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Recording Industry Hopes To Hinder CD Burning
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "News.com reports that the recording industry is currently testing technology that would limit the number of times that a given CD (or copies of that CD) could be burned. The idea is to let consumers 'make a limited number of copies of their music -- enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example -- without allowing for uncontrolled duplication.' Currently, Macrovision and SunnComm International are developing competing versions of such 'secure burning' technology, with BMG Music Group already testing the latter company's software."
The release gained some prominence after a Princeton student demonstrated that the protections could be easily evaded simply by pushing a computer's Shift key while loading the CD.
The solution to piracy is never going to find success in copy protection. As in the example, above, there is always going to be a "workaround."
I think the RIAA has to make their case to their customers in a manner that is compelling and, yes, actually encourages voluntary compliance. You should be able to make copies of a CD that you bought. It is not right, however, to make 25 copies for friends. However, slippery a slope as it is, I think it is probably okay to make a copy for a friend or two. But, it's a slippery slope and many would take issue with me.
The solution is sociological, not hardware/software.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Record labels in the United States have been sensitive to these consumer concerns, worrying particularly about earlier versions of copy-protection technology that had difficulty playing in nontraditional CD players such as game consoles or car stereos. They've released many protected CDs overseas, but only a small number in the United States and United Kingdom, where perceived opposition has been the highest.
Oh please, they are unconcerned with how we feel. They are only concerned with how much money they will make. I don't see how not releasing a copy-protected CD because people will balk is being concerned w/our feelings.
I wasn't aware that free-use included allowing a limit to be placed on something you have purchased. Making a few copies for home use sounds good but it's all bullshit. They are trying to limit one of the few "freedoms" we still have.
"I think the labels have been relaxing a little in terms of usage rules," said Liz Brooks, vice president of business development at Buy.com's music division.
I realize that this quote comes from a VP at Buy.com but I wasn't aware that the labels got to decide what rules we had to follow regarding fair use. Wow.
Just remember all this when you are supporting the cartels. Your money goes to developing methods and laws to limit your freedoms and to supporting suits against your fellow man.
I mean really. I haven't used a CD in 2 years.
...
If it ain't on the 'net, it ain't something I'm interested in
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This technology sounds like it will be easy to defeat. You might just have to rip your CDs to Wav and burn a CD from the Wav files instead of a direct copy. They're rather limited in what they can do and have compatiability with CD players. This would work for most cd's
Personally, I don't think further hobbling of the traditional product will improve their sales. The recording industry needs to wake up and make fundamental changes to their model that:
1. Embraces and promotes the downloading channel (a la iTunes, et al).
2. Finds more ways to diversify and vary the traditional physical product (CDs). Packaging, boxed sets, picture disks, collectables, etc. The music itself has to be just one component of a well-integrated marketing. Every 10th CD will include a certificate for a second free CD!
3. Uses their distribution and marketing clout to create and promote stars--revenues then come from a variety of marketing and event activities (the Grateful Dead made most of their money from touring and even allowed "bootlegging'). The product has to evolve from being bits to being the magic of the music experience (or whatever).
The cat is out of the bag and there's no putting it back in. For better or worse, the ripping and online swapping thing will simply never be defeated. Its kind of like the "bazaar" model of development that ESR speaks of and no matter what the industry does, the "community" will find a way to crack it.
They can either die a slow painful death or evolve. In the new age, the viable product is the "rock star" (or interesting composer or beautiful diva), not the bits they spew. It'll take some work.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
If I can hear it, I can rip it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Now I'll probably have to buy my CD burning software from the RIAA too. Wonderful.
To limit copies of CDs made, the recording industry should just keep producing the same old crap that nobody wants anyway.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Survey says... people don't like DRM.
2002 Lawsuit againts SunnComm
Good discussion on DRM
The problem with trying to protect information with technology is that it has been shown repeatedly not to work. It only takes one person to crack the protection, and a million people can get a digital copy of the cracked work in days. During DEFCON, a digital security conference held in America last year, a Russian programmer called Dmitry Sklyarov illustrated this by showing how easy it was to circumvent the protection on Adobe's "E-Books". For this service to the public and to Adobe he was arrested and tried by the FBI, under the provision of the DMCA, the American version of the EUCD already part of US law since 1998.
Obviously, the same problem exists with the technology Macrovision & SunnComm are currently proposing. It just takes one person to create a DRM-less digital copy & post it on the latest P2P network...
I doubt they want people burning a copy for a friend
Sure, I bet all the hardware, OS, and applications people are going to jump right on and support this. Especially the open source ones.
Even if they all did... What's to stop me from ripping the image and repeatedly using that. Or ripping off one superb quality MP3 or OV and using that for my burns.
When will they learn that prohibiting us only inspires us to find ways around it!
To repeal the tax on media. If the record companies develop a scheme to limit cd burning, it makes sense that people who buy blank media shouldd not pay a tax that reimburses record companies for people making copies of music. Since the labels can control how many copies of a CD are made, they can factor this into the price of a CD.
My other sig is extremely clever...
...is what happens when I make a copy of my copy of the original. Would that be impossible too, and if so, how??
What I would prefer to see is my current ability to make unlimited dups of my *original* CD. I don't mind creating "mules" that is copies that then can't be copied, but if I bought it, I shoudl be able to make as many copies as I want/need for personal use and not have them tied to a physical machine.
the RIAA and recording industry needs to wake up. People know how to get past the protections. There will be softwares written to do it.
They need to learn to except whats going on and change their business model.
Evolution or ID?
Anything digital can be circumnavigated. There's always a way. And as long as Lite-On has $30 52X burners and Memorex has 100-pack spindles for $19.99, they will be used feverishly and for whatever purpose we choose.
...an encryption scheme designed by Macrovison and SunnComm International has already been cracked by an 11-year old with a 486.
Back to the drawing board.
Apple's already taken care of this for you. It's called iTunes. If they switch to a digital only distribution method such as iTunes, then they can control how many times you can burn that particular album as it was meant to be heard by the artist. Of course, you can always copy the newly burnt disc, but that will be true of *any* copy protection that is backwards compatible with the redbook standard.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
yeah... ive been waiting for this day for a long time. kinda like the day i got my leg cut off. maybe i can send them back that check for $12 they sent me so they can get this out the door faster.
who would buy/use this. thank god for linux
And all it takes is one pirate to rip the CD and put it on Kazaa.
We am RIAA. We am hyping new protection scheme which also don't work, just like old protection scheme. We am again forgetting protection system depends on software to co-operate. Since software not co-operate last time, we am trying again.
Right, I'm sure this will work wonderfully. What do they plan to do, replace my CD-burning program? And how, exactly, are they going to do that? Is this just going to be another "corrupt strategic sectors of the CD" strategy? I thought they learned last time they tried that and discovered that a lot of CD players wouldn't read the CD at all. And never mind the fact that one could just rip to WAV files and then burn from there...
In short, it sounds to me like more snake oil salesmen peddling their wares to a desperate industry with a failed business model. I can't see any way to do this that's compatible with existing hardware and doesn't require control of the software. Which they most definitely don't have, no matter how much Microsoft wishes they did. To say nothing of the fact that anything implementing this "technology" would, by necessity, violate the Red Book CD Audio standard and run afoul of the same labelling laws as existing "methods".
BMG Music Group
NIC Card
ATM Machine
Anyone got any others?
Let's face it, any self respecting pirate will make a binary copy (bit for bit) of any digital media. Once you have the bits, no technology will limit the numbers of copies you make. They are targetting the little guy who makes a few copies, etiher under fair use or slightly beyond. Someone who just casually wants to make a copy, but isn't going to try really hard before shelling out for another CD.
This isn't about limitting piracy, but boosting sales. May seem the same thing, but in this case I don't think it is.
Why don't they invest the money they waste researching and developing crap that will be cracked by a 15 year old kid in about 10 minutes into something worth while..
like to cancer research affordable housing, feeding starving families, cleaning up cities, more efficient automobiles, alternative energy, etc, etc...
<end/>
You guys sold corrupted and crippled disks to your customers.
Did it work? No
You tried this super duper water marking scheme.
Did it work? No, in fact Prof. Felten and his team broke it within a week
You're attacking your customers, insult them and threaten legal action..
Did it work? No, in fact you're pissing your customers off
You tried yet different approaches to "copy protect" the medium.
Did it work? No, in fact you piss people off, since the can't play their legally purchased product on their legally purchased car cd player
Is there no more new material available since you tried to force all those smart schemes on your customers?
Hell! of course! within minutes after availability on "cd"
So here's a free hint for you:
Why don't you make a product available, which is of good quality, cheap, readily available and doesn't force us to give up our privacy and suck your ducks just so that we can listen to a song? You know, sort of like Apple did it (and which rumour says you're in the process of killing by higer prices and enforced bundling).
Provide us with a convenient, realistically priced product, not being throttled by rediculous schemes (region coding anyone?). Stop insulting our intelligence and integrity and stop treating us like criminals and I'll promise:
We buy!
NB: Focusing on a good products might help sales too. There's only so much Britney and Back Street Boys you can listen to before throwing up.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Just a point. The parent is for Canada not the US or others.
Evolution or ID?
..it can be copied. And even if I have to copy a copy...
No, they don't get it.
Seeing as how I haven't purchased more than a handful of albums in the past two years, I think they can count all of their efforts to prevent me from copying their music as a resounding success.
