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Australian Commission Rejects Crippled-CD Complaints

Posted by timothy on from the lotsa-luck dept.

rooinlondon writes "The Age newspaper reports that a recent complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission regarding copy-protected audio CDs has been rejected. Has anyone else complained to local authorities regarding this issue ? Has anyone had any more luck with their action ?"

7 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. There's only one thing you can really do by Xenkar · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Don't buy CDs.

    A business must sell goods or services to survive. After they sue every file sharer on the internet, they'll give in and start selling non-crippled media. I don't really understand why anyone would really want to listen to a music disc with one or two decent songs and ten to fifteen filler songs.

  2. How about a different law? by narratorDan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Skip the laws covering what is on the CD, how about laws covering basic product usability. If you bought a TV in AU that used NTSC (Used in USA) rather than the PAL standard that is used in AU, could you return it as defective?

    True, it works, but not in AU!


    NarratorDan
    --
    "If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
  3. Re:phillips and protection by wallet72 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tried that argument, myself and got a friend who is a music retailer to ring them about it. Their very glib answer was simple... 'it's an audio CD because it plays on some equipment, therefore it must be standard. If it doesn't play on other equipment then maybe you need to look at that equipment.' When told that non protected CDs played fine, it was only the 'protected' CDs, their response... 'that may be the case, but I've already answered that issue.' (these are direct quotes by the way)

  4. A long time ago... by mikiN · · Score: 5, Interesting
    in a galaxy far away two companies called Philips and Sony wrote the Red Book on CD-DA (Compact Disc-Digital Audio) and that was that. All CD players in existence could happily play CD's mastered to that standard. To prevent copying there existed the CP (Copy Prohibit) flag hidden away in the subcodes. To allow people to make a personal backup copy there was added an SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) control bit to count the number of copies made, up to 1, obviously.

    The fact that CD-ROM/CD-R manufacturers later ignored SCMS completely by allowing any audio-CD to be copied regardless of CP/SCMS bit values doesn't mean that the recording industry should level their wrath on us poor consumers by bombarding us with unplayable CD's.

    It's the drive manufacturers who chose to circumvent the SCMS policy in the first place. In a way, it can even be said that they are assisting in circumventing a copy protection scheme and as such are violating the DMCA

    Anyway, these so-called 'copy-protected' CD's do not conform to the standard so should not be sold pretending that they do.

    --
    The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
    1. Re:A long time ago... by ASkGNet · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And today copy protected cd's do a bit more than set a hidden subchannel code flag. Today, there are cases of a particular copy protection killing macintosh cd drives (jamming them), so they can only be opened by a service technician, a copy protection (which supposedly never saw the light) that would crash the OS/hard drive of the PC that its CDROM drive was used to playback the CD, now we have copy protections that simply destroy the media (DVD in this case) after a set period of time.

      Sometimes greed tops every other emotion and feeling. Recording companies have this syndrome for a long time already.

  5. I guess you could.. by jotaeleemeese · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... if you were not warned in advence.

    And warned does not mean small text in a lose paper inside the box in which the TV is packaged. Warned should be a big label in red letters with "WARNING" in capital letters in the top of the box and the legal responsibitlity of the seller explaining this.

    --
    IANAL but write like a drunk one.
  6. I got screwed by EMI by EricKoh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A little off topic, but I feel the need to warn consumers of the potential pitfalls of buying these crippled CDs. I just bought 2 CDs today using EMIs 'Copy Protection CD' technology. Both CDs wouldnt play properly on my portable cd player (iRiver IMP550). Each track would start skipping after a few seconds of play. I suspect it has something to do the electronic shock protection present on the player. (Unfortunately I cannot turn it the ESP feature off) The CDs would play on the PC (windows media player etc), but there would be clicks every now and then. The clicks are not present and the CD plays properly on windows if I install their software player. Any solutions to this problem?