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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."
i am glad they are copy-protecting his stuff. that means less of it taking up bandwidth
Good thing they picked sucky bands to copy-protect. :)
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
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
And thus we have proof: not all DRM is used for evil purposes. Sometimes it's used for the common good ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
first it was hasslehof, but now i have proof kenny G is a nazi, muhahahahhaahha, see not only does he ruin perfectly good dentists offices, but also the entire music industry huh who knew
"Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G."
That's just too easy.
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?
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
Before:
Step 1: Want MP3
Step 2: Buy CD
Step 3: Have MP3
After:
Step 1: Want MP3
Step 2: ???
Step 3: No profit!
Way to go RIAA...
(Not to mention that I don't even want the music on landfill-type media. Sell me MP3s online and I'll pay, goddamnit!)
My Sig: SEGV
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.
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!
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!
Here's one:
http://fatchucks.com/index.html
I'll post more lists if I find any.
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.
I used to care about DRM in CDs of the mainstream music industry, but then I realized I never did buy from mainstream bands or artists. Go listen to some indie music which is a hell of a lot better than Pink or Kenny G will ever aspire to be.
A good example is now, I'm listening to a lot of Red Martian on the punk side and John McCutcheon on the folk side. Both of which provide MP3s online of their stuff and actively support the promotion of online music. Not only that, but Red martian sells their albums anywhere from $2.50 to $6.00, you will never find that in any record company, with good music to boot. I've also listened to my local scene enough with Side Project for their funk sound or Lithium for their Punk and Ska offerings.
My point is, it shouldn't really matter if DRM goes mainstream, because chances are, your local scene or offerings that you must actively find produce a better sound than the publicity machine. Forget about buying from Arista and similar big names, then start listening to new music. It benefits your ears and hurts the large record companies who use the DRM at the same time.
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...
It only takes one Windows system to make it work for the rest. Warez community can afford it :-)
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?
It seems ironic to me that two stories down from the post about the new copy protection schemes is an article about perpetual motion.
I hold in my hand a 'CD' by Fischerspooner (an odd but entertaining band). Like most wide rlease cds, the back of the jewel case has many logos. Things to note:
The 'Compact Disc' logo we've come to expect is missing.
A 'enhanced CD' logo is present.
Reading the fine print, this Capitol Records release (released on march the 6th) says:
"Enhanced CD" is a certification mark of the RIAA
Need I mention that this CD cannot be burned in any of my machines? Ripping to mp3s is only possible via the line-in jack, and has horrible quality (compared with ripping from my cd-rom, that is).
This is not a santanna album, its from a much smaller, newer act. The RIAA has made more headway with promoting thier agenda then this article seems to imply: These CDs are already on the market, and have been since the begining of the month, at the least.
Please note: The RIAA site has the definition of the 'enchanced CD" 'standard' available here. The standard does not require any form of watermarking of copyright protection. However, as a copy-protected cd is technically NOT compliant with the original philips specifications, I find it very suspect that the RIAA made thier own standard. Especially since this standard serves no purpose other than to replace the ageing 'Compact Disc' logo.
man is machine
Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G
Phew! So we don't have anything to worry about then. I was really getting worried for a minute there!
I sure am glad I don't buy CD's. =)
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
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.
How do you record the AUX IN port?
I assume that like 90+% of the population, you're using Microsoft Windows, so I'll give instructions that apply to Windows 98 and Windows 2000.
Step 1: Open the mixer. If there is a little speaker icon in your tray (the tray is the part of the taskbar next to the clock), double-click it. Otherwise, go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Entertainment > Volume Control.
Step 2: Show the mixer's recording panel. Options > Properties and then Adjust playback for > Recording. Click OK.
Step 3: Choose the line input. Normally, the check box under "Mic Volume" is selected. Select the check box under "Line In". (Microsoft made a user interface design faux pas here by drawing the input selections as square checkboxes, which normally represent individual on/off settings, rather than as round radio buttons, which represent choose one of many.)
