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CD Copy Protection Case Goes to Court
grungie writes "From The Register: Belgian consumer watchdog Test-Achats (Test Aankoop), known for its crusade against Nokia's "unsafe batteries", starts the new year with a fresh assault on the music industry. It is taking the music giants EMI, Sony, BMG Music and Universal Music to court for installing anti-piracy systems on their audio CDs. This is excellent news! I was less than happy when I had to use cdparanoia to add The Foo Fighters' latest to my iTunes collection. I used to live in Belgium: Test Achat is serious about the protection of consumer rights. Let's hope other countries follow suit." You can read the stories in French as well as Dutch.
..here in India which is notorious for not having a decent return policy. I think, for music CDs almost all countries won't accept a return.
It would be nice to return the RIAA fsckers an opened music CD, in these cases
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
He didn't say whether or not this was a good thing. IMHO this is bad. He won so clearly it would be great to let the supreme court set precendence (it doesn't work like in the U.S, but it's not that different). Clearly the prosecution realized that there is no way they would benefit from taking it to the supreme court.
The UK seems to ban making backup copies of music you've bought, and doesn't permit you to copy your own CDs so you can listen to them on your car cassette player. Allegedly. What's the rest of Europe / the world like? Here's an area where the US has some sensible rules.
Yes - I know you can ignore the law...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
If you buy something from the CD rack of your music shop, and it won't play in your CD playing equipment, you are entitled to a refund.
In fact, buying such a CD, then returning it for just that reason, provides "valuable" feedback to the labels on how acceptable / workable copy-protection isn't. (Maybe we should all go buy the stuff, then return it to send a message?)
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
The translation of the press release makes for mangled reading but if I follow it correctly the law is such that you are permitted to make private copies of CDs you've bought. There's also some vague reference to a "tax" on equipment for copying, but I don't think that's ever been implemented.
Belgium is a small country, so what impact is this likely to have on major record labels? They seem hell-bent on continuing this practice, and I can't see them doing Belgian-specific pressings to get around this. Even if they did, you'd probably find that it was made illegal for US citizens to import CDs from Belgium.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
My definition of damage is any impairment to proper use.
I should not have to spend ANY energy fixing my stuff due to actions of others.
As an extreme example.
A terrorist can blow up a building and kill a few people, but we can just rebuild and make a few new people. I don't think anyone would argue that such easily repaired damage is insignificant.
I received two audio CD's with so called 'copy protection' on them for christmas. I wasn't able to play the CDs on the PC without lots of skipping, but I was able to rip them (perfectly - as far as I can tell) without any problems or specialist software.
After reading about how copy protection works, I can only assume that I must be lucky enough to own a drive that can read these disks?
The response from people at ifpi , our local RIAA is that users shouldn't expect that their CDs work in their car stereo (main problem for the average belgian joe) is because car manufacturers use CD-ROMplayers in their cars and no music CDplayers (please don't flame me, it's their words, not mine).
I've searched their site but haven't seen that response listed anywhere, but that's not really strange because their entire piracysection (with subsection for facts, CD-R and internet) are "to be defined" since that section went onto their site months ago.
But on (flemish) TV this is the mantra of the IFPI spokepeople, and with t -my guess is- they're trying to divert the rage of average belgian joe who just bought a CD that doesn't play in his car from the CDproducers to the carmanifacturers (they should have given you a real CDplayer with your car).
Arh, normally I would just say fuck'm , don't buy their crap; but now I'm pissed at their disinformation and want to see them judged for the smegheads the are.
The first question is: can we expect a landmark decision here?
Yes, I think we can. Like with the Kazaa case in The Netherlands, people will most probably be looking forward to the outcome of this case. Furthermore, legal decisions in a civil case can be enforced all around Europe (when decided for those countries) by means of the Brussels and Lugano conventions.
Next question: how soon will there be a decision?
In a long, long time, probably. When I take my teachers seriously (best of the best of dutch IP lawyers), lawsuits can take years in Belgium, depending on the cravings of the judge. When it's a good day for hunting, you're lost.
However, I do not want to copy this statement directly. Perhaps there's someone from Belgium to throw some light on this case?
Since the "copy protection" is generally done by interfering with the error detection features of the CD standard, this product is inherently less suitable for in-car or personal player use (while jogging, say). It's also more vulnerable to scratches... Almost like in the old days with vinyl records?
But your local RIAA folk are still wrong. Consumers should be able to play their music CDs in ANY CD player. That's what the standard is for, after all.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
All I can tell you about copy protection is that in my home, for Christmas 2002, a DVD/CD player was received that only played mp3 music if it was recorded at a specific bit rate, with a lot of restrictions. The gift giver was thanked, and asked to return it.
We have put off purchasing a DVD/CD player (and now recorder) for the living room, two portable mp3 players, a DVD-Ram/+R/-R recorder for the computer, an mp3 stereo deck for the car, a kitchen CD/mp3 player radio for mom, and a portable mp3 stereo for outdoor trips all because it is unknown if any of these items will restrict us from playing the music that we own.
I'll be taking a cd with mp3s on it to the local electronics outlet in the next few months to see if there are problems playing mp3s on several car stereo decks in the price range we can afford. We'll gladly give up a bit of sound quality (especially in a car) for the convenience of being able to play over a hundred songs on a single cd rather than shuffling cds while driving, especially being able to eliminate songs we don't like.
