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Sony Music Testing New Copy Protection
RandyOo writes "According to this Reuters article, Sony Music is about to start testing a new type of 'copy protection' in Germany. It looks like they'll be releasing multi-sessioned discs with normal audio in the first session, and compressed, DRM'ed music files in the second session, as well added 'extras', including access to exclusive online content. The article explains that the disc's audio can still be copied, and there's a hilarious quote at the end by a BMG spokesman: "All copy-protections can be hacked, but if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer." "
I've stopped buying copy-protected CD's since none of them plays properly on my discman. As soon as they manage to come up with a form of protection that won't keep me from actually playing my legally bought CD, I might reconsider my boycott...
RTFAing, this technique obviously uses ATRAC3+
This is exactly the type of thing that the music industry should do. How many times do you hear the argument for ripping CD's for personal use only. Whenever I get a CD, the first thing I do is put it in my MP3 jukebox (linux, or course!) and rip it. If I could get away with putting it in the jukebox and simply copying the files from it I'd be just as happy.
This way, you know if you find a copy of the song in the wild it is there as an illegal copy. Hopefully the number and availability of pirated material will lessen (there's always hope) and the music industry can concentrate their legal might onto the actual criminals!
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
That still doesn't address the problem of some/most CDs having a few good songs and the rest being crap filler. IMO, services like iTunes remain a better idea because you can buy only the songs you want.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
These multi-session discs with DRM-enabled content, videos, etc has got to be taking a toll on the actualt minutes of music you get on a disc. Or is it possible to downsample CD audio files to free up some room? Even without the protection issues, I think these "Extras" like videos aren't worth less music or lower-quality audio.
What's pathetic is the DVD and CD prices differences of like releases. Take Rush for example with their latest "Rush In Rio" live releases. 3-CD set and 2-DVD set are roughly the same price, even though the DVD set gives you a documentary, Dolby Digital audio, etc.
OK, I'll bite...
How will this prevent CD copying? Where's the real extra value in the "compressed" (which I read as lossy) DRM'd content? Oh, I get to go to an "exclusive" website with extra content. Whoopee. If I have the CD, I'm ripping tracks in an unprotected format regardless of whether there are already pre-ripped tracks available. Why would I want to copy DRM'd material to my machine?
Seems to me that by having a multisession CD, that means there will be less unprotected music since it takes up a majority of space. Unless, of course, there is plenty of unused space on today's recordings. I wouldn't know, I haven't bought a "major label" CD in years. Last CD I bought was from a local performer, bought right from the guy after he played a club one night (got it autographed too...another perk in supporting local talent.)
I don't know maybe I'm one of the unwashed, but this makes no sense to me. I agree with the other poster that said "just make a regular CD" and I'll add "and price it reasonably" and we will come.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I think we are all overreacting to it :-)
/.-technominded-caffeiene soap washed-DVD+R eating-nerds.
Normal users are more ignorant about how to bypass copyprotection. And those users really don't care if they have slightly moire noise or quality-loss then us,
I think this is an other copyprotection that most users will have a problem with...
except those that don't want to buy Sony equipment. (like me)
fortune is my favourite linux command
it's these people - largely mafia types - the industry should be worried about (something like 1 in 3 cds is fake) rather than a student copying a cd
Some people, and even some organisations, are capable of being worried about more than one thing at once - and even as they try and deal with one situation, they also try and deal with others. The pirates are a known problem which doesn't change people's buying habits that much - Napster and Kazaa on the other hand are new for these companies - and they're right to be worried. With codecs improving and broadband access increasing, it's really not hard to obtain an even better selection than the big music stores have, and at a cheaper price.
In the past it was easy enough to copy from the radio - if you wanted to listen long enough and be taping all the time just in case the song you wanted came on. It was easy enough to copy a CD that a friend already had - but harder to search for anything and everything. There's also the matter of convenience - it used to be more convenient to go to a store and browse shelves of music than hunt around amongst your friends for the song you wanted. Even putting price aside, it's now easier to download off the net than to search in a store. Get a good enough codec at a high enough bitrate, and the stores have nothing to offer:
* not cheaper
* not more convenient
* not sufficiently higher quality
As for how - well, laws of course. They work well enough for other things - underground markets don't hurt the established providers anywhere near as much as legal and better alternatives.
