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More Incompatible DVDs and CDs Coming Your Way
wwwssabbsdotcom writes " More DRM is coming to DVD and CD shelves in the future. Looks like more incompatible discs for players around the world. Rip-proof and self-destructing seems to be the latest DRM craze."
So quit grousing and don't buy em.
More plastic to add to the AOL CD landfills...
These guys are going to kill their own business. Their copy-protection techniques will only increase the motivation to seek the content through obscure channels. When the "legitimate" version is less functional and more expensive than the "black market version", guess who's going to lose?
In the beginning I was free.
then I became a pleb, and my master controlled me.
then I because a citizen and the government controlled me.
Now I'm a consumer, and all my rights are under control.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If they make self-destructing DVDs, then I will be *certain* to rip it first thing. I listen to my music almost exclusively on my computer. I've got any number of CDs that I've never "played", I just ran it through CDex, and listen to the mp3s. I will consider any attempts to make "rip-proof" formats as special challenge.
I suspect that anyone who lacks the skills to do the above themselves would then be that much more likely to download a copy that someone else ripped.
DVD's like the extended edition of "Fellowship of the Ring" already won't play on legal set-top hardware like the XBox because it doesn't get recognized as a DVD (while playing just fine in 3 other set-top units.)
As far as I'm concerned, the industry is already shipping pre-destructed material. Shoddy plotlines. Crappy acting, B-stories with A-budgets. "Adaptations" of classics. Bah.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
(Un)fortunatelly that is impossible; if you can listen to it you can copy it.
I wish the industry could get that into their heads and stop throwing away money on DRM schemes and concentrate on making products actually worth buying.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
I did - when I bought the friggin' CD!
I know - after all, everybody who uses MP3's and their iPod stole the music, right? Everybody who clicks the little "Rip" button on their computer to store their music CD collection so they can listen to any song, when they want, only got it from some Gnutella site, correct? Any movie in DiVX format isn't there so you can have a media player storing backups of your movies onto your computer so you can watch them when you want and keep your DVD's shiny and new for all time - no, you must be planning on letting the rest of the world download the movies illegally.
OK. I'm calm. My personal response has been simple: don't buy things in this format. Tell others about the format and what to watch out for (like "Does it have the official CD logo on it?"). When I talk to government officials, telling them "You know, if somebody wants to make a self-destructing DVD/unrippable CD - more power to them, that's they're right. But they damn well better be putting a logo on their product that says so in advance so I can choose to reward or punish them with my own buying power."
Yeah, I use the iTunes store - sure, it has DRM, but doesn't go outrageously overboard, because at least it gets the idea that I buy the music, I own it - so if I want to burn it to CD or transfer it to 2 different iPods so my wife and I can listen to our music in the car, that's my right to do so.
But did "rental" music services ever get my dime? Nope - and see what's happening to them. I predict they'll be gone in another 5 years (except for the last holdouts sponsored by major corporations who won't see the light of day - like how the Minidisk finally exited stage left for 99% of the music consumers, the 3DO vanished, and like the original DIVX standard did).
Yeah - spin another one, folks. Try, try again until you buy the clue.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
All it will do is result in more boycotts of DRM crippled discs and consumer anger directed at the media companies. I really don't know how long its going to take before they realize this. Killing fair use is not the answer.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
"Sun Microsystems said this week it plans to roll out new software to protect copyrighted content stored on mobile phones and smart cards. "
That was a bit vauge. And didn't have anything to do with CDs or DVDs. The rest was pretty much fluff. And the winner for most amusing paragraph was this:
"Ravaged by piracy, movie studios and recording labels have been fitting new CD and DVD releases with layers of computer code with the aim of preventing or limiting users' ability to copy, or "rip," them onto a blank disc and trade online."
OOoo! Layers of computer code! Sounds so mysterious! And someone was Ravaged!!
Summary: Unfortunately I read the whole article, but maybe I can save you the trouble.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I personally despise the recent trend towards DRM protected media. How the hell am I supposed to make a backup of my CD or DVD? We all know that they designed the damn things to be so scratched up, that within a year they become unusuable ;-)
Seriously tho, I vote with my dollars and urge you to do the same. The solution is simple - Don't buy it!. I refuse the purchase a CD or DVD that I am not able to make a backup copy of.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
to download pirated copy. The fools are leaving customer satisfaction out of the equation...