The only thing this is going to do is piss off the average non-tech savvy consumer. Those who want to break DRM will be able to do so no matter what. This is mainly going to effect the person who is using for legitimate purposes, who may then decide to stop buying CDs altogether.
One thing that all of these uber-DRM schemes don't take into account is that all it takes is ONE person to crack the code, or re-encode the CD via analog means into his computer and post it on KaZaa. Once it hits KaZaa then it's over for the DRM on that CD. People can then swap it all they want, regardless of if their CD only allows for 3 burns or whatever.
Also, how receptive will people be to a CD that can only be copied 3 times over its lifetime? Let's say that you're 16 and buy the new Britney Spears CD to listen to. You make one copy for home and one for your new car. Years down the road you make 2 more copies for various reasons and then want to make a 4th dupe of the CD. Wait, you can't, because you're limited to 3 burns over the CD's lifetime. Or, more likely, the company that makes the burning software that keeps track of your burns goes out of business and suddently their servers and backend stuff to keep track of all of this breaks down. Or you run Linux and they don't make software for linux because there's not enough of a market for it. Or you have a Mac and they just don't support Macs. Or your original CD gets scratched, can you then make a copy of the copy w/out the DRM getting involved?
It's just too much for people to keep thinking about over the span of years owning music. This will fail.
Apple's already taken care of this for you. It's called iTunes. If they switch to a digital only distribution method such as iTunes, then they can control how many times you can burn that particular album as it was meant to be heard by the artist. Of course, you can always copy the newly burnt disc, but that will be true of *any* copy protection that is backwards compatible with the redbook standard.
They have created a way to allow a playlist to be burned only so many times. You can create a new playlist with the same songs and keep on burning.
Evolution or ID?
The people hurting the RIAA aren't the onesy-twosy CD-copying Joe Users that they're ultimately going to screw with this, it's the CD factories overseas that mass-produce thousands upon thousands of bootleg CD's. And you can be sure they'll have no problem getting around such limitations.
>> 1. Embraces and promotes the downloading channel (a la iTunes, et al).
I believe they already are! Remember the price hikes the RIAA wanted to impose? (I believe their goal was $2.99 per single (popular singles). If that's not 'embracing' the downloading channel, I don't know what is. (granted, this certainly wouldn't promote the downloading channel when the price per song is significantly higher than purchasing a CD...)
What a great way to encourage even bigger losses in CD sales. As a consumer, I see this as a CD with design obsolescence. And what about copies of copies? Am I now supposed to keep my original in a hermetically sealed vault, only to bring it out when my most recent copy dies? One more tick towards total failure?
And wouldn't this make tracks I buy from the iTunes music store superior to physical CDs? After all, I can burn them as many times as I want.
Since physical CDs are supposed to be a cash cow for the record industry, I don't see why they'd be excited to make them less attractive to consumers than they already are?!?
To stock up on DRM incompatible CD burners. If the CD works with 'em, copy protection is gone. If it doesn't, I'll sue 'em for labeling non-CDs as CDs - in small claims court. Small claims court protects the little guy from having a huge company's big guns brought to bear, but imagine the /. effect applied here - even less than $500 judgements could become costly.
After looking over the article, it seems that this technology just hinders directly copying a CD. What happens if you extract the audio to your hard drive in MP3 or OGG format first, then just burn those tracks to disc? Does this technology still work? Isn't this what a lot of people do anyway, copy the CD to their computers then burn individual tracks from many CDs to make personalized compilations. I know that's what I do frequently. It wouldn't make much sense to just limit CD->CD copying with no thought on audio extraction. Though, it's not that I like either idea in the first place.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
There's a poster below here that makes the comment that "if it ain't on the net, I ain't interested".
Voluntary compliance is the key. Make it so that we want to comply, and stop fighting the consumer drive.
It's been a while since I took Econ, but I will always remember the invisible hand theory. The market will ALWAYS force itself toward equilibrium.
Laws, unions, anything that unnaturally hinders the market breaks equilibrium. Forcing high prices on cds. Suing your customers into submission.
Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally? They're holding onto a cartel-type model and it's just not going to work.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I have yet to see a copy protected CD from any of the labels I usually buy from - as a matter of fact, many of them are making their music available as ultra high qualioty Lame VBR MP3s through eMusic.
More people need to check out the free mp3s at Epitonic and Insound to get a taste of what's available from indie labels - virtually all of it in unprotected formats, and virtually all of it far better than the slop the major labels dump out on Clear Channel. Check out The Streets - "Fit But You Know It" at Insound - catchiest single I've heard for years! Great stuff!
Well, frankly, it can't be done... At least not within the CD. My only guess is that the CD has software that auto-loads, tells a server that the CD has been burned n times and that it now can no longer be burned. If I change my hosts file, EAC is not going to care what the CD is doing. In fact, all "copy protected" CDs I've been able to rip or make copies of for myself using EAC (including this very excellent one:Soulive's Turn It Out Remixed ). Once you rip the WAV files and copy that, the little auto-run software is gone.
That's the problem(?) with DRM. You need to implement it in hardware AND software at the same time for it to be able to "work" (see: DVD Region Codes) and even then it's not really going to work (ibid).
Now TO BE FAIR, this idea has its heart in the right place. I don't think anyone but the most extreme zealots would argue that a person should be able to make 10,000 copies of a CD by another artist. But where is that number? It's higher than "just a couple" but probably around "several".
Or, this could be a way to make DRM seem friendly and logical, have everyone implement it, then change it so it's what we all know it's going to turn out to be: crippling and crippled.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Seriously...
No matter what they do, they can not take serious action without breaking compatibility with the millions of cd players already out there.
It has to be completely voluntary. I'm sure we all know how that will work.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Its so simple! Add a SIN tax! I think this has worked to curb smoking and drinking, right?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I mean really, think about it. The only storage mechanism they have available is the local hard drive or the CD itself. Well, the CD itself would only work as a method IF the CD is actually in the burner. I sure don't use my burner READ the CD I am making a copy of, it goes into a DVD-ROM, hense no write laser. That leaves the hard drive, and unless they lockdown the CD to only be used on that 1 computer (which would actually mean it is no longer a CD), you could just:
a) delete the storage file with the current data causing it to believe the CD was never copied before
b) use a different computer
c) wipe your hard drive
d) use linux
e) use BSD
f) make an iso image of the CD and transfer that across the net...
This does nothing at all to stop actuall pirates (as can be proven by letter "f" in the above options). How long do you think it will take our current firmware hackers to do a diff on the updates and remove any "protection" from a fireware, especially in this day when people already have dual layer DVD burner firmware for DVD burners which the companies are not releasing the firmware for 6 months in order to get people to buy their $200 dual layer burner instead of their $80 single layer burner which has the same hardware...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I can name four fundamental changes to their model which will stop most piracy overnight.
Of course, none of the above will ever happen. It stopped being about the money a long time ago. Now its about control - control over culture. Any of the above changes would reduce their control, and effectively eliminate their ability to dictate who becomes a "phenomenon" and who is relegated to back-shelf status.
http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphab etic.cfm?LETTER=I
:)
Adam Smith. I nearly forgot his ever-so-generic name.
Excellent scholar.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Wow, the record industry tries to hinder CD burning?! Stop the presses! Better add that to the list.
meanwhile, at the secret RIAA underground HQ:
Let's see,
shift key defeat...check!
whatever keypress bypasses this method...check!
ah, only ~102 to go and victory is ours, mwa ha ha
So this stops the casual copier. Big whoop. What about the fact that they lose a significant amount of money to pirates that mass-produce it? Buy a 500$ CD-Copier, and it'll include the copy protection in the copy. They'll still lose the money on that CD. Not to mention that for the casual copier, they'll just grab the mp3s off the net.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It's so encouraging to know that the ever-unexamined "costs of piracy" is still the main bugaboo of the RIAA. Heavens forbid that they look over any of the actual research that shows that "piracy" has no major impact on the business. Saints preserve them from looking over their own books to see that their severe reduction of output over the past few years has been a major element of the decline in sales. Let's pray they never look at the sales figures of the most pirated CDs which tend to increase, not decrease as P2P goes up.
Any other industry with this many virulently clueless individuals in charge would have gone bankrupt years ago.
Who is releasing 2 CD's at once. One is called "Sweat", the other is called "Suit". Get it?
Given that they haven't yet managed to create a CD that is uncopyable, what makes them think they're going to be able to make one that is copyable for a while and then becomes uncopyable? That's a much harder problem.
It'll be interesting to see what the technological approach is. An autoplayed Windows app on the CD would be the simplest route, but even that would be very difficult. It would have to somehow interfere with your CD burning application to store an updated "burn count" on the new CD -- or to prevent burning if the count had reached some threshold. I suppose rather than putting the burn count on the CD they could store the data on the net somewhere... that way they could keep track of how many copies of any particular purchased CD were made. This approach would obviously be trivial to defeat (shift key, for example).
A slightly better way might be to combine an "uncopyable" audio CD (assuming they can find a way to do that that works well) with an extra, compressed and encrypted copy of the audio and an autoplayed Windows app that can burn from this encrypted source. The big challenge here would be to use a standard CD burner to create a playable but not copyable audio CD to prevent next-generation copies, except via the same tool. Managing the burn count would be easy, this way, since it would be their burning software doing the work.