If they trusted us, they'd just print up CDs as usual and assume we wouldn't steal them.
This is a bit callous. The fact of the matter is that Lots of People(tm) pirate music and the music industry wants to stop it. This is the first sign that they are listening to consumers and their advocates. Instead of relying on just DRM (lest we forget CSS?) they recognise that its use is limited and they are offering consumers more bang for their buck.
Look at DVDs. I'm speaking only for myself but I would be far less interested in downloading a DiVX rip of a movie than a MP3 of a song. The fact of the matter is that more is lost in the translation of the DVD; I don't get surround sound and I don't get extras or outtakes.
I'm glad Sony is taking this tact; it's far nicer than dragging 12 year olds into court.
all valid points but i'm leaning towards the view that "20th century" music production was a short-lived business. before the 20th century we couldn't record or sell music, it had to be performed live. people routinely heard live music (and not just the rich people, although obviously on the whole they heard the best). then we discovered how to record and playback. amazing. an industry was born which made billions over a hundred years or so because it filled a desire for music at home (need is maybe too strong a word). People bought records (and then cds). now they can get that same music without physically buying a cd. that's progress. perhaps musicians, who once were happy making good money by working hard performing - instead of making millions by selling cds - will have to revert to that type of lifestyle (most big acts tour heavily anyway, as that is where the real money is) i suspect most musicians would happily accept this sort of system. it's the record companies who don't. they've realised they have no business left. which is why some of them have started branching out into concerts (ie, robbie williams' new "record" deal includes a cut from his touring i understand).
All I Want For Christmas Is My Constitutional Rights
This is actually a rather clever move. You see, Average Joe is going to put the CD in his computer and copy off the prepackaged music files, cos it's easy.
They're going to work fine on his computer, and he runs Kazaa so they are made available over Kazaa too. Problem is, others won't be able to play them after they download them from him. However, I wonder if Joe cares. The only thing Joe will be upset about is not being able to play music he downloads from others who are simply copying DRM files from similarly packaged music. But I somehow doubt Joe will make the connection between the files copied off the CD in this manner and the problem he's getting when he downloads random track X from Y.
> Trust has to be earned.
> Judging by the vast amount of MP3's available on Kazaa, I see no reason why they shouldn't trust people who have shown time and time again that they'll happily make copyrighted material available to everyone for free.
You missed the other half of the formula, "if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value".
Your cynicism may be justified, but the full formula hasn't been tested for about a generation now. (I refer not just to the subjective quality of the music, but also to the price of the media. CDs' steep pricing was originally justified on the basis that they were retooling the industry and the output was limited, but curiously the prices never did come down. Except of course among counterfeiters, who can sell them for $1/disc and still make a killing.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's hilarious because the guy says that all copy protection can be hacked, yet thinks putting DRM'd material on the disc is a great idea.
Why bother? If they're trusting us, they don't need to use DRM, do they?
Doesn't sound like a great idea to me. The quality of the tracks won't be as high as the CDDA data, and this extra content will simply reduce the amount of space available for the 'proper' audio data. I don't want all the music artists doing a 'Linkin Park' and releasing albums with 30 minutes of music on them.
And the digital content will only play on Sony-licenced equipment. So they trust us, as long as they're getting their money from the equipment we have to buy in order to access it.
No thanks.
The thing is that it only takes one person to buy a CD, encode it to MP3, and share it with the world. Why should the rest of us have to be penalized and inconvenienced for one person?
That's the thing that always really frustrated me with the product activation schemes for software: the people who pirated it just hacked it and went about their merry way. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to struggle with calling Microsoft or some other company just to explain that we installed some new hardware or that we're reinstalling Windows.
If they really trusted us, they would put the money, time, and other resources into fixing bugs or developing new features rather than coming up with new ways of preventing us from backing up our work... because you know that everything that they come up with is really going to stop the large-scale pirates.