I'm buying fewer and fewer DVDs and CDs. It ain't because they're copy-protected (usually, you can rip that, or if that's impossible, your friendly neighbor has a sound studio and you can rip them easily.
It's because the content sucks. Profusely. I haven't been in the cinema for now something like 6 months. I buy relatively few CDs, most of the Heavy Metal and Death Metal bands started producing lousy music. There's little left to buy. Metallica? Became "Selloutica". The latest Sepultura stuff sucks as well.
Now if I can't play a DVD in my laptop, I simply won't buy it. The test is thanks to the fact that my machine is luggable, doable at my preferred store and quickly accepted as final judgement.
Maybe in Winter, we'll have some better stuff to buy, but before, revenues won't go up in the media industry.
I wish the industry could get that into their heads and stop throwing away money on DRM schemes and concentrate on making products actually worth buying.
This is the major problem with many American industries; a significant obsession with protecting existing markets with monopolies and vendor lock-in through incompatibilities and standards deviation, among other techniques.
There's too little effort paid to R&D and innovative product development as means to market expansion and customer loyalty, especially since those things don't have payoffs in less than 4 quarters.
Nothing wrong with a good piece of ass, hit the mute button, and watch
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I'd rather have cheap products that sometimes don't work on 10 year old players (and protects rights for a creator of art) than expensive ones that can be pirated but work on all players.
So you consider it piracy if you buy a CD and rip it for the purpose of playing it on your iPod? Did they make you sign a contract indicating that you would only listen to the music using the original CD?
As for "sometimes don't work on a 10 year old player", you do realize that the goal of copy protection is to not work on a computer cdrom drive of any generation? This is why we have discs with garbled TOC tracks, this is a scheme targeted directly at computer drives which read the TOC to determine if the drive is audio or data.
I consider it piracy when a publisher takes my money and gives me a round shiny disc which fails to meet my expectation of being useful (that is, playing in my player which is fully capable of playing other round shiny discs). Companies who wish to break this expectation must either 1) accept returns for defective products which fail to meet consumer expectations or 2) clearly indicate that the round shiny disc is not a standard round shiny disc. Simple absense of a "CD" trademark is not clear indication.
People keep posting "Why whine? Just don't buy it!" but which products am I to not buy? I have to wait until someone else buys a cd and determines that it is copyprotected and posts that information to a tracking board somewhere. Even in cases where the CD trademark is missing, which copyprotection scheme was used? Perhaps it is one which is still compatible with my player and my expectation for the music. Not only that, but I have noticed that several of my non-copyprotected round shiny discs do not bear the CD trademark. Is this an intentional attempt by companies to confuse the issue? If no round shiny discs bear the CD trademark, how do I tell the protected and the playable discs apart?
Imagine the outrage that would happen if one in 10 hamburgers served by mcdonalds was actually made from horsemeat, and was served as a beef hamburger with nothing to tell it apart from the rest of the hamburgers. Now imagine everyone knew this, and nobody did anything about it because mcdonalds made money this way. This is what the publishing companies and their guardian the RIAA is doing to us all, only the ratio of horseburgers is going to increase without you being notified.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Have they already forgotten the lessons of the old Divx players? No one wanted an inferior, crippled product. The market already spoke. I have a hard time imagining they'll get it "right" this time.
Digital piracy will always exist. For every mousetrap, someone will build a better mouse. So why should we law-abiding citizens have to pay the price? If I want a DVD or CD, I'm going to buy it. Period.
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Something cleverI think your missing the point. If you go to the "cd" section of a store, and buy a "cd", it should play in a "cdplayer." If you decide you want to go to the "dvd" section of a store, and buy a "dvd" it should play in a "dvdplayer." But when you buy cd's or dvd's that don't play in their respective cdplayer and dvdplayer then you no longer are selling a "cd" or a "dvd", but you are selling something new. And can NOT be defined as either a cd or a dvd. Folks don't want "something new." They want what they paid for. You wouldn't go buy beta tapes to play in your vhs because they won't fit in the vhs player, and they won't work.
