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Stations Can't Play Crippled Music Disks
arb writes "The Age is reporting that some radio stations are unable to play copy-protected CDs. It seems at least one radio station is facing problems transferring CD tracks to their digital playout system. Is the lack of radio air-play a price the record labels are willing to pay in their efforts to stamp out piracy?"
I read a recent story on Canada.com about a Vancouver station playing songs from the new Radiohead album that they downloaded from the net ...
Yay! The return of Pirate Radio!
And with great software like TuneTracker (at http://www.beosradio.com/ ), it's easier than ever to run a professional-level radio station with a low low budget.
Yeah, right. So they're having problems ripping the commercially-released discs into their digiplay systems. All that we'll see happen is a separate release of non-cripped discs for radio airplay stamped 'NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY' or whatever, like they do with singles. I doubt this will even slow down the advance of the use of this technology.
Copy protection on audio CDs obviously doesn't work, e.g. look at Massive Attack's 100th window and google for some of the tracks, like butterfly caught, and you'll find there are ripped tracks floating arround. That's not news to the crowd here on /., there are more than several dozen methods and programs to rip copy protected CDs.
But the point is, if the radio stations do *not* resort to these, if they just put the CD on the tray and try to download the tracks to HD and that just doesn't work, then there's a chance labels rethink the whole thing. They could choose to send custom made CDs to the radio stations (e.g., just data CDs with the audio tracks as wav files) or they could just drop the whole idea because the cost would be too high (from several POVs).
Or perhaps the labels choose to ignore these weird radio stations and all these crap gets less airtime.
Both ways, it's a win-win situation.
I've spoken with a DJ from KZOK (classic rock) in Seattle about this very thing. They used to use Napster, etc. to acquire songs that were difficult to find but were covered by their RIAA agreement. Last year, Infinity corporate nixed it. Basically, they said that anyone using P2P on company property or with company equipment was fired. As an aside, KZOK also happens to be one the last remaining station (at least in Seattle) that has a working 8-Track hooked to their board.
I bought the new Placebo album the other day (on Virgin Records). It had a "copy control" sticker on the front. There's no Compact Disc logo on it anywhere.
On the back is a blurb saying the disc is designed to play on CD players, DVD players, PCs and Macs. What it doesn't say is that in order to play it on a computer you're supposed to use the software on the disc (hmm... totally future-proof). Furthermore, it autoruns an installer to install the software.
We verified that we couldn't play the disc on a Windows 98 PC using standard audio players. We didn't install the software on the CD, for obvious reasons.
On OS X we were able to play it and rip it using iTunes. On Linux (on a same model thinkpad as the Win98 PC) we were also able to play and rip it.
The shop I bought it from was a small indie, and I notice that in the bigger shops the album doesn't have any copy-control information on it. It's possible that the indie sold me a promo, in which case perhaps they're trying to stop MP3s leaking before the album comes out, or it may be that the retail album is a regular CD (or copy-protected but not so labelled).
Assuming these stations have paid the Australian equivalent ASCAP and BMI fees, have the rights to broadcast this material.
IP law is deliberately confusing and can only be sorted out by human beings. (In the case of complex situations, human beings that charge high fees).
There is no way that any simple, inexpensive bit of software can correctly determine whether or not the user does, in fact, have the rights to the use he or she is making.
In every case, of course, the DRM schemes err in the direction of denying use to people that POSSESS rights, never the other way around.
P.S. Yes, I did read the article. This sounds like Midbar's scheme, in which (when it works properly!) the computer still cannot access the real audio tracks, but the special software allows access to lower-quality compressed versions--which can only be played, not copied to the hard drive. So even if the boss had allowed the software to be installed, the station would have probably found that this didn't do any good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's not that they can't, they just dont want to
You are almost certianly wrong. They state that they cannot play the CD's as is:
unable to play any of the CDs it received - the copy protection on the discs gets in the way.
And even if they installed the DRM software there is no reason to think the DRM software will allow them to transfer the music to thier broadcast system. The DRM system is specificly designed to prevent you from transfering the music.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If I pay what I'm sure the radio stations must to license the music, I'm damn sure going to get the shit on a disk, instead of having to risk not being able to find any copy of the song but GoKu_tEh_MUSicMaN's 32kbps rip-from-a-scratched-disk burn of it.
:) Heck, this disk-protecting stuff doesn't even really work for Joe User and his magic marker. What a riot.
The RIAA already has the radio industry whipped into paying license fees for the music anyway. Despite the number of entertainment outlets there are today, without radio, the RIAA is going to greatly suffer.
