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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."
You want to copy their music? Play it in CD-ROM on computer (or in portable CD player), plug into output sound, tell recorder to directly record digital output. Encode. Share.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
There're a lot of Linux users that keep a Windows box for games. In the future some Windows users could want a Linux box (maybe a barebones) for media.
Well, it'd be risky if they started copy protecting any music that is popular amoung the geek population... Say, linkin park (I'm making an extrapolation. If you hate it, sorry.) or something? Don't you think it would be dangerous...
Here in Japan, Massive Attack's latest release was DRMed. I don't know if it was in the states.
:-p
The funny thing is, in Japan, your can rent music. In fact Tsutaya, the Blockbuster video of Japan, rents music (CD) at all their stores and even crazier, they sell black CDs and MDs at the counter!
This so-called second session, containing files that can be used by computer music aficionados but not widely distributed, has come to be a key goal for the labels.
based on these lines, it looks as if they're going to have two versions of every song? that no doubt means that there will be fewer songs on some CD's... or perhapes will have really low bitrate versions for the computer, to save space... except that these versions will also sound crappy, due to their low bitrate.
and i guess people without constant internet connections are going to be a little screwed, since, afaik, all microsoft's drm techiniques involve some sort of online interaction with a remote server. that kinda alienates half the population right there...
1.) This is going to be an excuse to jack up the already obnoxious price of CDs
2.) If it can be encrypted it can be decrypted...what makes them think that this time crackers will just roll over and not break this copyright protection? I dont think a small band of corporate code jockies will forever outsmart a determined community.
3.) There are always alternatives, they can spend years locking, bricking up, chaining, securing the main door and not accomplish anything with the back door, side doors, and windows left wide open.
4.) Alternatives will provide new rips anyway and what have they then accomplished except...see point 1.
Anybody know where I can get some toilet paper with DMCA on it?
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Is the music industry really so dumb as to think that hardware and software solutions will really ever work?
Think of it this way, software companies have been trying for years to copy protect their software. They've gone rapidly through overburned CDs, hardware dongles, encrypted CD verification. Sony even masked Playstation discs so that they could leave sections of the CDs blank as a sort of key. None of it has worked yet. What makes record labels think that they're immune?
Of course, don't get me wrong. The more time they spend on pointless hardware and software solutions the more time they divert from their likely more effective political attempts.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
And in the meantime, the enemy's already thought of an alternative name: enhanced CD.
Ohh, the doublespeak. Ohh, the irony! . . .oh, well, I had better things to do with my money anyway.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
you mean something vaguely like forcing it to see only the first session? Not really that difficult. I used to run it so that my computer would only see a given session (CDA or DATA) so that I could keep multiple versions of the same thing on the CD.
On your CD Player...your computer.
Returns rip the heart out of Music profits...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
The rental CDs are actually distributed as rental cds, and presumably cost the store more. I would guess that these could be tracked and royalties paid for each rental.
CDs in Japan typically cost US $25.
Not only can you rent the rental CD, but the stores have MD case inserts for some of the more popular releases.
Even cheap CD players have optical out, and with CD text, and an MD with optical in (i.e most of them), you can make a pure digital copy easily.
But this is disappearing, Japan has many DRM cds these days.
I may have just gotten trolled, but oh well.
Fscking the legitimate rights of anyone, no matter how small the minority, is NOT acceptable. This is pretty clear in the Constitution, which last time I checked was still the law of the land. We are innocent until proven guilty, and by not allowing us to make our legal copies of albums we have purchased on the chance of piracy is an unconstitutional assumption of guilt on the part of the general consumer.
For the record, a good chunk of people buy their CDs and rip them to MP3's for legitimate purposes. I have 7 GB of songs on my hard drive, all ripped from my personal collection. I then use them on my iPod. Hell, the only time I ever use a physical CD anymore is when I'm in the car. The most important point of this anecdote is that I'm doing absolutely nothing illegal.
If these new DRM CDs become the standard, I lose all my ability to fair use because I have been presumed guilty of software piracy by a record company BEFORE I have even bought the album. No longer would I be able to use my computer as a jukebox. Suddenly my iPod becomes an expensive external firewire drive. I wouldn't even be able to play the CD as I have a Mac. So you are telling me that I should have to deal with this just because some people fileshare illegally?