Love Music? Got a Band? Are you a Label? http://garageradio.com
I wrote a letter to the record label after I ran into the first CD (Radiohead's Hail to the Thief) that wouldn't play in the player I wanted, and have now stopped buying any CDs from that label (EMI). In fact, only 1 of the computers I tried it in even could read the data files that allowed you to install the audio player. Since said players are only available for windows and some versions of Apple operating systems, and only installable if you have admin on your computer (making it less than ideal in an office environment) I am allowed under Canadian "fair dealing" rights (http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/38266.html#rid- 38379) to copy from audio CD to "a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced and that is ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose..". Ie, a computer hard drive, or another CD. This is similar to the fair use rights in the United States.
Unless everyone writes a letter at the least, then it's only a matter of time before every CD will work only in stereos and on machines which have specific versions of software like Windows.
I should add that the CD in question would play on Windows only if you installed "upgrades" to windows media player... I cancelled that, and am ripping it with a line in feed tonight.
Don't want the government to control you? Leave society and become a hermit...but you lose lots of practical benefits, like convenience stores, electricity, the internet, public sanitation systems, health insurance, etc.
However, when there are few or no lost benefits, people won't hesitate to use alternatives. Same thing applies to DRM...the more they clamp down, the more consumers squeeze through their fingers and start using consumer-friendly alternatives like ogg and mp3.
It's a funny cycle...raw CD audio isn't portable enough, so they create MP3s, leading to rampant file sharing and eventually Napster, leading to RIAA's unholy crusade for DRM, leading more people to use MP3...it will only end when consumers have no control over data. A bit late for that...
As far as I'm concerned, the industry is already shipping pre-destructed material. Shoddy plotlines. Crappy acting, B-stories with A-budgets. "Adaptations" of classics. Bah.
:-(
Good.
Maybe more and more people will slowly wake up and realize that the whole "entertainment industry" is rotting and dying, and instead of numbing their minds sitting in front of the boob tube, wasting their lives away filling their brains with knowledge-pollution, they need to instead spend their idle time pursuing worthwhile hobbies, projects, sports, adventures, etc and actually doing something bigger, better and more important with their lives...
Fat chance that is likely to happen any time soon though
I am a Sonyphile from the 1970s and Sony have never let me down until just recently.
I wanted to buy a Norah Jones CD but was told that it was recorded on one of the CDs that weren't recorded to the CD format and that killed Macs if played on them. My wife uses Mac so I checked and had it confirmed.
Now no Sony product enters our house be it camera, CD or movie. They are good products but they are no longer trustworthy the way that they were.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
Consumer electronics companies such as Sony and Nokia have stepped into the mix too, installing DRM systems into new hi-fi systems and hand-held devices to ensure copyrighted materials aren't reproduced and transferred from gadget to gadget without consumers paying for it.
What ever happened to a little thing called "fair use"? If I want to make a copy of a cd for use in my car, why shouldn't I be able to? If I want to rip a cd to mp3s to play on my HTPC, why shouldn't I be able to?
Oh, sorry... I forgot that mp3s automatically lead to piracy, as does cd copying. Yeah, I guess that all the times I've scratched up a copy of a cd that I own using it in my car cd changer makes me a pirate.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Where does that leave me? I've just spent $25 on a movie that I can't watch. I can't return it. Hell, chances are the license I had to agree to won't allow me to sell it. So here's the problem....
The movie was advertised as being a DVD. My player was advertised as a DVD player. DVD is (from what I understand) a fairly open standard. By advertising something as being standards compliant that really isn't, would that not constitant fraud, or at the least deceptive advertising?
If I remember correctly, didn't the owner of the CD trademark/patent threaten to label DRM'd CD's as not being CD's b/c they didnt' conform to the standards? Should that not happen with DVD's?
Vote with you dollars and your voices. If you buy a DVD that is not compatible, either don't buy it, or take it back and bitch loudly. Make sure other customers can hear you. Basically, make an ass of yourself so that the manager has to give you your money back to shut you up.
Yes, I know I'm rambling.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
What revenue were they losing when Johnny rips his CD to play on his mp3 player? Until recently, the publishing companies haven't even recognized portable non-cd-based music devices as a market.
Clearly illegal trading is costing publishers money, but copying alone isn't. Why don't the publishers jump on kazaa and grab a batch of IP addresses of people hosting mp3s and use the DMCA? Oh wait, that would be a legit application of the DMCA, and its apparently illegal to actually use it for its intended use instead of using it to bully people around for making competing products like remote controls and dvd playing software for unsupported platforms.
