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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
A 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.
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.