You assume that Sony is stupid. They know that you can get around this by going to the first session of the disk and ripping (see the quote). However to the bulk majority of people the DRMed files are acceptable.
You've almost hit I what I suspect is Sony's plan.
They know that, aside from piracy, there are good reasons to have copies of music on a PC, notably ease and convenience of use -- with music on a PC, I don't have to change CDs, I can play tracks from multiple CDs in one playlist, etc.
By including a version of the music that's already in a convenient PC format, they hope that users won't even bother to rip the normal tracks (and maybe they'll have made that harder to do, to, by including munged tables of contents or whatever).
Once enough people have swallowed this new format -- say in five years --, they'll point out that for many users, the audio-CD portion is redundant. So they'll come out with "Bonus" CDs that contain twice as much music, for the same cost as a regular CD, omitting the audio tracks in order to have the space for the bonus DRM'd tracks.
Once that's been swallowed, they'll start producing "CD"s that contain only DRM'd tracks, probably validated by phoning home to a central server, possibly with mandatory registration.
At that point, Sony will hope they've stamped out file sharng, and will raise their prices.
Now I don't do file sharing (at this point I used to plug emusic.com, but no longer), but I do want to ensure that ay music I buy is convertable to MP3, as I have hardware that only plays MP3s, andvcan't play DRM'd music.
For the moment, Sony's hybrid CDs will probably work for me, but if they go to full DRM, dropping audio tracks, it will be a problem for me. (And, no, I won't upgrade to a DRM capable player, as I assume that it wouldn't be open source.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
But Apple at least lets you transfer drm rights from one computer to another. THe tracks are yours as long as you own a system. And you can use 3 devices and systems at once. This means a friend or two can hear and decide if the file is worth buying.
Face it guys. Pirating is stealing. Yes I like downloading music but it costs serious bucks to make an album.
I hope Sony will do something similiar or just use the Advanced AUdio Codec that Itunes uses. Great sound quality.
http://saveie6.com/
isn't this exactly the way we would prefer the music companies to respond? i mean, we all know that there is in fact no way they can lock us out of copying current cd technology, so as opposed to spending lots of money on the problem, why not accept it and just move on? oh yeah, and give the consumer pre-ripped digital copies of the music as well. sure, it's DRM protected and we don't like that, but BIG F!@#in DEAL! they haven't actually tried to protect the CDDA tracks, so you can just rip with your encoder of choice.
so what's the problem? why is this hilarious? is it that they actually trust us for a change? is it funny because we can't be trusted not to steal their music? it seems to me like somebody at BMG finally "gets it".
Here's a project for the EEs among you. How about replacing the controller on an IDE drive with an utterly stupid device that is driven entirely through software? The load on the CPU would be somewhat ridiculous as CD-ROMs and audio drives do quite a bit of error correction and so forth. But this drive could not be fooled by anything they do to a CD. These copy protection schemes all hinge on interfering with assumptions that CD-ROM engineers have made. This is not a new idea. In the eighties, there were hardware modifications for diskette drives that basically made them software controlled devices.
The whole DRM debate is spurious. Copy protection is a technological answer to a failed business model.
Record companies are middle men who have traditionally controlled the distribution channel. They no longer monopolize the distribution channel, and therefore are less pertinent. I think we will start to see more of the profits accrue to the artist now, rather than the record companies, and in turn, artists will need to become responsible for their own marketing and promotion, generating a potential new service industry to the music business.
People, we are seeing the creation of a new industry dynamic. Let the record companies spend their profits on last-gasp attempts to preserve their monopoly. Who cares. Let them copy protect. Someone will break it, and while they are agonising over how best to copy protect, the industry will change under their noses because they are too busy to see the reality.
Oh, and what's more, I for one, will not buy copy protected music on principle, like many others, so these efforts are further hurting sales. The whole situation reminds me of nothing so much as a bunch of proverbial lemmings emblazoned with Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. rushing headlong towards the cliff...
My wife bought a "copy-protected" disc. It wouldn't play in the Discman, and wouldn't play in the Sony mini hi-fi either.
So I dropped it in the Linux MP3 server, and it ripped straight away, no problems.