That, or the publishers don't think enough money is being lost to make it worth their time for them to actually do any work.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Except you don't get to have any more. Cuz' they're gonna copy protect it.
Granted, the analog hole will always exist, and if you're going to degrade the content with compression anyway, what's wrong with running it through an analog cable partway through the process?
As far as the wild speculation about self-destructing DVDs and CDs, you either didn't read the article, or you are sensationalizing (as was done in the headline). Nowhere in the article were self-destructing DVDs or CDs mentioned, EVER! They were talking about downloadable music files that could only be played a few times before rendering themselves useless.
The RIAA still hasn't come out with anything worth trying yet, but stop distorting the facts just for the sake of making the RIAA look more Evil(tm).
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Don't allow copyright to be used when DRM protection is used. Its as simple as that.
There are parallels to patents and trade secrets.
If I choose to make my idea a trade secret then its protected forever unless someone breaks it, but if I want to use patent protection, then I have to disclose it publicly.
Public disclosure, in exchange for legal protection.
The same should be applied to DRM & Copyright. if I choose to DRM my protect, fine, good, but then its not in the public domain, so it can't be protected by copyright.
You want copyright protection, then you have to give *your* side of the bargain too, and put it in an unprotected format, so that it is available when the copyright expires. How can I know if you will be around next year, let alone in 120 years when your copyright expires? I can't, so if you won't put it into public domain, then you can't get copyright protection.
Thats the solution.
When you can download an album or a song for .99cents a track and burn them without issue, and without going to the store, what benifit do you have going down to Sam Goody if the CD's they sell you there are DRM?
No, this will drive people to use iTunes even more.
Heh. The irony is, these new protection schemes don't break old players.
They break new ones.
Newer DVD/CD players are built off computer CD-ROM transports and optics -- they're more prevalent, cheaper, and do a better job than the old audio CD-only ones.
Of course, these copyright scheme are designed to specifically not work with CD-ROMs. So, odds are, your brand new CD is less likely to work with your brand new CD player than it is to work with your 10 or 20 year old CD player.
And you've completely ignored that you can't do things you're legally allowed to - like copy it to a medium that's more suitable for your listening such as an MP3 (I have ripped all of my legally owned CDs to MP3 for use on my TiVo).
Oh, and guess what -- rights of the creator of the art? What rights. They have none. They don't own the copyright - the studios do. And while they do get paid, it's essentially indentured servitude for all but the most successful bands. And they still don't own the art they created.
Never, never, never confuse price and cost. The two are independant. The price of a product is what the consumer will pay for a product. The cost is the amount of money it took to produce the product. Right now, the consumer is willing to pay more for music on CD than on tape. That is why the price for CDs is higher. The fact that it costs less to produce a CD is irrelevant. The consumer is willing to pay the higher price.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Self Destructing DVDs will simply not be bought unless the pricing ratio is well worth it.
I expect that they will be pretty popular actually. Its just like a rental, at the same price point, except there are no late fees, and you never have to remember to return it. This lets all regular retail places in on the rental market, because they don't have to maintain customer databases or return procedures. Instead of going to blockbuster, you can just drive down to the 24 hour convienance mart and get any movie you want.
Hell, I wouldn't be suprised to see a system where they have a kiosk with a DVD burner that will put whatever movie you want onto a special chemically limited DVD-R so that stores won't even have to maintain a stock of disks. It would be like an ATM machine, just put it in the store and some guy comes around and services it every couple of weeks, loads up new blank disks and new releases. Put it on a web page, order up your movie before you leave the house, and it will be ready to pick up when you get there.
I'd buy that. Specially when someone comes out with a specially treated wetwipe that prevents/reverses the chemical process that disables the disks after exposure to oxygen.
People take the path of least resistance.
Thats precisely what these companies are counting on. 99+% of the DVD watching population wouldn't know what to do with a DVD rip if it came with instructions. Nor will they care; if a DVD won't play in their consumer player, they'll assume its a bad disk and go get another or get their money back.
