from the Net rather than buying a CD and ripping tracks themselves for use on their MP3 players and computers.
3. *no* change in the rate of serious piracy because serious pirates just laugh at the stupid copy protection schemes being used (audio patch cord and decent soundcard anyone?)
And how stupid will the recording industry look if their CD sales figures don't immediately soar to new heights as a result of this copy protection?
If sales levels remain basically unchanged then they're going to have to admit that either:
a) people weren't pirating much anyway
or
b) their copyprotection doesn't work.
But you've got to feel sorry for an industry that has already shot off both its feet but keeps reloading and blasting away in vain, right?
What do you get when you alienate your customer base, potential future customer base and anyone with an interest in music? A further drop in sales, that's what.
Copy-protected CDs have been shown not to be effective at stopping people "pirating" them. Even if an ideal copy protection did exist, there's still that blasted analogue hole. If they want to copy protect their content, they'll have to use a different medium since older CD players don't like copy-protected CDs.
As I've said before, this is just an attempt to slow the "piracy" problem in order to give them time to think up of a new strategy.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
good thing i don't listen to those artists, but either we all stand together or all hang seperately.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Am I too silly to expect a cd that is longer than 40 minutes?
-- Seq
The standards define what's a CD. These - things - whatever they are, wherever they came for, whatever they're trying to do here - are _not_ CDs.
If there is no name for them, they cannot be feared, and despised, and resisted. There is no way to think about them, or talk about them - which is exactly what they want.
You must speak the true name of your enemy.
It only takes one Windows system to make it work for the rest. Warez community can afford it :-)
They'll get around to that in a few years. The kind of people that listen to that Kenny G shit probably won't have any idea about the DRM issus. This will allow them to get an "install base" for this copy protection and then they can go to congras and say "look at all these millions of people whe are ok with it".
This is truthfully very sad to see, particularly the amount of control that Microsoft's own product is exercising over music. I mean, they already control so much of the software market and entertainment market, it is sad to see that this only expands their control. In my opinion, this DRM (if it is necessary at all) should be based on widely accepted standards and protocols created by some public ruling body, NOT the RIAA which is a group of privately controlled companies or some company like Microsoft solely wanting to make a profit.
:(
I mean, whatever happened to just being able to stick a CD in a CD player and have it play without having to connect to the Internet to verify its authenticity? Why should Microsoft benefit from some artist's musical expertise?
-6d
Actually it would be very risky. Think about who listens to Kenny G, etc. They are ppl my age (43). Most are not ripping. If the cd fails in the equipment, they will take back to the CD and complain. Then, the studio will know if they have the tracking right or wrong. A geek or youth would simply download a ripped version.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The RIAA and record labels are just bringing their demise on themselves
We'll see. It's possible that this will increase sales(don't know how--it's not going to stop file-traders--but miracles could happen, right?). If this increases sales, They will copy-protect more disks. If it doesn't increase sales, they'll copy-protect fewer disks. It's up to us to make sure they make the right choice.
Synergy is your friend
Say, linkin park (I'm making an extrapolation. If you hate it, sorry.)
Apology accepted.
Just out of curiosity, what data are you extrapolating a "geek" like of Linkin' Park from?
Either way, I don't find it particularly dangerous for record labels to attempt to be compensated for their products. I think it's fairly natural for them to use increasingly more extreme measures of reducing the brazenly open distribution of their content.
I mean really did you expect them to just bend over and take it?
The more people steal their products, the more they're going to do everything within their power to reduce the effectiveness for the average person to do so. Dangerous? Not particularly. The people that whittle away your fair use rights are the people that think they're the ones with the power, take whatever they want, and fail to understand that the music industry isn't just going to sit there and let them pick its bones.
If you want to find someone to be angry with download this program, do a search for some of Arista's artists, and then message all of the people distributing their work. Something like, "Hey Fuckhead, you're evaporating my fair use rights of copyrighted materials."