Outside of some sort of software on the CD that attempts to control burning, or a future MS OS that has the DRM built in, I don't see what they can possibly try to do.
Well, I suppose they could create a completely new audio format that is incompatible with CDs but has DRM features built in. Perhaps they could even do a decent job on the "security" (unlike the DVD standard), but then they'd have to figure out how to get consumers to buy it, and all of the equipment needed to play it. Not likely.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The last CD that I ran across that had copy protection on it belonged to a coworker of mine. He wanted to rip it, so I ran a stripe of black whiteboard marker around the outside and erased little bits of it until the whole last (audio) track ripped correctly.
Ironically, I bet that cdda2wav on a *nix box wouldn't have been fooled by the silly data track. But at the time I didn't have a *nix box with a CD reader handy.
All the money they are spending on copy and playback prevention is obviously their justification for the outrageous prices for music CDs. They are just about as expensive as the average DVD at Best Buy!
I haven't purchased a music CD in years and years and I don't plan to while this is going on. I am increasingly firm on this position since I was reminded of the problems of copy (playback) protection used on the latest generation of defective CDs when a friend in Japan bought a Janet Jackson CD and couldn't play it in her car without excessive skipping. I explained to her what the problem is and that she should return the CD for refund and wrote to the CD publisher.
The only reason I use iTunes is the unlimited burning (I know 8/10 per play list). It is time to move on to digital downloads and away from all of this cd key and cd protection nonsense. In many case the protection causes bugs, crashes, and general system instability.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I wonder if the RIAA's 'cost of piracy' numbers fall under any of the new Sarbanes/Oxley rules for Financial Reporting. I would love to see the proof of those numbers.
In God we trust, all others require data.
>> There may be workarounds, but there will also be a fair number of people who will not want to put forth the effort to deal with such workarounds. It is a matter of convenience.
It only takes one person to create a DRM-less digital copy & post it on the latest P2P network... convenience factor negated.
> enough for a car, a vacation home...
IMHO, if you can afford both a car and a vacation home then you can afford to pay full price for multiple CDs. What would be fairer would be a "means-tested" law that says that if you can't afford a car and a vacation home then you can burn a few CDs.
Wouldn't your CD burning software have to support this 'limit copy feature' already? Doesn't most burning software first make an ISO or a BIN of the CD(with encryption) and then burn the EXACT copy of the original CD? So if I'm making an EXACT copy of a product, never changing a bit in the process, how is it going to know I'm making copies?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
The RIAAs attempts to sue the individuals that perpetuate "crimes" (I don't believe in intellectual property) against them are doing themselves (the RIAA) a terrible discredit, and are only fueling contempt and reason to pirate more. Pirates now will likely mass-distribute with the deliberate purpose of causing mass sales-figure-drops in order to annihilate this absurd tactic. The RIAA's angle should be to positively reinforce discouragement of duplication (similar to the way the "truth" campaign commercials do for smoking, which are quite good IMO) People who do not pirate may even take up the task of doing so to lash back at the seemingly oppressive RIAA. They (RIAA) are, in a sense, trying to put out the fire with kerosene.
thehomeland(.org)
HAHA hahAHAHAHAA oh oh please HAHAH AHAHh ahhahahahaha i cant stop please please hahahaha hhahahaha i cant hhhahhah ahahaha i cant hahahahha breeethhe hahahahhhahah no hahahha hahahaha ROFL hahaha i cant stop! hahahhahah wait hahah wait hahhahahahaha i wont hahahahahahhah oh hahaha i wont press my shift key then!!! ROFL!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
even if you were only allowed, say, 5 copies, you could create 5*5*5*5*5 = 3125 copies, simply by copying the 1 'master' cd to 5 new cd's, copying each of those to 5 new cd's, etc.
How many people out there are currently doing 3125 copies (with no limits on copying)...?
HAND.
Will it count against my total allowed number of copies if I end up burning a coaster? How about if one gets damaged/destroyed? Do I get my 'burn points' back?
It will NEVER stop being about money. As a great quote from "The Heist" says
Coffee Cart Man: Hey buddy. You forgot your change.
Joe Moore: [Takes the change] Makes the world go round.
Bobby Blane: What's that?
Joe Moore: Gold.
Bobby Blane: Some people say love.
Joe Moore: Well, they're right, too. It is love. Love of gold.
They want control so they can squeeze every last penny out of you that they can. The more control they have the more gold they get! This is why you plan won't work, almost all of it involves being happy just making a lot of money, they aren't happy unless they make ALL the money.
I'm seeing a lot of "if it is digital it can be copied" and "any form of DRM/Copy Protection will be cracked within 10 minutes of release."
While this is true of Apple's DRM scheme, and any copy protection scheme that is even remotely compatible with REDBOOK (i.e. they are severely hobbled by what they can do within the constraints of backwards compatibility with existing players) I have to provide a counter argument:
Nobody has successfuly cracked Microsoft's DRM. Apple's DRM was cracked in mere days, but Microsoft's solution has existed for a couple years now without a successful crack.
Why is that?
jrjBlog
as long as the music comes out and one has a minidisc player or tape recorder or etc. one can make millions of copies of their tripe.
lose != loose
Personally, if record companies dropped the price of CDs to $5, they'd make up the lost revenue in the sheer volume of sales.
I mean, you'd have to one lazy bastard to waste time burning a cd when you could just buy it for 5 bucks.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
These guys just don't get it.
We have plenty of these "copy protected" CDs around in the UK and they are a total joke. My wife's computer completely hangs when you insert one as the CD drive's firmware goes mental. A power cycle is the only fix.
A friend hired a car with a slot loading CD player. He inserted the *original* of a BMG copy protected CD and the CD player hung and wouldn't eject. It took the hire company a couple of hours to get the disc out and now there are now ongoing arguments regards him having to pay them for this.
Using the simple sticky tape approach they are easy to rip and you can then burn a CD that works much better than the original as it doesn't hang your hardware.
Whenever I've encountered one of these horrid things I've make sure that BMG got a few support emails and the clear message that the CD is going back to the store. My wife has learnt not to buy these pseudo-CDs and now I just need to get my relatives clued up.
I did RTFA, but it's not at all clear to me how the CD "knows" whether it's being read to simply play the music, or whether it's being read to make a copy on a burner. How does this scheme work? It's just digital data for Pete's sake. There will be a work-around.
Beyond that, I'm not so concerned about magically somehow being limited to, say, 4 copies, but I am concerned that it will not work right at all and I'll not even be able to play the danged thing at all.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
nt = no text
HAND.
...because I don't really see how you can ever do anything only on the CD side that will prevent copy.
The way I see it, as a last resort, if you unplug you CDROM drive from your soundboard and make a digital playback... well, it's bits going through your memory, you call always record them! Or, taken to the extreme, you can always get the analog output and re-record it: with any decent electronics knowledge and half-decente DAC/ADC, the sound quality isn't noticeably degraded.
is it just me or i remember that when CD's just came out, someone promised that they'd one day be as cheap as cassettes? never happened. they say it's all going into the publicity and the packaging, but somehow it still isn't working out in my head.
Given how little info they need to actually store they could put the software and some flash memory into the burner.
Get a free ipod.
Real men rip their MP3's with analogue input. Digital is for pussies.
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
Give a greater percentage of the money to the artist, and take the costs for the things the label supposedly provides (marketing, production, distribution) out of the label's share instead of the artist's.
I don't see how this has anything to do w/anything. *MOST* people could give two flying shits about the artist and how much money they make. I am one of them. I support free music.
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law.
They disregarded the law before they started treating them like criminals.
Destroy ClearChannel. Utterly. Simply refuse to deal with them. Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience. This will allow people to discover music that they like.
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
The Dead *NEVER* allowed bootlegging. They allowed *NON-COMMERCIAL* recording/trading. That's a huge difference.
TODO: Something witty here...
Because there's no way I'm buying 4 copies of a CD just to play it in RAID 0...
I'm setting the over/under on someone breaking this protection scheme at 200 milliseconds.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
explain to them that most CDs are one-time recordable and that the really bad ones are the RE-recordable ones.
Say something like, "Regular CDs can only record one album once. These other (evil) ones let you record many more, on the same disk! Blank regular CDs have been available for over a decade, but these evil ones are relatively new (which coincides with the recent sales drop). You should get these banned."
Then, by extension, get them to try banning hard drives.
Some might say that this is their way of trying to kill this distribution channel.
The concept of self-limiting propagation of Britney Spears music is highly alluring. I now support this copy protection scheme wholeheartedly.
--- Ban humanity.
I bet that the way the protection works has something to do with the rate at which the data is read from the disk. Maybe there will be a layer on the disk that heats up when the disk is read and if it heats up too fast too many times, it makes the disk unuseable. I'd bet that the workaround would be to rip at slow speeds (listening speed) inorder to not burn the disk out.
...is that I haven't purchased one bit of new music since the Napster debacle. That's four years of me never purchasing any music from the RIAA, and as far as I'm concerned, they will never see another penny of my cash. If I really want a song, I'll buy it at a used music store, and there's a lot of good indie music out there as well.
I also make it a point to pirate as much music as possible; I didn't really go for the file-trading before, but now that the RIAA is so adamant about throwing people in prison and/or hitting them with life-crushing lawsuits, I feel that I have a moral duty to steal their music. I rip CDs from friends, distribute burned CDs with MP3s on them, and have probably copied my 60G MP3 collection onto friends' hard drives at least ten times over. I don't do the file-sharing thing, because it's too easy to track people down, but I now go out of my way to give burned CDs to people who would have bought albums -- I've probably single-handedly cost the RIAA more than $10K in revenue.