Lemme get this straight? I go out and buy ArtistX's latest cd/dvd. Costs me $20 bucks. What do I get for this? The DVD player refuses to play the cd. The Imac freezes solid. Getting it unfrozen means I gotto trek down to the pc store and fork out an extra $120 for the service fee. I gotta reboot the pc. And Zonealarm goes freaking crazy because program X keeps trying to dial out. Don't call me paranoid here -- it'll happen, it's just a matter of time. To play the godforsaken audio cd, I gotta put the cd into the portable cd player, feed it into the computer and record an mp3, and use that mp3 to create an audio cd that plays on the dvd player, the imac, and the pc. All this for 20 bucks. Whatta deal! OR, I could use the 10 minutes it takes to get the freaking saran wrap off of the audio cd and download the cd from Kazaa. For free. ORRRRRRRRR, I could really stick it to the music company and the f'ing band who signed off with said music company and NOT BUY THE DAMN CD AND NOT DOWNLOAD IT! When the music industry sees all interest in music cd's die utterly, both on Kazaa and in cd sales, they'll be falling over themselves to stop the DRM nonsense.
Nobody I know likes being reminded everytime about the FBI. Nobody I know likes being forced to watch previews. Nobody I know likes being told what to do with their DVD when they use it for their own purposes unless they take it upon themselves to give copies away to everyone.
It's about the content dammit! People don't buy DVDs for previews, for fancy menus or the damn FBI warning. Most people want the movie, not the 2 hours of celebrity mutual masturbation that is the typical "bonus" disk. I have a better idea for them, find a way to reduce the cost to such a point that you can buy **just** the movie for $10 after sales tax. If they want to make it sooo easy for customers to get the movies they want and make them happy they'd make it so that producing a "lite" DVD is so cheap that they could sell them so inexpensively that a $20 bill would buy you 2 movies.
Of course that would require an entrepeneurial spirit, something they have not known for almost a century. That would require them to take a calculated risk, something that they don't understand the need for. The market won't hold back forever. Americans have technological blinders, but we're not blind. When we see nations like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan that have no analogs to the DMCA sticking their tongues out at us when their gadgets are a good 5-10 years ahead of ours because of the DMCA, et al, Americans will be mad. Why? It won't be just silly gadgets, it'll be a lot of things. First it will be the divisions that make the gadgets like the DVD-VCRs, then it will be the rest of the company that goes overseas. More jobs lost because "artists" were being "ripped off."
I'm more musically inclined than Britney Spears and company. I say fuck the "artists" if we have to choose between their copyrights and a functioning free market. It's more important that 5,000 musicians not get paid for their songs downloaded illegally than 2,500 more manufacturing jobs or any other jobs go everseas because the companies found our copyright laws too stifling.
Everybody has ignored the most obvious factor of musical growth: the advancement of science. The most scientifically advanced societies on Earth also have the most musically diverse cultures as a general rule. The more science has made our lives better, even in peripheral ways, the more musicians have benefited. In 100 years science took us from having a society with only a few major types of music (in no small part because so many modern musical tools hadn't been invented like electric equipment) to having dozens. It made it possible for tens of thousands of musicians to at least effectively supplement their income with their skills. Excuse the hell out of me, but science has done more for copyright holders than copyright law. It was not economically feasible for so many musicians to make a living off of their music 100 years ago, but now thanks to the explosion of technological growth it's definitely possible if you're good.
I have one final proposal for the closet socialists and fascists of the **AA: lobby against budget deficits, pork barrel spending and the peacetime income tax if you want more money. All of the yuppies get the other 30-50% of their income back. What do they do with it? Invest it all or give little johny or suzie more allowance? A lot of the former and probably a lot of the latter as well. What is little johny or suzie going to do, buy blue chip stock shares? Hell no! They're going to go down to Sam Goody, buy an extra $100 worth Nelly, Jay Z, Britney Spears and Metallica.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Wow, my kids watched Disney's Robin Hood about 50 times (the still get it out now and then). So they want $750 (50*14.99) from me for this movie? That's their due?
They are really nuts -- people buy movies with the expectation of watching them a couple of times and maybe swapping with their friends. As soon as you want this kind of money they'll just go back to watching TVA lot of the early bugs have been dealt with, and record companies say they will continue to roll out new copy-protected discs and offer online downloads that expire after a few listens based on the latest DRM systems.
And consumers will continue to buy less and less music. You have to love the recording industry; they're probably the only group that constantly FUDs itself.
If technology firms like Sony and Microsoft have their way, songs and movies will expire after a single play...