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
I think the real issue here is that the record labels are trying to stop us from format-shifting.
A lot of slashdotters might be too young to remember the mystical 80s when digital audio was new and we had re-issues of old stuff onto the new format with much fanfare and rejoicing ("The Beatles come to CD! Huzzah, hurray!"). The record companies were able to jerk all of us whose music collections existed on vinyl into replacing them with CDs.
?Fast forward fifteen years and MP3 comes along - except that we can do the format shift ourselves . This is the record companies' worst nightmare - they're not worried about the piracy per se.
People taping songs from the radio and assorted other cheapskate stuff have been around for a long time - only people with no disposable income are willing to go through the hassle. Guess what, they weren't buying records anyway.
My multi gigabyte MP3 collection is similar to what I expect most people's is, all my favourite CDs converted to the new format plus a few (say 10% of the total) songs that I don't own, but have been listening to on the radio for the past thirty years. If I wasn't moved to buy an LP / CD / Cassette of Guess Who just to get "American Woman", guess what, I'm never going to...
the selection of artists seems to me intentionally selected to appeal to the exact type of person who:
owns a windows machine and doesn't suspect there are alternatives
is the least likely to hack/reverse engineer the drm in the copy protection
couldn't care less about drm or fair use rights, and doesn't bother using kazaa...
i mean come on, folks. the average kenny g listener (sorry, dad) probably doesn't give a rat's ass about any of this baloney, which is exactly why it will be successful and touted as the solution to piracy after n number of albums have been released with all this copy protection and nobody complains.
think they don't have a profile of what your average linux using ogg vorbis encoding windows bashing music fan listens to? of course they do. are you surprised that none of those bands are on this list?
The scary part is he isn't. The music industry actually has proposed making it illegal to produce analog-to-digital converters without DRM watermark recognition shutdown!
You have it wrong. If it increases sales, they'll claim it worked and copy-protect more disks. If sales decrease, they'll blame piracy and copy-protect more while working on better encryption.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
Oh? You have proof of this? Let's see a study that has been done which supports any of your statements. Hell, try giving some anecdotal evidence even.
Personally, I have something like 40Gb of MP3's. All of them are legally mine. I have the CDs or tapes still. Many people I know have ripped their music to MP3's to use with iPods and MP3-based CD players. Most seem to have only MP3s of music they own, in part since they find only pop-crap fit for 13-year-olds on P2P networks.
That, my shift-challenged friend, is because a car is a physical object, whereas what you are buying in the case of music, books, movies, etc. is the right to the use the works. Hence the term copyright.
Wrong. Physical goods are not treated the same as intellectual property. This was understood back when the U.S. Constitution was written. It's not just that people want to make copies of the music they buy, they have (in the U.S. at least, and probably in most other countries) the legal right to make copies of a work they have bought legally, as long as they adhere to fair-use principles.
The music industry has to "get over" their obsession of controlling how people can listen to music. The industry has been, for many decades, bloated and decadent. They jacked their prices through the roof out of all proportions to the cost of manufacture and distributing music. They regularly screw over their talent by continuing to charge fees for things such as records broken during shipment (virtually no CDs are broken during shipment nowadays, but the record companies charge artists as if they are still shipping fragile 30's era records). The record companies broke price fixing laws, and were forced to offer rebates to customers.
Frankly, I have no sympathy for the record industry. All they are is a bunch of middlemen who screw artists and their audience. They are little more than a pimp. If they want to make their product more unpalatable to me than it already is, so be it. I can live without them. I'm willing to bet that both artists and their fans can live without them as well. Implementing DRM may be good, in that it could make them face the fact that piracy isn;t their biggest enemy. Their biggest enemy is themselves.
hey don't have any inalienable rights to control what you do with recordings, it is given by law.
You don't have any inalienable rights either. All rights are provided as a matter of law. It matters rather little what Locke and those that shared his views believed to be their source.