It feels simliar to the MPAA and movie clips on talk shows. Conan mentioned one day that they had to pay the movie company for the right to show the clip on TV. Give me a BREAK! Whether or not the actor gets paid for his appearance, it's still big advertisment. Deciding which part of the chain should break first is difficult though, because the entire Entertainment Industry is built on itself. It pays itself to advertise for it, it pays itself to design and build sets, it pays itself to distribute music, and all of the money it pays to itself stays within the industry. There is no money outlet from the Entertainment Industry, only an inlet, and that inlet is from practically everyone in the country.
Of course, this is the Entertainment Industry's weakness. If it shits and dies, only people in the industry will really care. Everybody else is tired of being accused of being thieves, and there are other ways to entertain ourselves.
Best of all, this big "Shit and die" seems like it's approaching. Sony is at odds with itself over its various products, and distribution channels are hampered by its own hampering technology.
Considering that the RIAA is making CDs without the official "Audio CD" label, aren't they technically violating the DMCA? They did, after all, reverse engineer the compact disc standard, to make a disc that can be played on otherwise audio CD compliant player.
Even though there was never any official encryption to begin with (and those who analyzed the CSS code probably consider it as minimal), that doesn't give them the right to perform an illegal act. The CD technology IS patented, and covered under international law as such.
Making a "Not-CD" (subliminal joke there if you say it to yourself out loud) in essense violates those patents, even if they removed the Compact Disc logo.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I have some knowledge in how radio stations work these days and a great many of them are totally computerised. For example, MegaMix2002 (http://www.soundsoft.net/) is a very popular radio DJ package. Basically you have a computer with this loaded and it does everything for you. The DJ controlls it, and that is all. Well, the way it works is by ripping CDs to MP3s and storing those on the computer. Much more efficient for the DJ to be able to call up anything with a few clicks than sorting through stacks of discs. Ok, so, if the discs are designed such that they can't be ripped, they'll screw over MegaMix along with other ripping apps and hence screw radio stations.
These days, radio stations really are just using the same technology as a normal user. They ahve specialised apps and some speical hardware, but at the heart is just a standard PC.
Since most illegal mp3s come from critic and radio advanced copies, why don't the labels digitally watermark these advances? Of course the problem would be you'd want a unique mark for every copy (so, I assume, you could find the source and not pick on a bunch of kids who picked it up). But just burn them onto CDR then.
Then if a copy is found online, diff it with the original, and find out who leaked it.
Or maybe I'm oversimplifying things. I guess if you could make the key seeding random enough that it wouldn't be easy to wipe...
What is music when you despise all sound?
With this in mind, an "upgrade" to a DRM-based system would probably be possible, particularly if the RIAA pushed it with special incentives (upgrade your system, we'll give you some exclusive tracks 2 weeks ahead of time!). The problem for the RIAA is that the analog sound going to the transmitter is still very good quality; a dedicated tech with a laptop could probably patch his system into the link from the audio system to the transmitter and get fairly good MP3s or OGGs. Until the RIAA gets everything in the world digital and DRMed, there just won't be any way to stop a dedicated pirate. Even then, I bet someone will find a way real quick ;).
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Why dont radio stations fight back and beging to refuse to play songs from copy protected cds? If all radio stations stopped playing those cds would it not follow that record sales would drop?
Wouldnt that give the RIAA a taste of their own medicine.
Tragek
As the head of music at a student radio station in the UK, I've seen a large increase in the amount of copy protection issued on the promos that I get week after week.
Standard practice for our playlist system is that I rip the CDs to an MP3 format (using Xing), and then wrap the MP3s in a WAV header (for track information). This has become more difficult recently - as most people will know, some of the copy protection systems split the audio up into a bunch of really small data tracks followed by a huge long one. This can be easy to deal with in the software (just merge the tracks, and kill the white noise at the end), or it can be impossible to deal with (in that Audiocatalyst doesn't recognise any data on the disc at all).
As stated elsewhere, all the copy protection schemes include "music software" for PC/Mac playback. The most frustrating thing about this is that for the most part, the software playback of the CD is at some ridiculous quality (like 43kpbs). It has become easier for me to bring along a hi-fi to the station, and do most of my reviews on that (and take a mini-jack/mini-jack cable with me for A/D transfer). It's pointless to do this to us - anyone who would actually go as far as to violate the promotions agreement either by passing promos on or ripping them is not going to be stopped by some cheap 'n cheerful protection scheme.
The fools (damn them).
Sarcas
--
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Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life