Have either Sony or Microsoft actually said anything to that effect? I've heard talk of restricting use to the original owner, preventing copying, etc etc, but one PLAY??
someone who's going to pirate music is going to do it and then find a reason to justify it
Some people who copy music illegally feel guilty that they're doing something wrong, but carry on anyway. (Oh, and don't call it piracy, please, it has nothing to do with robbing ships.)
The point the grandparent post is making is that, for some people, DRM-crippled media will be enough to tip the balance towards illegal copying.
Standard CDs will play on any CD player, and there's a readily available specification for making compatible CD players. The cost of legal CDs is the price of the CD; the cost of illegal copies is the feeling of guilt and the potential penalty if you get caught. Many people feel guilty enough about illegal copying that the cost of legal CDs is less than the "cost" of illegal copies, so they buy legal CDs.
DRM-crippled optical music media happen to play on most consumer CD players, because the makers of those CD players cut corners and don't follow the specification rigorously. The cost of illegal copies is the same as for standard CDs, plus a bit of time investment in breaking the DRM; the cost of legal non-CDs is the price, plus the inconvenience of not being able to play them in some CD players, or on a computer, or rip them for use in an iPod or similar, or use them in a PC-based MP3 jukebox without finding the actual physical CD, and so on. Depending on the relative "cost" the customer places on guilt and on this inconvenience, the inconvenience might well end up as a higher cost, so they go for the illegal copies.
I'm not saying it's right, but if you think in terms of relative costs, you can see why the extra burden of DRM restrictions makes illegal copies look more attractive.
Ehm.. Don't we have enough landfill as it is. Well, especially with all those AOL cd's in there?
Serioulsy, for renting it _might_ be convinient, but how enviromentally friendly is it?
"You didn't buy the music, you bought the disc. "
Presuming I own the disc, shouldn't I be allowed to do whatever I want with it?
"I had to replace all of my cassettes with CD's 15 years ago."
Now that's just silly, quality aside, do you really think you should have to buy all of your music again when a new media standard comes out? I guess you have a copy of all of your favorite songs on record, 8 track, casette and CD. Maybe back in the day when software companies used to ship their games with 5.25" and 3.5" disks, they shouldn't have. Instead they should have made you pay full price when you got your first 3.5" drive.
I really hope you're just a troll and don't belive what you're saying.
The funny thing about the Celine Dion CD (for which I couldn't convince my mom to take it back to the store) is that it wouldn't *play* in a PC player, but on the same PC, cdparanoia made a perfect rip. Conclusion: the "copy protection" forces you to copy the CD if you want to listen to it!
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
And gosh, let me guess... There wouldn't be a bunch of ADVERTISEMENTS packaged along with this wonderful Radiohead listening software, would there? My my, the real reason for this is becoming clearer all the time...
It seems to me that if there are self destructing discs made, it would encourage, indirectly, pirating the cd/dvd for longer term use.
Going against legality of course, but people use all those p2p programs illegally with seemingly little guilt as well.
Just a thought.
paul
The RIAA, MPAA, entertainment industry giants, and other lobby groups throw great amounts of money, thought, and manpower at creating a "sustainable" market outlet in the digital world (for entertainment media). They claim their biggest threat to the entertainment market is piracy. If we examine the past actions of these groups, we will see that they have:
Why are DVD players/media and CD players/media not treated in the same fashion as a VCR or Copier device (such as a Xerox)? To my knowledge manufacturers of copy machines and (during their time) VCRs made decent profits. I could skip commercial recordings and previews on my VCR, but I cannot skip the previews on my DVD player. How is that fair use?
Ultimately, I see the courts will need to intervene to set a precedent (similar to the cases involving the VCR and Copy machine). The "entertainment industry" and the standards bodies will establish DRM standards that aren't too unacceptable to the consumer (arguably they won't know the reason for a loss of capability) at first. As the standards go through the review process over the years, you will see devices that have little to no consumer protection (rights and information) inherent in their design. As it is easier to implement a standard and get acceptance by starting with the most acceptable format, and then slowly repealing/adding features over time.