Step 4: Set levels. Open your recording program, record a relatively loud segment of the analog source, and tweak the levels so that the peaks don't make a harsh digital clipping noise on playback.
Step 5: Record. For this, you should use a program that records to disk such as Cool Edit or Sound Forge. Read the fine manual.
Step 6: Cleanup. Here, you are remastering the audio back into a digital format. Apply noise reduction and equalization filters until the audio in your computer sounds just as good as or better than the CD does.
Step 7: Compress. For MP3, use lame --alt-preset standard. For Ogg Vorbis, put the quality setting at 5 or 6.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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...
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 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!
Radio shack has already released a patch for these cds.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
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.
As I understand it, the term "compact disc" belongs exclusively to Philips. They think this copy protection, in its current iteration at least, is a crock, and they refuse to let anyone making "enhanced" discs used the CD term or logo. So look for the logo when you make your next purchase. If it ain't there, you'll know the disc is locked down. This gives you the opportunity to vote with your wallet (or with your internet connection, depending on where you stand on piracy).
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.
plenty of shareware and freeware on the net for simple recording. In fact, Hit squad shareware music machine is a wealth of shareware/freeware/crippled demoware to get you started.
wait! I almost forgot! PRO TOOLS FREE! Yep, what the professionals use, just with slightly less bells and whistles. Get your head around this, and you've got jobs waiting for you in recording studios.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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
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.
Like who gives a crap??
All the "artists" listed suck anyway.
And besides, never, ever tell a Linux dude "you CAN'T do that"
He'll show you you're wrong.
Hey, who stole my sharpie!! Damn!
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...
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!
Save your bucks. Use the free CD ripper CDeX. You probably already have it. After recording, it'll even compress it to your desired format for you. It does a great job recording. Look under Tools, Record. I discovered this when I thought I had a junk soundcard after using MS sound recorder. (much worse than a very cheap tape recorder) Suprise, the sound card was actualy able to record some decent sound. I've been using it to transfer my old stuff (LP's and pre recorded tapes). I wished I had this earlier to backup this stuff before it degraded as much as it has.
The truth shall set you free!
I have enough music that I don't have to buy those stupid copy-protected CDs for a good listen.
Are you suggesting that us 40-somethings have such bad taste as to listen to Kenny G?
No, but a lot of the none geek ones do. Dude, when I am SEVENTY, it will still be Aerosmith, Aerosmith and more Aerosmith. Got it?
Yeah, but when you are 70, will you be able to hear.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
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).
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.
EMI have already started putting DRM on all their new CDs in some territories (Australia and apparently Japan), and apparently plan to make this global.
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.
How long will it take for someone to discover how to beat the new attempt at copy-protection?
Last time it was beaten with a pen.
I'm calling the Vegas Sports Books for the Odds.
Dolemite
__________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
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.
I plan on using the (copper) digital-out on my CD player to connect to the digital-in of my audigy soundcard.
Such a simple solution!
Sigged!
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.
No
It may as well be a bug, but I'll tell you a story. I recently bought Massive Attack's latest album, as well as Air's recent City Reading. Both are "copy-protected". Fine.
I boot under Windows (98), put the CD in, and the D: shows somes files (no audio tracks!), including a player.exe. I execute it : it's an ugly CD-player that plays the audio tracks of the CD. No way to play those with winamp AFAIK. Ok the point is, the sound degraded ! No kidding, not my speakers, no. They volontarily degraded the sound of the CD when playing with that player on windows. Hell. This is why you cannot record the line from your computer.
Now let's try that on linux. Boot, plug the cd in, start xmms, play the cd. The sound is normal, no degradation, no problem. Ok let's go, I abcde the CD, and I have my oggs I can listen to on my Zaurus and everything. Sounds like linux people don't have to worry, yet.
I'm just wondering when they will volontarily bitch the sound on my HiFi (because as you said, you can link it directly through a digital link to your computer).
Now, don't tell me to buy more CDs from people who have such low interest in providing music to people, whatever they use to listen to it.
theefer
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!?