Personally, I refuse to buy any CD with DRM on it. (Luckily with these artists I'm not losing anything, heh.) I don't want to support the movement one bit. I just hope mainstream America catches on. The only way I see it going away is if the record companies realize how unprofitable it would be.
I've bought very few CD's in the last couple of years (note: I'm a 56k'er so I don't use file sharing). I have however ripped my 300+ CD collection to mp3's.
2 weeks ago I bought Norah Jones as an impulse purchase, after listening to it once I proceeded to rip it and found that it was "Copy Controlled(tm)". The cover had a logo indicating this but I didn't see it when I was in the store. By using a different CDROM drive in another PC I was able to rip it no problems. That however, is not the point.
After spending $30AUD I've got better things to do with my time than fsck around with DRM.
In the same purchase I also bought the new (un-copy controlled) Aimee Mann album, guess who's going to be getting my money in the future and who won't?
Australian? Join EFA
Deep down in the back of my mind, I'm afraid of the pandora's box we've all to eagerly opened. It's amazing how most of us will bitch about media rights while happily ignoring the over 6,000,000 GBs of files being traded across networks like Kazaa as if it somehow didn't have any bearing on the current situation.
I agree, we should have the right to do whatever the heck we want to with the media we own, however, the labels and artists have an equal right to make money off their work. And I don't care what rational you use, 6,000,000 GBs is a fucking gaping ass wound for a record company to simply ignore for our right to copy files however we want. And then I had to reflect on who opened this freakin pissing contest... We did, as a community of computer users (not you specifically) by letting this behavior spiral out of control. I used to be able to take CDs back if I didn't like them. Then the copying started. Napster. Kazaa. Ain't no way in hell that's happening anymore.
Fact is, the record companies, regardless of how greedy you think they are, have a right to make money. And right now, they have a 6,000,000 GB hole in their side. That's not even the volume in transfers across the internet, which is undoubtably a substantially larger number. As much as I would like to bitch about all the DRM shit happening lately, I have to honestly admit that we have done a piss poor job of regulating our own actions as responsible users. We happily cheat and steal, then have the gall to bitch about DRM and "The Man".
In short we deserve all the shit being piled down upon upon us by the labels as they scramble to stem flow of blood from their persons. Perhapse they are getting their just deserts for being overly greedy, but ladies and gentlemen, we have become a generation of parasites, and parasites eventially get plucked off and thrown to the fire.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
hehehe They have plenty of other less mainstream artists, but articles tend to not mention "Sonic Death Machine" (made up name BTW) since they have no recognition, whereas everyone knows that cokehead Houston...
Not bought a CD in over 3 years now. Been boycotting the RIAA. REALLY hard sometimes when there's new stuff I want, but the RIAA will only learn when their wallets hurt, and they're not getting a dime out of me until they get a clue.
Not likely any time soon. Madonna is releasing her single on her website for download... At $1.50 a pop... Whereas I could walk into a store (if I wasn't boycotting), shell out just over twice that, and get a single with 3 or more tracks on it. (Hell, some CD singles I own have about 6 tracks. A Nine Inch Nails one I have has 11!) And packaging, the actual media etc...
One day they'll get a clue. Of course one day, we'll all sprout wings and singing showtunes... It's just a gamble as to which will come first.
We had the same problem here in Australia.
A co-worker bought the CD but neglected to look for copy-protection logos.
He was unable to use the CD on his main listening platform (Our work being the cheapskates they are, we don't have sound cards, so play CDs in the drive, with the speakers plugged into the headphone outlet.)
So he took it back.
We downloaded 192Kb/s versions of the songs off KaZaa, burnt our own CD, and booked tickets for their concert which just happened to be on next month.
Outcome:
record company = 0
artist = + 2 concert tickets.
Exactly. Never underestimate the self-destructiveness of business people.
Record people: Eat a toad in the morning. That way, nothing worse will happen all day.
If any CDs I purchase can't be ripped to WMAs/MP3s, I'm going to be super extra major pissed. I listen to ALL of my CDs via my Nomad Jukebox 3 40gb player.