Calling it "stealing" is subverting the language to fit your viewpoint, it implies there is more in common with downloading songs and shoplifting other than both being illegal. It is copyright infringement, nothing more.
I suggest you grow up. The person distributing and the person receiving copies of media without the permission of its owner are taking away their equally law-given right of control, and through which, compensation for their efforts.
It is illegal, but it doesn't always have to be, nor was it always so. For example, there is new economic theory that proposes copyright isn't necessary and sometimes harmful to artists and innovators. If this was accepted as common knowledge, copyright would eventually cease to exist. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but pointing out that copyright isn't some inalienable right.
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
Your ideology is irrelevant, and I suggest you come back to Earth with the rest of us. It is illegal. Those people are benefiting without compensating the owners. The people with a vested interest in maintaining the right to control their intellectual property have large sums of money to use, and lose, and will take those steps that are economically viable to fight the illegal distribution of their property. You don't have to like it, but they're going to do whatever it takes. If they need to obfuscate their property, poison P2P networks, sue companies into oblivion, or pass draconian laws to push back the tide, they will. They're being pushed against the wall by the open illegal distribution of their property. They wouldn't need to waste their money on Congressmen and cryptography if there weren't petabytes of their work being downloaded without a second thought by the very markets that have sustained them. They're _going_ to make it as _expensive_ as possible for the average person to download their products freely because people _are_ making it more expensive for them not to. They don't care about where you place their rights in your fantasy food chain.
How many people have to go untaught or uncultured before it is considered harmful?
Intellectual honesty: 0
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
I second the motion but then again making CD copy-protected is useless since the anti-copying schemes really are ineffective. Just look at the example of macrovision, applications for ripping DVDs can already remove macrovision effortlessly. Just my 2 cents.
Checking out my form of escapism.
My understanding of this stuff is that it works by superseding the table of contents with a deliberately corrupted one in a way that is only interpreted by computers. That is, (legacy) consumer equipment will ignore the pointer (for want of a better description) to the new table and read the old one. CD-ROM drives will follow the pointer to the junk data and get confused. Now, this functionality is apparently useful for multi session CDs but if that's all I were to lose, I'd happily update the firmware in a similar fashion to how I update the firmware to allow playing of imported DVDs (eg for content not available here). In fact if modified firmware were available for a reasonably common drive I'd dedicate one to ripping in a flash... CD-ROM drives ~= the price of CDs nowdays anyway! And of course it only takes one person with this modified equipment to rip the CD and publish it. That said I'm *very* picky about the quality of rips (usually using ogg with q=6, considering moving to flac and forgetting about it) so I don't download anything. Gotta run...
Curious,
What do you think of bands like Phish and (formerly) the Grateful Dead that have made a great living off of concerts and the lifestyle that surrounds them?
I have no problem with either economic model, but frankly the RIAA is getting a little obscene with their tactics. I buy my own albums, and these CD's will not work in my MP3-enabled car cd player.
What is going to happen, is I'm just not going to buy those albums. I never cared much for most popular music anyways, but considering the 2 places that I listen to recorded music is in front of my computer and in my car, this is a big problem.
But you're making the assumption that it's the file traders that are keeping me from purchasing the music that I want to buy.
If the RIAA wants stricter copy protection, I'm fine with that. But if my right to copy to make a backup or a duplicate which I, and only I, will use is violated, I will not have a part in that. I will (for obvious reasons) also not buy anything that will not work in my current setup.
I guess my biggest problem with this whole situation is not that the RIAA is trying to protect their work, but that they're denying me the right to USE their work in a lawful fashion. Only they will suffer for that.
Frankly, I think the only true way to institute copyright in this age would be with a governing body which manages who owns and distributes what. These copy-protected CD's are going to be a joke in a few months when 'compatible' cd players start coming out due to demand, or they go away, due to demand. You can't just yank something away that so many people have latched onto and not expect an uprising.
This is what I don't understand.
They don't want people downloading mp3s--so they're going to actually RESTRICT their CDs even more?