DVD recorder for the computer? Was planning on getting a deck that included DVD-Ram thanks to the random access feature, especially suitable for computer files and archiving, but which can also be used for audio and video creation for playback in the living room. That plan appears to be on hold because we're waiting to see if DVD-Ram format survives, and waiting to get more info on the ability to playback music and videos we own, without ridiculous restrictions.
Portable mp3 stereo playback? We'll wait to see what becomes popular. Probably another year. In the meantime, cassettes that we can record at home without restrictions will have to do (which is something we've been doing since cassettes overtook 8-track player/recorders).
Living room DVD player? Forget it. If we need to play back a video, it will be piped from one of the computers on our home lan through a s-video output to the television, as we are already doing. Thanks to broadband, and a relative's dvd player (and his patience), we can watch any dvd we want without paying for a player. Our house is between his house and his job, and he doesn't have to buy any videos, we keep him well supplied.
Without full disclosure on restrictions, we won't waste any money on consumer electronics unless we find out beforehand through someone else's experiences, whether the hardware works with the music and videos we own. We've been burned by incompatible software, and software that doesn't work as advertised, costing hundreds of dollars each, and we aren't going to start the same thing with consumer electronics. I have another relative who has been burned by the Sony mini-discs.
Any consumer electronics we buy in the future MUST be compatible with the music and videos we own, and must be able to play (and record for backup) them in every way currently available and every way that makes sense. Or we won't purchase them. That's the bottom line.
In Canada I have the legal right to copy a friend's music disc, etc, this has been decided by our copyright board (as long as I make my own copy). In my humble opinion, copy controlled discs are violating my rights granted by my government. In a seperate issue, if I can legally copy someone else's music cd, can I not legally copy software? :)
If the industry didn't package these things like CDs and make them look like CDs, then "don't like it it, don't buy it" would make a lot more sense.
Imagine: you go to the store to buy some flour so you can bake some bread. There's an isle with a bunch of sacks of flour. You go to that isle, and pick up a sack that appears to contain flour (but you don't read all the printing on the back of the sack) and buy it. Then you get home, make your bread, and it comes out all wrong. You look at your "flour" sack and find out -- oops -- it's actually rat poison, not flour. Ok, now technically this is your fault, and you should have paid more attention to what you were buying. But why did the store have this crap on the same isle as the flour, mixed in with the flour sacks, in a sack that looks almost exactly like a flour sack (except for some fine printing on the back)? It smacks of fraud and deception.
The reason these discs are made to appear like CDs, is that if they were marketed as not CDs and segregated to a different part of the store (much like most stores don't have the cassette tapes and LPs mixed in with the CDs), then people wouldn't buy them. The motive for their fraud is that they are attempting to avoid marketplace accountability. "Don't like it, don't buy it" is exactly the strategy that they are trying to circumvent.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Then you repeat step 2 until they're forced to give you a different title or a refund because they don't have any more. Had to do this once for a computer game where they messed up the copy-protection so it wouldn't play on ANYBODY'S computer. Of course, I told the clerks that none of them were going to work, because they were all from the same run, and it was the master that was bad.
I don't read AC A human right
Thin edge of the wedge - which can work both ways. Legal precedents, examples of what works and what doesn't work. Belgium may be a little country, but it is an integral part of the EU, which is big.
I own two CDs that claim to be copy-protected. One doesn't appear to be copy-protected all, just scary notices on the artwork. The other makes it almost impossible to play on a Windoze box unless you use their brain-damaged CD player application, but my Linux box plays it without comment.
The latter also doesn't have the official CD logo on it, either.
...laura
A lot of this stuff can be summarized as "The man in the middle attacks." Media as intermediation. The corporation as the "person" behind depersonalization.
It's pretty clear that the artist has ownership rights to some high degree, and that the purchaser of the art has ownership rights. Similarly for the farmer and the those sitting down to eat. But in our system of middlemen the artist and farmer on average barely scrape by, often holding a second job to do that, while those about to "consume" get an abundance of adulterated junk of low artistic and nutritional quality while our money makes the middlemen very comfortable indeed. Meanwhile the farms and music makers are forced to consolidate into megafarms and megastars....
What would happen if our food middlemen decided to add substances to, say, the potatoes of one distributor that would poison only those who ate the meat of another distributor? You don't, after all, have to eat those potatoes. You don't have to buy those copy-protected CDS, either, or combine them with musical equipment they won't work in. (My DVD player plays CDs. Just why should I want to buy a separate CD player to play the crippled ones?) But clearly something's wrong here. Food from different suppliers should be as fully compatible as possible. Musical items from different suppliers, likewise.
Anything else is restriction of the fundamental ownership rights of the artist/farmer and the appreciator/eater. The laws need to be restructured so that the middle men are allowed only those rights which in no way infringe on the fundamental rights owners, who produce and consume whatever the middlemen distribute. Distribution should be recognized not as ownership, but as the relation of a cargo carrier to the cargo carried.
And we must realize that anything which robs from the final customer also robs from the original producer. The century-long history of the obliteration of small farmers due to the stranglehold on markets by middlemen amply demonstrates the economic principles involved when middlemen are allowed too much sway. One way to address this is to alter the balance of laws so that fictitious corporate "persons" never have rights equal to individual living persons - whether the persons who play music, the persons who run family farms, or the persons who enjoy a good tune with a good meal.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"So bite the bullet and stop buying. I did."
Sadly, they spun the sales drop as a result of your 'voting with your wallet' policy as "sales down due to piracy."
"Derp de derp."
I find it odd that the foo fighters cd has copy protection on it when dave grohl was quoted as saying "I don't care if you download our songs, we are already millionaires so as long as you enjoy the music go ahead."