The consumers could stop this nonsense right now by doing three simple things:
- cancel your cable (if you subscribe)
- do not "go to movies" or buy CD/DVD/Computer Software merchandise that is DRM enabled (whenever possible)
- do not buy consumer electronics or computer systems that have native support for DRM
A final action could be to support your Open Source projects, as they currently don't have an issue with piracy.To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Today, thousands of Radio Shack and other electronics stores were all raided by the US Marshalls service for selling and/or manufacturing "anti-circumvention" devices as prohibited by 17-USC-1201 - the DMCA.
Early reports indicate that the items that are causing these retail outlets such grief are commonly known as patch-cables.
According to Harvey Buttnut, well known computer geek, these patch cables can be used to pipe the analog audio from a CD player into the audio input of a computer - allowing the computer to make a recording of the CD with minimal quality loss and no more copy protection.
Lawyers for Sony Corp. at the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe confirmed that it was their investigation that led to the raids on these stores. Apparently, the lawyers' son had accidentily purchased a DRM protected CD from a music store and wanted to play the content on a portable MP3 player.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
You have to love this kind of quality journalism, folks: "Ravaged by piracy, movie studios and recording labels have...", the media has been describing the issue of file-sharing like this since Napster blew up, but this is the strongest adjective I've yet seen.
They never intended for people to play them on their multi-function brown box of mass entertainment that makes things like MP3 trading possible.
Too bad that everything else from steros to dvd players now use similar hardware to the ones used in the multi-function brown box of mass entertainment. Many DVD players use either a standard IDE dvd drive, or an ide dvd drive with a different connector. High end steros with cd-text support and extra features like mp3 playback also use "smarter" drives than the standard issue discman.
You didn't buy the music, you bought the disc.
If I bought the disc, why can I not return the disc except to exchange for an identical disc?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I remember signing a petition regarding just that and about a year later divx discs disappeared. This is nothing new here just a new spin on an old trick. The best way to fight this is with your pocketbook. If the greedy movie and music studios release crippled product and the public refuses to purchase it they will be out a heap of what they love most and react accordingly. There will always be people who try to cheat just like there will always be people that will follow the rules. I believe most folks fall into the honest category yet the honest folks are usually the first to suffer at the hands of these new, draconian technologies.
Self distructing CDs are not what I or most of the people I know want to spend our hard earned money on, give me something lasting. That's why I want to go to indie shows and buy albums from the bands themselves.
The entertainment world is changing, and, in my opinion, it should become more about the art produced than the money made.
A closer example is if you got into your car and a block down the street you get pulled over and a cop gives you a ticket for "potential speeding". You weren't but the cop assumes that you could.
Cop now leaves and you are now looking down a long strech of highway. Why wouldn't you speed? You've done the "time", why not do the "crime"?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I don't really understand this argument.
That's because you're stupid. Don't panic, you're not alone.
Are you saying crime-prevention measures give people a right to commit the crime?
No, that's not what he's saying. He's saying technological measures that obstruct his perfectly legal activities will not be tolerated, and if breaking a repugnant law is the only way to carry out said activities, then that law will be broken.
The idea of a rip-proof CD amuses me.
:)
Back when the web first started, there were a lot of web-page creators scrambling for ways to make their page viewable, but not able to be saved, printed... whatever. The end conclusion was always the same: "If it can be viewed, it can be printed".
The same goes for "rip-proof" CD's. At some point, it has to be listenable to a human. When that happens, the song is vulnerable to being copied.
The obvious way to do this is just to route your "Line Out" into your "Line In" on your PC and then just have a sound recorder going while your CD plays. Of course, this carries the problem of converting from digital, to analog, and then to digital again.
What's only a little less obvious and a little less difficult (so much so that I can hardly believe I haven't seen it available yet) would be to have a pseudo sound output device. Assuming that the CD would be playable (but not rippable) on a normal PC CD-ROM drive, you could tell your CD player app to use this pseudo sound device as the output. To the app, it would look like a regular sound card (kinda like how Adobe Acrobat appears to be a printer), but it would actually just write the digital data to a file (again, like Acrobat does).
The nice thing here is that, the CD could even be restricted to only being played on a DRM-enabled player. At some point, that player has to send the audio off to what it thinks are speakers. If you have a pseudo device that intercepts the audio, then there you go.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if Paladium had components to prevent this... but that's a different story. The point here is that, if you had a pseudo sound card, you could still rip AND keep it all digital. Granted, the rip would happen at 1x... but that's why I have a second PC in my office with lots of games on it.