Piss off your customers enough and they will fuck you by any means available; more often than not illegal.
But that's what the RIAA would hve you believe IS bootlegging - particularly the "trading".
Their sales would explode.
No incentive to buy the cheap pirated ones.
CD's are cheaper to make than when they were introduced yet they cost the same.
Heck, I'd go out and buy 5 tomorrow. Right now I don't buy any, just once in a blue moon because the whole stinking CD better be friggin great if I'm going to spend $17 for it new.
Screw those market researchers who fixed the price.
I actually don't mind paying for a good CD. But - notice the word 'good'. What is it we can buy/hear on the radio? A lot of bands that make almost the same music - it's quite simply dull. So the first thing to do is: stop mass producing things - how many boy bands, rappers, slutty middle-aged 'teenage girls' etc etc does the world need? Not that many, by the looks of things.
And instead of producing 100 million copies of a CD that is only so-so, why not sell them electronically, or have the record shop burn one when the customer want to buy it?
This would give us many advantages - not least that you would always be able to go and find that rare album only you want, which the shop never has in stock (or is out of print).
"The idea is to let consumers 'make a limited number of copies of their music -- enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example...'"
I don't have a vacation home. I do, however, have a job.
Reminds me of this quote from Jack Valenti: (Discussing the plausibility of anti-piracy advertisements featuring wealthy Hollywood figures) "I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that." (Entertainment Weekly, 18/04/2003) http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Jack_Valenti
As for limited copying, it sounds more and more like we're buying licenses to listen to music, not a shiny 5" disc. Tell you what: if I can buy a CD once and get free replacements for the rest of my life if the disc gets lost, stolen, or damaged in any way, and update it to new formats as they come out (I know a guy who has bought "Dark Side of the Moon" on 8-track, LP, cassette, and twice on CD) then maybe I'll start accepting the idea that you can dictate how I can listen to it. (PS: assuming the hardware is heavily DRM'd and otherwise useless, I'll expect free updates for my car and home systems to handle each new DRM scheme.) Until then, kiss my ass. As long as I'm buying the hardware and the discs, I do with them as I please.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Um, no... the copyright holder does NOT necessarily own the work (e.g. if they decide to sell it to me), they own the sole right to copy (that what copyright means) said work. They do NOT have a right to tell me how/when I can use their work, except in the case of me trying to distributing that work (or work derived from it) -- they do NOT have any rights beyond that.
What I want to know is whether this would cripple my burner for uses unrelated to the labels' IP. Can I still make non-copy-limited disks of my own IP? (Yes, Virginia, "consumers" also create IP.) If I want to give out my work under a "copy as much as you like" agreement, I should be able to do so.
What happens when I make up a disk of individual selections for which I am licensed to do this?
If I do system backups to CD/DVD, do I run afoul of the new scheme at some point?
There are a number of perfectly legitimate and perfectly real uses of the affected hardware which are not addressed by the article, making me fear that they were not considered in developing the technology.
>> I believe they already are! Remember the price hikes the RIAA wanted to impose? (I believe their goal was $2.99 per single (popular singles). If that's not 'embracing' the downloading channel, I don't know what is. Some might say that this is their way of trying to kill this distribution channel.
>> Some might say that this is their way of trying to kill this distribution channel.
Haven't you seen Gladiator? Remember the embrace Lucius gave to his dad, Marcus Aurelius?
Step 1) Overprice product and add a bunch of unwanted DRM.
Step 2) ????
Step 3) No profit!!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
Sorry guys.
.wav file.
cd player output --> sound card input -->
Thanks for playing. Try Again.
There's this thing called "barrier to entry" which is the point at which something is either too complicated or too costly. CDs cost too frigging much. The average CD I'm interested in is over $20 (cdn). That's alot for one CD with 10 songs on it. Damn, Cut that down to $15 and instead of me buying ZERO, I'll buy TWO.
You're absolutely right about my poor wording there, but my point is that they were less paranoid about controlling and protecting all the "bits." Their product was the broader GD experience.
Back in the day when I was into that scene, the energetic collector could amass huge comprehensive collections of the music without spending a dime on CDs and it was actually an amazingly informative scenario that has a lot of similarities with the modern swapping scene. I guess Deadheads were simply more motivated to put up with the technological and temporal inconveniences of tree-trading, snail-mail, cassette tapes (ugh), etc.
The digital revolution has lowered the bar such that fan-community collection and distribution is within everyone's reach.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Then those that see a bargain (a ripped off CD but cheaper than the original) will buy it. If they do so then pirates will start copying it because consumers can't be bothered but will still pay less for it (duh! who wouldn't!) ad infinitum...
Hmmm... as you've already described - there will probably be workarounds... Me... well I love ripping my CDs and seeing as I've almost done the entire collection I can just rip the new ones I buy. It's great - choice... isn't it??? MMMmm...
YAR!!!!
Matthew.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
"enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example..." /. Who here has all of that stuff?
They can't be referring to anyone on
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
"What labels have told us is that their agreements (with the download services) are relatively short term, a year or under, and so they believe that they have the capability to require (the burning tools to be added) next time around," Macrovision Chief Executive Officer Bill Krepick said.
To all those who were bitching about PlayFair, keep this in mind: if you do not strip away the DRM from the music that you bought for your use, some day the music studios will just yank the ability to play your tunes anywhere. This is why projects like PlayFair are so important: they let you control how you use your own media. All this talk about PlayFair leading to piracy is pure bullshit.
If a Beta version of this can be defeated by holding the shift key while the CD loads it isn't really copy protection. This wont stop any of the early 90's CD ripping utilities, and will not affect *nix users either. Unless they can force open source software to cripple itself to further their own agenda, like what happens with the DVD decoders for Xine, this wont stop anyone. A simple (maybe not so simple) editing of the registry, or reinstall of windows will reset the counter I bet. I seriously doubt that they invented self modifying media which can only be copied a limited number of times. Hell, look what happened with playstation 1 games, those things had state of the art copy protection, the masses are only as computer savvy as they need to be, they will learn to break whatever is put out there, like mice finding cheese.
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
They're not trying to prevent any piracy (how do they plan on preventing copies from being copied?), but to strongarm download services into adding DRM. The CD protection industry is a joke. It's clear that they can't produce protected disc that plays in every model of CD player. The digital distributors however are under the thumb of all the labels. If all of the labels say it must be the case that every song available for d/l is DRM'd, then it will be so.
As long as I have at least one legacy, DRM free machine lying about, I will be able to capture that tune digitally. How can you stop me? DRM all soundcards? Outlaw legacy hardware? Legislate mandatory Cochlear implants that only recognized digitally signed and authorized music?
Really, I think this is just another thing the RIAA can point at when they tell Congress to legislate them back into the black. "See, see what those hacking music sharing terrorists did now? They BROKE our encryption! They CIRCUMVENTED our protection mechanisms! Clearly these sophisticated sabateurs can only be stopped if we have laws that can incarcerate them and an enforcement policy that generates enough publicity top scare potential terrorists. Here's a draft to get you started. Yeah, we know the first ammendment is going to be tough to excise, but we thought we'd ask in case Bush got re-elected. Besides, 'better to shoot for the stars' right?"
They're positioning themselves. Ultimately, they hope they can make legally downloaded music more restricted than music from a CD, and they probably can.
They will never be able to beat piracy, and have full proof copy protection. Why? Because there are SO many more of the hackers out there and most of these people are much smarter then the people developing this stuff.
Take for example, why do you think alot of programs come out with updates every couple weeks? Because someone keeps cracking thier code. In todays world, its not hard to reverse engineer someone else's work, or to find a solution to get around someone else well thought plan to stop you from using thier software without paying.
Hackers will ALWAYS win.
I already hardly buy any music -- maybe I'm not their target audience. I probably will buy less if I know it's copy-protected so that, 30 years from now, I've already burned my 5 copies and used them to death, or lost them, and now I can't make anymore. bah.
There are lots of them at really low prices,
RIAA and it's thugs don't get a cut,
there's incredible variety of music,
and you can do what you will with the bits on the disk.
So many complain about the lack of diversity
in RIAA's current crop of "entertainers,"
while there's about a quarter-century of
digital music waiting to be rediscovered.
From an earlier linked article on news.com.com:
"Copy-protected CDs take step forward"
Last modified: September 12, 2003, 11:12 AM PDT
The Hamilton disc includes computer-ready files that can be transferred to a PC, a Macintosh computer and many MP3 players.
Unlike the MP3 files traditionally created from unprotected CDs, these "pre-ripped" files will be wrapped in their own digital rights management protections that keep them from being swapped online and restrict some other actions. Buyers will be able to burn three copies of these songs onto their own CDs, however. The disc will also provide a link that can be shared with other people, who can download copies of the album's music and then listen to it for 10 days.
Comment:
So it appears they are counting on the cd itself being uncopyable (somehow) and including files that a computer can work with, which possibly leaves a fingerprint on your 'puter? to count the copies.
My guess anyhow?
How many of your average monkey do you think knows, or cares for that mattter, how much money britney gets for each CD she sales?