So the "copy-protection" actually forced us to copy the disc in order to listen to it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I like this folk artist named Peter Mayer. My wife and i saw him perform live and wanted to buy his CDs but didn't have any cash on us so we went home and resolved to buy them on-line. One thing leads to another and we're busy and we forget.
A few months later i'm goofing around and i search for him on Amazon. I am surprised to find such a "small" artist on a mainstream site, but happy to see that he has some free downloads! (Don't ask me why there are two separate pages for "all free song downloads by Peter Mayer.")
I download the songs and spend a few days enjoying them. I copy them for my wife and for a few friends, then decide i really do want to support this guy. So i go to his label's site, Peppermint Records order his stuff (No money for Amazon today!) and check out some other artists while i'm there. Some sound good, but Anne Heaton really impresses me. Amazon has some downloads for her too. Turns out i'm crazy for one song and not so hot on the others so i don't order but i enjoy (and share) the mp3 and vow to check her out live if i get the chance and to look out for any new CDs she makes.
At the same time, my friends are doing the same thing because of the stuff i shared with them. They've bought several of Peter's CDs and some of them thought Anne's was worth the investment too. We were all being responsible and trading publicly available stuff, but when my CDs arrive i'll be ripping them to listen via WinAmp and if the occasion arises, i won't hesitate to give a few out.
I didn't have to buy anything, nor did my friends. I've got what amounts to a nearly complete album of Peter Mayer's Greatest Hits on my hard drive, but i know that if i don't send some cash his way, he'll have to go get a real job and i won't be hearing any more of his thoughtful, beautiful songs.
So is this post for or against file sharing? On the one hand, i didn't engage in any Napster-scale swapping. On the other hand, if Peppermint put some DRM crap on their CDs that made it a hassle for me to rip them i probably wouldn't buy them as a protest.
I think the RIAA doesn't take people like me into account. Most of what made me buy Peter's CDs was the music, but a part of it was my desire to support an independant label and artist. The only major-label CD i've bought lately was the Dixie Chicks. I like their music, but i was content to hear it on the radio on those infrequent occasions when i turn off NPR. I bought their CD to counteract some of the crap they were getting for exercising their first amendment rights.
I'm using my cash to reward those whose products and policies i like and withholding it from those i don't like. Maybe the RIAA doesn't have to take people like me into account. Maybe i'm just an insignificant statistical blip to them, but i'm talking to my friends and family about this stuff and some of them are doing the same thing, so maybe that blip will become significant if they don't change their ways.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
but as we all know, making -all- your customers jump through hoops that at best slow the criminals down by a few weeks, is not good business.
and their revenue model is predicated upon illegal vertical, -and- horizontal collusion, monopolistic practices, and price fixing (proven guilty on all counts, remember the class action suit?).
seeing as how the reported sales decline is certainly representing the minority of music purchasers, and does seem to at least correlate with the rise of consumer embracing of digital distribution - it's fair to assume we're talking primarily about meeting the needs the technical minority of their consumers, whilst avoiding making things more complicated for the nontechnical majority.
the cost/benefit of these schemes is not in their interests. instead of fighting the impossible fight (whether it's the Good Fight(tm) or not) - is pointless. You can compete with free (see: bottled water).
legit online music services continue to grow and flourish, even though DRM-less mp3s are free and theoretically just as many clicks away. but it turns out that consumers would rather -not- break the law if they can get a product for a non-fixed price.
combine that with the fact that p2p apps will never actually be able to compete on quality, convenience, or consistancy. they involve too much client trust, which is too easy to abuse (low quality, mislabelled content, or outright deceptive practices and flooding with junk ).
in the end, i get the feeling they're spending more on PR, lawsuits and copy protection to crack down on this single-digit decline, than on getting on-board with digital distribution (which seems to be precisely what the downloading market segment wants).
but the RIAA realizes that the artists and consumers are not morons and not happy about the last few decades of their monopolistic practices. digital distribution -will- catch on, and their control over the entire scheme will fail. so they are sticking to DRM, lawsuits and FUD - not just to protect their revenue model - but to protect their -monopolistic- revenue model.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"