They're simply giving me even more of an incentive to download a cracked (and these are always "cracked" in some way) version so I can burn my own, fully-functioning CD.
Revel in the logic!
I have enough music that I don't have to buy those stupid copy-protected CDs for a good listen.
Get Walmart's attention.
....and it doesn't work.
First we go to Walmart en masse & buy music CDs we know are screwed up.
Then we return the CDs, en masse. Make sure you point out to the "returns" people that you tried playing this on your Mac, & the linux computer YOU BOUGHT FROM WALMART
take some printed articles showing growing use of linux or how macs are THE system for audio. Leave the articles with them....it might be useful to hand scribble on the front of these in red ink, "walmart sells CDs that refuse to play on their own systems" or "walmart sells CDs that refuse to play on Macs."
it will only take several hundred before this goes up the pipe. Managers and higher will start to talk about this.
Walmart just may react favorably.
A major german computer magazine decided to call them Un-CDs.
Maybe Non-CD works better for the english language.
It's both short enough to be snappy, and makes clear what these
things are (not).
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
I gather that you don't believe in inalienable rights --ie, natural rights that exist because, well, we believe that they do. That all rights are privileges granted by those with power, and that any other view is fantasy and de facto childishness.
Do you realize that you have disowned Jefferson's view of the rights of man? You've rejected everything that the United States was founded upon. Is this what we're really up against? People who have swung so far to the right that they have disowned the ideals of our country? Might is the only right; we're pricks, we're rich, get used to it?
From what I've seen of the neo-conservatives, I think you exemplify what they stand for, from debt explosion, to treaty abrogation, to the destruction of the tax base, and free schools.. the creation of impossible "property" composed of notes of a song or the ideas in a book.
The rights of man do not really exist. They are not written on an asteroid by the hand of God himself.
The rights of man, which we hold to be self-evident, are a fiction agreed to among civilized people. Since they can be denied with the flick of a pen, or an election, they can only exist if people understand them -- support them -- and die for them. This is what patriotism means.
The artsy-fartsy intellectually dishonest people whom you mock are the real source of the free air you breathe. They maintain the big lie -- that you have the right to a constitution that guarantees certain rights to the individual. We, the intellectually dishonest, have for over 225 years fought the "realistic" people who point out that our rights can be taken away with a club. Or a gun. Or a secret arrest and imprisonment at the President's mercy (0).
No gun, no army, no flag can guarantee the rights in the U.S. Constitution, if a majority of the people of the U.S. don't understand their heritage. The intellectually dishonest hippies are the true conservatives, trying against desperate odds to preserve over two centuries of hard-won rights and beliefs against "intellectual honesty" which basically champions thuggery as the only true reality.
I am a true conservative. You are a radical.
This is nothing to worry about. These "CDs" either
A) A multi-session CD, one Audio and one Data (from what the article said, I beleive this is what they're doing)
Or
B) A "CD" that is encrypted (etc) that uses software to un-encrypt it on a computer.
If it's B, most of their market will be alienated. They *MAY* stop illegal trading (doubtful, probably would get cracked) but anyone not wanting to listen to their CDs on anything other than a computer would be screwed (thus resulting in almost no sales)
If it's A, there are two solutions: Connecting your stereo to your computer, and ripping it that way, OR simply write a program that ignores the 2nd session, and plays/rips the cd that way. Record companies are wasting their money on copy-protection, because in order to maintain compatibility with old hardware (I still have a 10 year old CD-player) actually protecting the content is IMPOSSIBLE (because computers and other similiar devices can emulate plain cd-players) until we get DRM integrated into our computers, hard drives, CD drives, etc. Once that becomes a reality, thats when we have to start worrying.
Man, that's the scariest thing I've read in a long time, and is completely opposite to the principles the USA was founded on.
An inalienable right, like the right to your life, is something the state cannot grant, because if the state can grant it, it can just as easily deny. Now, these protections are enforced by law, but the law does not give you those rights in the first place.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.