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law. If you're tolerant of them making as many copies as they want to, of them ripping and sending favorite songs to friends, etc. they'll be more inclined to obey just laws. And you'll make more money.
Nobody cares about this either. It's on the news, the people get outraged for a little bit, and within hours they are at CC or BB again buying CDs.
Destroy ClearChannel. Utterly. Simply refuse to deal with them. Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience. This will allow people to discover music that they like.
Before these guys went after howard stern, nobody ever knew they existed. Repeat after me: PEOPLE ARE NOT WELL INFORMED, PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO BE WELL INFORMED, AND EVEN WHEN YOU, AGAINST THEIR WILL, INFORM THEM, THE LATEST BRITNEY CD IS APPARENTLY MORE IMPORTANT THAN FREE SPEECH, else how can you explain that these people are still selling as many CDs as they sell?
By the way, please don't confuse my attitude with that one of an elitist. I am just a pragmatist.
-Facun.Back in the day, when ISA slots were all the rage, there was this neat little add-on board that you could install in your 286 called a Copy-II-PC card. Now this lil card didn't just pop up for no reason... this was THE way to do bit-for-bit copies of floppy disks. Now some software manufacturers tried their hardest to munge up a floppy in just the right way so that the ol' DOS "diskcopy" would fail, but the Copy-II-PC card didn't miss a beat. You had to tell it which bits to copy (even bits that seemed to be borked to DOS but were actually copy protection) and with the right settings from trial and error, you could figure it out with little effort.
I guess my point is that the music industry seems to be repeating history with these copy-protection schemes. The software industry figured out that copy pro didn't work, and that anyone with $139 for a bit-board could make all the copies of the software that they wanted. So instead of spending money on copy protection, now software companies have invested in better ways of providing software (subscription services, online gaming, on-demand downloads, etc.) which people are willing to pay to use.
When is the music industry going to figure this out? It's time to change the way they do business. Don't keep trying to prevent us from copying something that we are entitled to use!! Give us a better way to buy music, create something that generates greater demand, and actually adds some VALUE and then people will begin to stop copying and pay for originals.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Until the day when everything is encrypted from the CD to my speakers, I'm always going to be able to get good quality copies.
And even then, I'll only have to wait a few days before the encryption is hacked.
I burn cds as a backup, sure. I then listen to the backup. I view burned cds as disposable and expendable, If it's scratched, it doesn't matter, I can just burn a new one. I have gone through 20 copies of just one cd as it gets played through and scratched up after a while, and that is the beauty of CDRs, they are so easily replaceable.
OK, this proves the RIAA is completely clueless. So, they are trying to restrict copying by eliminating the ability to copy a copied CD.
In order to copy a CD in the first place, you have to rip the tracks (to your hard drive), right? So, once you've done that, you can burn as many as you like. There is no technology that could restrict that...well maybe a Windows upgrade.
Once you have the tracks on your hard drive, you could also create a data disc, or an MP3 disc and share that with your friends, again, without the possibility of restriction.
The fact remains that their industry has made scads of money, producing and promoting a lot of mediocre music, and they feel like *they're* the ones being ripped off. Which is the ultimate irony...
*MOST* people could give two flying shits about the artist and how much money they make. I am one of them. I support free music.
Wow.
Most people *I* talk to have the exact opposite opinion. They feel ripped off not because the artist is getting rich off of CD sales, but because the middle-men are taking the majority of the cash. In fact, most people *I* talk to would rather download a complete album from $P2P_APP and send the artist $5 directly via mail.
But hey, if you feel that the artists don't deserve any money, that's certainly your right to think that way. I like free music too, but I certainly don't *expect* artists to do it with absolutely no financial incentive.
I have a SICK collection of CDs....I started buying CDs back when there was more QUALITY music than there is now. As a result, I have more OLD CDs than NEW CDs. (Everything that comes out today is the same as every other band, with a handful of notably unique artists like Nora Jones, etc...).
.02
So here's my point....I have a large colletion of CDs, and I like to do a lot of outdoor sports. So, I carry my CDs around in one of those large BINDERS. This comes with me in the car, camping, etc...
One summer, I brought my CDs to the beach, and sand got in the binder. As anyone can imagine, 3/4's of my collection in the binder got scratched beyond use.
Since then, I've learned my lesson, and I copy my CDs and use the backup CDs to carry around. When they get scratched, I re-copy them, and put them back in the binder. Heck, for $30 for 50 blank CDs, it's a lucrative way to guarantee the usability of my collection.
But now, with this article, they're saying that I should only be able to make X number of copies...meaning that after I've screwed up my CDs say, 15-20 times, I have to buy it again, or take the original with me. How is that fair? Seriously folks, this is a real life example of how this could hinder someone. I REALLY do this. What is their answer going to be, "be more careful with your CDs?"
The only way this is going to ever get fixed is to have the artists have a LARGE revolution and stop using these companies to markey their materials. As simple of a solution as that is, there are so many facets involved to make it a reailty that....it probably will never happen. Especially since the artists that proliferate these schemes are multi-BILLION-dollar (Dr. Evil pinky to the lip) contract holders.
Anyway, thought everyone would like to see a real example of how copying works for me, and what it helps me be able to do. These limitations serve nobody. There will always be software that can RIP tracks, and once ripped, they will always be able to be burned again and again, so they really should just give up.
One word of advice: Don't get rid of your old programs that perform RIPPING. They don't have DMCA/copyright protection/DRM built into them yet, and will continue to work into the future. They might be slower, they might not be as pretty, and they might not have burning capabilities built RIGHT INTO THEM, but they will continue to work. KEEP YOUR OLD PROGRAMS ON ARCHIVE. My
If the RIAA and company didnt waste so much money on trying to find ways of preventing fair use, that in the end will be futile; ( As long as HiFi systems have line out or optical out) then maybe they could instead sell CD's at a reduced price to encourage sales. From a consumers point of view, i'd like to know who's going to pay for the additional cost of these DRM protected CDs, because it sure as hell isnt going to be me.
nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Fucking people. You buy the cd with your money, the cd therefore becomes yours! You can do whatever you want with it. Why are they trying to change that? They are changing that from "The cd is yours" to "The cd is yours until you burn X number of times, then all your cd's are belong to us!"
Obviously there will always be an alternative way to get a cd copied and RIAA must really dig hard to find a way to do such a thing (and I doubt they will). There are also those other burning tools which claim that they can help make perfect images (Alcohol 110% which works almost perfectly). How would RIAA stop companies who just want people to make backups no matter what? Sometimes cd protections are FAR TOO ANNOYING. For example (maybe a bit off topic but same kind of frustration towards these protectionn)
I hate putting my BF1942 cd everytime (turn and turn babyyyyyyyy) so I wanted to mount an image to make the process go faster. Result? Every program I try ends up freezing/crashing. Thanks to EAGame's protection, I have to be annoyed taking in/out my cd. Which good shooter nowadays even requirs you to put a cd! (quake 2, quake 3, ut, ut 2003/2004, hl/cs, cod, moh give you ability to play online without cd)
Bottom line is, RIAA and other money digging music industry has to find a better way to protect their music. Something that might not affect the people who want to do these things legit.
Personally, I think all this stuff they do it just fantastic. It allows the technically inclined to have something to do with their time, and something to hone their skills on, along with proving the point that there is NOTHING they can do to stop people who don't want to pay for music/movies/software/whatever.
At the entrance to the bank you will find a Collar device. Please put this collar on before robbing the bank. This will make it easier and safer for security personell to incapacitate you while you are committing your crime, or track you should you get away.
Thank you for your cooperation.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
They don't need to know.
When dealing with one huge entity like ClearChannel, the musical interests of said sheep become homoginized. The revenue of a single album becomes the focus of a record company for weeks at a time. If the diversity of popular music were increased it could reduce piracy. When a track becomes popular in one locality it would be less available on file sharing services as a song that becomes a more universal hit, since less people would be interested in it. As an added benefit, if an album does become widely availble in pirated form it wouldn't be such a huge hit to their main revenue stream, as they'd have other acts and other albums to fall back on.
I am sick and tired of seeing things like that. Where is the real piracy?
I am currently in a country right in a center of South America. It's been impossible to find a real DVD. CDs are hard to find but it's possible.
You can find a reseller of pirate material every 10 meters in the street. Students in schools sell copies of duplicated material to pay for their studies, or to make parties.
E.g. Troya sells for under a $.
Here nobody buy original content. So I maybe am a pirate because at home I have some copies of CDs I didn't buy. But it's not many and I don't even use use them that often. The CDs I like, I have original versions of them. I have my share of paid CDs (over 200). Does that make me the bad guy? Not sure when you see what's happening in 90% of the world.
Yes I see the argument of those saying: but you have the money to buy the CDs. People there don't have it. I will answer to that that they have sufficient money to get as drunk as us, to buy themselves a CD player, a DVD player or a VCD player.
I don't even have a real DVD/VCD player at home, appart from my computer's drive.
I think all the piracy talk is bullsh!tt.
They cannot change the mentality there, but can send us to jail or pay heavy fines if we break the law once.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
Ok, the RIAA is having a flaming hissy fit these days, but exactly how do they plan to make something like this work? Are they going to insist on "blessed" computers or will they try to encode a copy protector on the cd its self? Pretty much, any way they do this there is a very simple work around - play it on any piece of hardware and then just record the sound on your computer. I mean, how are they going to block that? Will they lobby to outlaw 1/8" headphone jacks? Good grief. The RIAA is just nuts.
