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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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
Flashback to 80's computer software. Just hope your new music CD doesn't quiz you on the liner notes before allowing playback. ;)
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
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