1) Buy CD
2) Rip CD to player
3) Transfer songs to NJB3
4) Listen to songs in car and at work
I never, ever, ever listen to music off of the CD. Too damn inconvenient.
Honestly, this is getting damned ridiculous. I never ever use the P2P networks, why am I being punished????????
Creative Labs and other MP3 companies need to sue the living f*** out of the RIAA for starting to destroy a legitimate business. Honestly, who is going to want a useless MP3 player after all this is all said and done????????? Creative Labs and Apple (iPod) ought to unite and sue their az off!
Some people believe that distributing needles to drug addicts reduces problems.
Maybe it isn't the copying that is the problem, much as the use of needles isn't the problem.
Needles are harmless. Drug addicts spread disease and crime. Copying is harmless, It's what you do afterward that may or may not be harmful.
And don't even go there...
Jack Valenti (MPAA) saith:
Why would you buy something you can acquire for free?
I saith:
Why would you give away what you payed for? And since you are now paying, why would you not simply get it from the source, or are artists incapable of publishing songs on the net?
Better yet offer a $1 million dollar prize to the best seller of your product only require a $1/month fee to enter the contest. Prizes handed out yearly.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
A much better English equivalent is "Anti-CD".
I bought a "copy-protected" CD recently, well aware of the fact that is had protection, not just because I wanted the music but because I had to check out how this stuff worked.
The CD had two sessions, the first contained audio tracks, the second data withcrappy 48kbit WMA-encoded tracks. It was easy to rip the tracks though.
This method only works in Windows though. If there is a way to dump raw data from a CD in Linux, or even better, select which session you should see, there shouldn't be any problems extracting the tracks.
And I mean it. Two considerations, nothing more.
$0.01 #1
- I don't care what kind of copy protection they use, all I want is to buy a
- CDDA compatible disc and play it in any of my CDDA compatible players (including the one in my computer and notebook).
$0.01 #2It sounds weird to me, if they are so worried about money, why don't they worry about finding a effective to comercialize their product?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Computes are digital beasts. Think about the data flow of a computer for Audio:
- With DRM, a piece of software will be extracting the data, applying rights (mis)management
- It then send it to the audio-mapper on the computer.
- The audio mapper then sends it to a device driver (not the hardware)
- The driver now sends it to the audio hardware
- Your soundcard has a DAC (Digital-Audio-Converter), and makes sound.
- It then amplifies this some and sends it to your speakers.
The weak point in all this is the fact that the computer is "digital". IE, once you can intercept that digital stream, you have a pure copy of the data (not music, although coverting 16-bit chunks, 44k times a second makes music we can hear).To circumvent DRM, all one would need to do is create a device driver, which is a disk-based sound card. The destination could be a custom-audio file format which records the output information (16-bit/44k/stereo), along with the data. By making a GUI which allows you to select different "chunks" of data (ie, new track, new file segment), then you could convert that data back to an MP3 file very easilly. It could even output MP3 files in real-time. Modern computers are fast enough to do this.
If you look at DVD-Audio players, they almost all output Analog out ONLY. Why? Well, they could downmix into Dolby Digital and send it across your fiber optic (or other digital form), but, that would allow a near perfect version of the the sound. 99.9% of the people would accept it for the same thing since our speakers and amp-chips aren't good enough to amp. 192k @ 64-bit (or is it higher than that?). The main reason is that there is loss in the DAC-ADC-DAC conversion, which would represent a substandard copy. People who want DVD-Audio, don't want sub-standard. Therefor, by preventing them from copying it, they can protect the information for a much longer amount of time (and not be subject to a PC's device driven environment).
While Video DRM is a bit harder, do mainly to compression techniques, it is possible to do the same thing. A DirectX video driver which records each block being written to the display could in theory write out a raw video dump (It'd by huge the end), analyze it, and recompress/create the MPG data (since any large update would be your MPG keyframes, and small blocks would represent your updates (MPG-U blocks?)).
Until the day that the computer is locked up from a developer, and everything must be licenses (ala, "Sony Playstation" copy protection of CD's), the personal computer remains just that. Personal. A system for interpreting 1's and 0's and turning them into information which our brains can interpret.