Most people *I* talk to have the exact opposite opinion.
You aren't talking to a real cross-section of the world. Stop hanging around with people that have a clue and start talking to people that don't care about artists, conglomorates, cartels, ClearChannel, music that isn't Top40, etc.
Then it will all make sense.
Ha!
;)
Haha!
Wahahahahahaha!!!
Idiots.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
The idea is to let consumers 'make a limited number of copies of their music -- enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example -- without allowing for uncontrolled duplication.'
i mean, yeah, the buzzwords have changed, but it sounds exactly the same as all this revolution rubbish some years ago.
but what these morons don't get: as long as a cd player actually plays a cd, it can be copied. every soundcard is able to record it's own output stream. the only way this would work is via new devices. oh wait, it won't. i forgot, every stereo has analog output. and every soundcard is also a D/A.
nay, morons everywhere. they're way of thinking reminds me of something...ah yes, they think like machines.
beer as in "free beer"
No matter what they do, people will always come up with a simple solution around a problem such as this.
/. article some time ago along these lines had a few rather interesting solutions around these DRM problems. I liked the simplist solution. Someone plugged in the line out on their CD walkman to the line in on their computer.
:-)
For example, a
No more DRM problem. Simple
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
When did DVDs get dropped down to 5$
Give a greater percentage of the money to the artist, and take the costs for the things the label supposedly provides (marketing, production, distribution) out of the label's share instead of the artist's.
I don't see how this has anything to do w/anything. *MOST* people could give two flying shits about the artist and how much money they make. I am one of them. I support free music.
I want to buy Eminem's third ferrari.
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law.
They disregarded the law before they started treating them like criminals.
Bah...the AMERICAN law...its legal here.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Destroy ClearChannel...Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience.
Sadly, that wouldn't do much because the small stations you are talking about are almost also controlled by another one of the big companies (Entercom, Saga, ABC, Emmis, etc). The point is, there are very few small and locally owned radio stations anymore, especially if you're talking about a major market and the ones that are belong to the colleges and are up in the 88.1-91.9 part of the FM band, have a few hundred watts, if they're lucky (esp in big markets) and no one listens to them anyway.
Major Market Example: Chicago...NO LOCALLY OWNED COMMERCIAL STATIONS IN THE FM BAND. Go a bit lower to Milwaukee and you see that in the FM band, the only locally owned station belongs to some crackpot preacher guy. Not much chance of music being promoted there, huh?
-A
Never happen, unless they make CDs unplayable or convince everyone to switch to completely digital amplification systems. To play a CD is to convert it to an analog signal. When that happens, all digital protections are gone. A to D conversions will then contain no such coding. The fix is no more difficult than hooking up your CD player to your stereo.
By the way, the above material is a violation of the DMCA. And so is plugging your CD player into your stereo, for the reasons stated. The RIAA and its purchased congresscritters have set a new standard for "stepped on their own dick". As soon as they tangle with a technologically expert attorney and a clued in judge, there will be some red faces and bare asses.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Is there anything out there that isn't "about money"?? More importantly, why shouldn't it be about money?
What? It didn't work for DVDs? I've bought a lot more DVDs than CDs, just because I felt like I was getting more for my money. And it was mostly because the DVDs were cheaper than the CDs I wanted.
How about this as a model for the music store?
/. post constitutes prior art?
One cost the RIAA complains about, that is legitimate, is the cost of distributing the recordings of CDs that turn out to be poor sellers.
Most music stores have a means to sample their catalog today, from small gizmos. That implies some form of readily accessable electronic storage. Now imagine that the record store of the future stocks only high-demand CDs, and the rest of the stock is stored, perhaps even on a cache basis. The store also has a (more expensive than consumer) machine that can burn CDs, apply high-quality artwork, print labels, and the like.
Want a high-demand CD? Pick it up, pay, and walk out with it.
Want a more garden-variety CD? Find it in the catalog, listen to a sample if you wish, and order it. (deposit optional part of the business model) Browse for 5 or 10 minutes, or go to another store. Come back, pay, and take it home.
Want something obscure, like the namesake of "It's a Beautiful Day"? Just like the garden-variety CD, except it may take a little longer to get the full contents into the cache from a remote server.
Oops, I should have patented this Business Method.
Wonder if a
IMHO something this simply thought-up should NOT be patentable. Iff there's some devil in the details that's not easily worked out, THAT may be patentable.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If I buy it, I should get allowed to duplicate it as much as I want. At least for private purposes. I hate the RIAA I hope they die out. That way real music can get created again.
Why anyone argues the 'soft sell' of DRM is beyond me; this is only going to get in the way of fair use and people who have legitimate uses to burn cds - the pirates are going to circumvent it (just like Adobe's currency detector - which was cracked in a week) and the people who will suffer are going to be us, not the guys in the dupe-houses trying to crank out the new Willam Hung CD.
Any time you give the Music Industry an inch, they will take a mile, your wife and kids, your car, house and dog. If you let them dictate fair use to you - you're not going to have *any* fair use.
I'd like to see some statistics -- preferably from an entity NOT controlled by the RIAA -- comparing the projected "losses" due to piracy within the United States versus piracy within Southeast Asia.
If you stop a bunch of high-school kids in the US and Europe, big fugging deal. Put up enough obstacles to fair use, and the Britney-obsessed drones will politely shut up and pay their money.
But there were monstrous cartels of professional pirates in SE Asia before Napster was even an embryonic thought in Shawn Fanning's mind. There are still monstrous cartels of professional pirates there, and there will continue to be monstrous cartels of professional pirates there, no matter what sort of fair-use restrictions the RIAA tries to throw at the problem.
The solution is not a greater impediment to copying. The solution lies in driving the professional pirates out of business. Of course, the RIAA (or the BSA, or the MPAA) doesn't pWn the governments of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and China, so I don't expect they'll ever actually admit this is where the real problem lies, because they can't do anything about it.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Step two, rip to lossless format.
step three, burn to CD.
Wow, some copy protection.
Wait I got anotherone. Step one, run the out of my soundcard to the line in. Or use audiograbber to just grab soundcard output digitally.
Step two, record.
I may get some quality loss, but not even as much as a mp3.
Or wait, couldn't I even make a ISO of the disk and burn it that way instead of track by track?
What happens if I use linux, or a mac?
What happens when I just download the mp3's of someone who already did this and burn them to CD?
The RIAA needs to stop with the nonsense and focus on a digital distrubtion network. I think ITunes has already shown people are willing to pay for quality digital music. Take that model, make more quality music, and make it more profitable.
Anything that can be seen, heard, or felt can be copied. Nothing the industry will do can sucessfully curb duplication of music. The only factor that can cause a change is the people themselves.
Props to GNAA!
If I poke you in the eye, do you quit using tired old comparisons that have no bearing on the subject?
Hey butt-nugget, artists are not poor, mistreated victoms getting ripped off. They fly in their private jets, ride in stretch limos, live in 10,000 square foot beach front mansions, and tour the nation in 40' luxury liners.
The public doesn't feel sorry for them, they want to be like them.
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
What the hell are you talking about. You can get most DVD's now for between $10 to $20, and people are buying a HUGE number of DVD's, with copying issues being only a footnote. Consider how much work goes in to producing a DVD (never mind the movie) vs. producing a CD, and that the prices are generally worse for CD's than movies!
DVD's are showing EXACTLY why reducing prices would work for music!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This has been my idea for a few years now. Music stores need to get asses in the door. Yeah, the internet is nice and all, but people love to shop.
Set up an in-store burning shop. You could use a kiosk to select songs you wanted. Choose from ALL the songs. I mean everything in the record company's dusty library.
Prices:
anything 1 year old or newer: $.50/song
anything 1 to 5 years old: $.25/song
anything 5 years old or older: $.10/song
You can either have an audio CD burned, or have them burned to CDs as MP3s. That's $10 for about 100 old songs. You add artwork, liner notes, etc and it costs a little more. Sell plain-jane sleeves to fancy "limited edition" jewel cases. Whatever. Have pre-made lists of songs for purchase: "employees hitlists", "top 100 songs of the 80's", "top 20 songs of every decade". Offer a free song for every 50 you buy. Something, anything creative.
Now you could have a website that people could order from, but the key here is to get people into the store. Get them in there, let them browse around while their CDs are being burned. Sell merchandise, movies, etc. Sell pre-loaded MP3 players or USB keyfobs. DVDs full of MP3s! Get people interested in music again! Make it so filesharing online isn't worth the hassle.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
All the good music is already out. I believe most decent music stopped around 1994.
They can copy-restrict Britney Spears all they want.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
These CD's had to sell for around $7 to $8, not including S&H, to cover expenses. The software engineers and the smart people required to run such an operation had to be paid :-)
MP3.com sold, at peak, around 1200 D.A.M. CD's per day of Independent Artist content. Perhaps major label stuff would be a lot more popular, but I'm not sure that an increased demand would result in lower prices. While the CD and tray cover production was well automated, the picking and packing and shipping are people intensive processes.
Now TO BE FAIR, this idea has its heart in the right place. I don't think anyone but the most extreme zealots would argue that a person should be able to make 10,000 copies of a CD by another artist. But where is that number? It's higher than "just a couple" but probably around "several"
So what is the magic number that should be allowed?
I used to have this car CD player that would scratch a CD about once a week - so I would burn copies, and about every week I'd have to replace ones I liked. I'm pretty sure any arbitrary limitation would have stopped me from making copies long before I wanted to keep listening to the CD.
No limit is acceptable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I made this comment once before, but I think it is worth repeating. As soon as you listen to music, you have impinged on the copyright because you can remember the music; your brain has essentially stored this information.
.wav from that input, and encode that .wav as ogg/mp3. Then burn or share to your heart's content. It requires a .wav editor and a wav->mp3 encoder, but windows has a .wav editor built in, I think, and you can find Linux ones on sourceforge easily enough. and oggenc comes with most major distros (am I right), and I'm sure you can get a Windows executable mp3 or ogg encoder easily off the Internet too.
.ogg file that you yourself encoded, and it won't have any identifying hashmarks, watermarks, or other system for the RIAA to track it after they hacked you for using P2P.
Anyway, my somewhat-related point is to say that the easiest, most efficient, and undefeatable workaround is to simply play the "copy-protected" CD in your discman with a 2-ended 1/8th stereo cable running from the headset jack into the "Line In" port on your computer's sound card, record a
Unless they start encrypting how music sounds (thereby defeating the purpose of selling said music), you will always be able to copy music in this fashion. Will everyone go to the trouble? No. But I tell you that this beats buying a CD so god damn copy protected that you can't play it on your computer. Copy it to a
PS - you can copy music off the radio this way too, provided you are quick with the "record" button.
Mitch Bainwol has to come to your house and listen to CD's with you.
http://cassettefetish.com
'nuff said.
Coffee Cart Man: ...
..
.. more ... coffee ... *bleugh!*"
First I thought that was 'Coffee Cartman'
"No
Delphis
And it is a fact that CD sales continued to climb, despite illegal price fixing on the part of the record labels, until the demise of Napster.
Correlation is not causation.
File-sharing is even more widespread than it ever was during the Napster days, and more people have broadband. Just because Napster went away and then CD sales went down doesn't mean anything. In fact, it could be argued that causing Napster to go away made pirates create even more P2P apps, and so even more people were pirating artists' work than ever before.
Oh, I forgot, we're scapegoating the RIAA here and ignoring the artists in this equation. You know, those nameless people who actually rented the studio and spent a couple of months recording the music.
Do you realize that for all the moaning and complaining the labels do, they are still making profits that would make any small business jealous? Never ever forget, that this stopped being about money a long time ago. Money is a secondary issue now. What these companies are really after now is control.
Yeah--control over their own copyrighted materials. How dare they. The nerve!
The most interesting bit is that in the grand scheme of things, speaking from an economic theory standpoint, it doesn't matter if consumers share music with 1 or 10 or 100 people. Most consumers will share less than 2% of their CDs with less than 5 people, and a portion of that sharing will generate new sales. So it all becomes a wash in the end.
Ah, made-up Slashdot statistic! Let's just pull numbers out of our asses and not cite a source.
The time, money, and energy the labels are spending trying to shut down music sharing is a utter waste, and won't even pay for itself in the end.
So many people are pirating the fuck out of everything, what's the big deal if the companies dare make attempts to prevent the violation of their rights that's going on? Or do copyright holder rights only matter when it's a situation of the GPL being violated? That seems to be the only time people around here care about being ethical.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Why not a copy protection scheme that gives you unlimited copies, but a) requires the master, and b) can only make one copy at a time (preventing the use of multi-burner arrays)?
Joe Schmo can make copies for his car/boat/pc/mp3 player, but none of those can be distributed any further. And the large pirate groups can't just crank out unlimited copies from the master, not without investing huge amounts of time, limiting their profits.
(the really professional groups use presses, stamping their own CDs, not burning them. As far as I know, there's no protection against that tactic, once you have the physical media)
You can use your purchased CD or d/l tracks as many times as you want. But you're prevented from widespread distribution to others. And hopefully, it's a transparent-to-the-user scheme.
I could go for something like that
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
The recording industry should put more muscle behind SACD if they want a format that will present some problems in making lossless copies. There is just too much legacy CD audio equipment out there that has to be supported for any CD based protection scheme to work.
The SACD encoding is inherently incompatable with all current PCM based CD audio systems so there is at least some challenge presented in getting the digital data off the disc in a usable format. It is possible to transcode SACD to PCM format with minimal loss. To the best of my knowledge, though, there is no consumer equipment that can make a digital copy from SACD source.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Basically,your list is a bunch of things that you want without any logical flow. Where's the proof? Why do you think that destroying clear channel will make them more money? Why do you think they treat their customers like criminals (haven't been handcuffed, searched, threatened, chained to the wall, or even interigated, what exactly do they do to treat their customers like criminals?).
Control more important than money? Please, wake up. Do you think they care who is popular and who is not (as long as its one of their artists)? All they, like any other buisness, want to do is make money. Do you think they haven't done market surveys and analysis to determine the price point of their product to produce maximum revenue? You give them far too little credit. They are not stupid.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It's sounds like a good idea, but customized indivdual products cost considerably more than mass produced items that can benefit from automation.
Shipping and handling per cd is $2-4 by itself
Sounds like you need to join a cd club, get 15 free and buy 1 get 1,2,3 even 4 or 5 free sometimes. Buy more get points for more free. Sign up a friend get 5 cd's free and they can start the whole process all over again.
Or buy used.
1 Day?
...and they had a very nice auction of industrial strength CD burners when they liquidated a couple of years ago. It wasn't a winning way to sell music.
Their management at least realized that they were fighting a losing battle and shut the doors before they ran out of cash (the cash was returned to investors).
Of course I don't speak for my employer. My employer doesn't speak for me, either.
Let them spend their money endlessly to try and create the perfect dictatorship system... I mean copy protection.
Consider this, their punishment for their assault on their consumers. They'll spend so much money trying and trying only to find out what every intelligent person has known since the dawn of man...
There's no such thing as an absolute system of control.
If it copies once, thats enough to copy it to a cdr, and then copy it to infinity. If it plays, you can encode it into a mp3 and copy it accross teh globe over night.
THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO. I'm sorry... It would do them far better to just work on better buisness models... But GREED will be their undoing.
So be it. I simply do not care.
I've been arguing this for years.
When the MPAA first released titles on DVD, they were in the $20 range. They lowered prices when releases of older movies came out on DVD, many to the $10-$12 range, and low and behold, people buy them. They buy them in droves! I know people who bought their first DVD player a year ago who are already up to eighty titles, and they don't even watch movies nightly.
As much as I hate region coding, their prosecution of Jon Johansen, CSS, and the like, I can justify buying their products because I still get my money's worth most of the time. The $5.99 bargain bins at Walmart, Target, and many of the movie/media stores only help the matter. They understood that the prices they charged for Laserdiscs ($30-$70 depending on the title and the packaging method) just was not going to work if they wanted widespread adoption.
I know that it's not entirely fair to compare DVDs and CDs, because of the size of the content of most DVDs, but they're still little flat discs that are packaged and sold similarly. While CDs take up less space, if they were cheap enough they'd have a hard time keeping them on the shelves. Everyone would have that new hot CD because they could justify spending a little more than a meal on it, versus a week's food budget.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
It didn't work for DVDs? Sure worked on me. I've bought DOZENS of movies on DVD in the last couple years, mostly because they're so cheap. I haven't bought a music CD in two or three years, mostly because they cost too much for what you get. This is all mere anecdotal evidence, sure, but when I go to the supermarket I still see racks of older movies on DVD for as low as $4.99. If selling DVDs cheap isn't working, they've sure been letting it not work for a long time!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It just seems futile, the record companies could care less how much we complain. Regardless of the consumer's feelings, they will continue to spend millions of dollars creating these wacky DRM schemes that some teenage Norweedishacanopean will crack on his 486 in the time it takes to down a can of Mountain Dew.
Let's stop complaining about it because seriously, let's face it, we'll always be able to make as many copies of our CDs and DVDs as we want.
Too bad it can't carry the CD logo if they add copy protection like that. Won't be following the spec.
Once again the Recording Industry has introduced technology that will limit the number of times a CD is purchased.
or does it sound like the "recording industry" spends an inordinate amount of time and money on unworkable copy protection schemes as compared to the effort they put in on actually releasing desirable recordings?
Are you kidding about the DVD part? For $5 each, I've had 5 DVD's in my hands before I knew what I was doing. They don't even have to be that good and I'll still buy 5 before I think stop to think about what I'm buying.
So, when's lunch?
When I buy a CD, I really don't give a rat's ass about the stupid shiny disk -- it's just the "box" that the music comes in.
I simply want to be able to listen to the music, and once I've put my good money down, I demand to do that whenever and wherever I damn please. That means I want to play it on my MP3 player when I'm running, in my car when I'm driving, or on my computer when I'm working. Should I choose to, I want to be able to sample it for use in my cell phone's ringtone, or mix it into the soundtrack of my family's home videos.
I'm sick of the recording industry assuming that I'm a criminal, and disgusted by their repeated attempts to limit my fair use of a commodity after I've already paid for it.
Aren't they?
1) Play CD into cassette recorder.
2) Sample cassette playback.
3) Burn 1,000,000 CDs.
If MP3s are acceptable quality, then a single conversion to analog and back is also acceptable.
write multiple times..... once it's in MP3, Ogg or Wav format there really isn' much that can be done to prevent copies from being made.
-Cnik
DRM could be made to work. M$ learned a lot from the XBox fiasco, the industry could put (digital) piracy out of the reach of almost everyone. But they'd need to compromise our hardware. Now suppose they could force every piece of new hardware to be DRM compliant, and that it was strong DRM. It will take many years after that for all the older tech to wear out, and if they don't want to lose their market, they still have to be able to sell to people with old kit during that period. Eventually though, kit like we have now will wear out, and people might forget that their stuff used to be much more useful. At that point, maybe 10 or 20 years from now, when CDs are dead media anyway, the RIAA can sit back and relax. They'd like it sooner, but they can wait.
Lots of CDs sell for $5 or $10. You need to look harder for them, because since they are cheap, less money can be spent on producing and marketing them. Does this make sense to you? Lots of artists get a bigger share of their CD sales. You need to look harder for them, because since more money goes to the artist, less money can be spent on producing and marketing them. Does this make sense to you? The high priced-CDs cost the labels a lot of money to make, and they chage accordingly. If you feel they are too expensive, then go cruise the cutout bin at your local record store. Or buy online from small labels who can't afford distribution because their records are so cheap. A fundemental law of engineering applies here: You can't get something for nothing
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
Song of the piracy apologist:
(1) I don't personally believe in copying CDs illegally-- but I think we should avoid using unkind words like "piracy" to describe those that do -- instead, we should describe it as an "infringement", much like a parking infringement.
(2) I don't believe in the record companies emotively abusing the word "theft," but I do believe in emotively abusing words like "information," "sharing," and "Copyright Enforcement Militia."
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
(4) I believe that piracy is driven by overly long copyright duration, even though most pirated works are recent releases.
(5) I believe that illegitimately downloading music is giving the author "free advertising". I don't buy any of the music I download, of course--but lots of other people probably do.
(6) I believe that ripping off the artists is wrong. The record companies always rip off the artists. Artists support P2P, except the ones that don't (like Metallica), and they don't agree with me, hence they're greedy or their opinion doesn't count or something.
(7) I believe that selling CDs is not a business model, but giving away things for free on the internet is.
(8) I believe that artists should be compensated for their work -- preferably by someone else. I mean, they can sell concert tickets (which someone else can buy) or sell t-shirts (to someone else) or something. As long as someone else subsidises my free ride, I'm coooooool with it.
(9) I believe in capitalism but only support music business models which involve giving away the fruits of ones labor for free.
(10) I believe that copying someone elses music, and redistributing it to my 1,000,000 "best friends" on the internet is sharing. Music is made for sharing. It's my right.
(11) I believe that record companies cracking down on piracy is "greed", but a mob demanding free entertainment is not.
(12) I believe that it's not really "piracy" unless you charge money for it, because, receiving money is wrong, but taking a free ride is fine.
(13) I believe that disallowing copying and redistributing music over Napster is the same as humming my favourite song in public. Because when I hum my favourite song in public, everyone likes it so much that they run home, get out their tape recorders and once they've got a recording of it, they aren't interested in hearing the original any more.
(14) I believe that when illegal behaviour destroys a business, it's "free enterprise at work".
(15) I believe piracy is simply "free advertising." Even though that's what radio is, but with the legal permission of the copyright holder. Basically, what I really want is to be able to choose the songs I want, listen to them whenever I want, but I don't want to have to pay for it. Essentially, I want the whole thing for free with no strings attached.
(16) I believe artists "deserve their money" only in cases in which the RIAA is the bad guy. But in piracy situations, I'm fully justified in ripping them off.
What I find amusing is that the pirates seem unable or unwilling to distinguish between creative activity and brainless copying.
Since a lot of the people here are GPL/OSS advocates: the "OSS way" applied to this domain is to learn how to play an instrument. Or how to sing or whatever. Then get together with a bunch of other people who can also play music, and make some noise.
One of the unfortunate things that has happened to the OSS movement is that a lot of the loudmouth advocates for it don't understand what it's really about. They view it primarily as a means to get free stuff, and then they turn their eyes from the free stuff to the non-free stuff and think to themselves "maybe I'm entitled to get that one for free too". The noble ideals of grass roots participation in the creative
personally, i could give a crap about buying a "single", especially when it doesn't come with b-sides! musicians need to partner w/ a few (already out there) nice OSS projects and package their FULL ALBUMS in various formats (to suit the various needs of listeners) and sell them online, through their own indie ("real" indie, mind you) "label" or partner up w/ genre-based "labels". let the big record companies promote bands. let them promote concerts and events... but let the artists SELL their albums for what they want, to whom they want, with whatever license that they want.
With EAC and the drive I am using, I can rip nearly ANYTHING. The only way they can make it unrippable is to mung the ECC so much that it won't play on anything.
Stupid bastards. They don't think anyone has the right to duplicate anything, AT ALL, unless THEY say so. Which, of course, they'll never do, they don't like people being able to repair heavily scratched CDs with EAC and some time. Hell, I just fixed a CD for a friend of mine.
FC Closer
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I buy DVDs, they're a good value for the price. I generally buy a DVD every week or two. I know I'm not alone in this. The DVD model is working great. I do not see them being hit by piracy the way the music industry is. Sure, I can find the movies, even DVD rips, online, but it's just not worth my time and effort. The DVD is cheaper then the amount of time it would take me to find and download a movie, and the case,etc that come with it make the DVD even more worth the money.
CD's on the other hand, are not worth my money. I don't perceive it to be a good value, so I do not buy them. At 5 bucks, I would see value in it, but I haven't seen a good CD for $5. If I do, I will purchase it, because I see that as worth $5. $10 is pushing it a bit, I don't think there are very many CDs worth $10 these days.
If you want to sell anything, the buyers have to perceive your product as a good value, or else they will not purchase your product. It's that simple, and the music industry has failed in giving me, and many others, the perception of good value.
The movie industry on the other hand, has been successful. They get my money, and I walk away from the transaction happy about my purchase. The Motion Picture Association of America also walks away happy, as they're making money hand over fist selling us a good valued product.
the RIAA should just invent a new music technology where the license can be verified. Then make that technology so cheap that it is cheaper than CD technology. Then get everyone to use it by stop producing CDs and start producing the music on the new technology. They could take a share of the cuts from the technology companies selling the new media players.
Call it CD2 or something, make the disks smaller, like 3.5 inch size, but can store more on them. The music won't play without a valid license that uses encryption. Each CD2 comes with a cd2-key that unlocks the CD2 for copying and is encoded on the CD2 disk. Also if a music file is made from the CD2, the key is encrypted on it as well so it can be tracked. The license is for 6 backup copies, CD2 or MP3 copies, whatever. Software to rip the music off the CD2 won't work as the key is encrypted in with the music and without it, you get garbage.
Online music stores can sell MP3s with the encrypted key inside of it, so CD2's can be burned from the audio file. The buyer gets the audio file and the encryption key.
To make a legacy CD into a CD2, the buyer has to prove proof of ownership to get an encryption key to make the CD2 disk. A receipt, email, or whatever that shows they bought a copy. This would foil the CD and MP3 Pirates.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Ah, the logical fallacy of thinking that because that you don't like today's music, it means nobody else does.
This is Slashdot, where people think The Who is still a relevant band.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music is so crap, why do so many people pirate it? It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe if they would just produce good music." That's not even the issue. Piracy isn't right just because you aren't a member of the MTV demographic anymore. You're implying piracy will go down if they make good music, which begs the question--why are people pirating music they think is bad?
Oh, that's right, it's an irrelevant issue and you're just scapegoating the music industry in order to justify piracy and ignore artist rights. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify pirating an artist's music.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Recording Industry Hopes To Hinder CD Burning
Is that their slogan now?
It's kinda like how McDonald's slogan used to be "Now Hiring"
If the price drops much lower like $5-$10 for CDs and maybe $10- $15 for DVDs everyone will be willing to sell them from their shelves as merchants know for prices like that are within the range of practically all consumers. It would be easier to just grab several disks on the way out of a shop instead of having to head over to the local rental place for ones' entertainment.
Okay, so the rampant piracy has gone to the point where the companies are going to try to implement copy controls in an attempt to curb it.
How much piracy has to go on before people stop so that the record companies stop these last-ditch efforts? I mean, do you really expect them not to try this? It seems to be the only way, along with legal lawsuits, to get people to stop pirating the fuck out of everything.
I know, I know--many of you have constructed entire ideologies to justify violating copyright holder rights. The artists are completely ignored in this equation; it's all about painting the RIAA as evil for, say, suing individual downloaders (which Slashdot told them to do back during the Napster lawsuit!). I saw one moron around here once describe them as a "Copyright Enforcement Militia." Talk about an out-of-touch, loopy mentality.
Absolutely nothing justifies ripping an artist off.
"Sufferin' succotash."
How bout the RIAA add downloading tax to my cable, say $0.50 a month. Then just leave me alone. I buy CD's when the artist has more than 1 song that I like or if its a band I like. And even then I've already downloaded the CD to make sure they have more than one song I like.
The old days of, 'A new band that sounds like ___ so their sales should be like ____' doesn't work anymore.
This is their intent, zero copies.
Then take the original from you too and lease the content to you.
"copies for your car".. suure...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One of the mainstream (Capitol, BMI, