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Copy-Protected CDs Going Mainstream

Posted by timothy on from the are-you-proposing-to-slaughter-our-clients dept.

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."

17 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. Kenny G ... by outriding9800 · · Score: 5, Funny

    i am glad they are copy-protecting his stuff. that means less of it taking up bandwidth

    1. Re:Kenny G ... by Loosewire · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

      --
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    2. Re:Kenny G ... by Peterus7 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

    3. Re:Kenny G ... by AnotherBrian · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Well, it'd be risky if they started copy protecting any music that is popular amoung the geek population...

      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".

    4. Re:Kenny G ... by Commutative+Monoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    5. Re:Kenny G ... by C0LDFusion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
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    6. Re:Kenny G ... by Commutative+Monoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    7. Re:Kenny G ... by Sax+Maniac · · Score: 5, Insightful
      You don't have any inalienable rights either. All rights are provided as a matter of law.

      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.
  2. Now you're just asking for jokes.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G."

    That's just too easy.

  3. Out of feet but plenty of bullets left! by NewtonsLaw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Out of feet but plenty of bullets left! by EinarH · · Score: 5, Informative
      First, I do agree on 95% on your opinion about copy-protection on CD's. But..
      1. lots of people bitching and returning disks because they won't play in there car player or on their DVD.

      Sorry but that won't happen.
      Most people, the average Joe user simply dont care. They dont give a shit as long as they can play their cds on the cdplayer. For their sake the RIAA companies could start putting programs that invade their privacy and monitor their behavior. RIAA-companies could start filling their CD's with annoying pop-up ads or force them to use a dubious DRM-scheme.
      And 95% of the cd-buying population would ignore it and still continue buying cd's.
      The thing most people care about is price and availability.

      A friend of mine who work part-time in a large record store (city with 300k population) told me that after they started sellinng cd's with copy-protection last summer the total number of returned CD's was totaling.......*silence waiting for the numbers*...... "somewhere between 25 and 50".
      And they are selling something like 1000-1500 cs's a day (open 7 days a week). Go figure.

      --

      Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.

  4. Japan by greggman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here in Japan, Massive Attack's latest release was DRMed. I don't know if it was in the states.

    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! :-p

  5. Fat Chuck's Corrupt CD List by willpost · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's one:
    http://fatchucks.com/index.html

    I'll post more lists if I find any.

  6. Do they really think this will work? by dracol1ch · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My question to the Slashdotters is this:

    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.

    --
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  7. Unbreakable copy protection & perpetual motion by blackketter · · Score: 5, Funny

    It seems ironic to me that two stories down from the post about the new copy protection schemes is an article about perpetual motion.

  8. How to record from the other input by yerricde · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?
  9. Disagree by MaxQuordlepleen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...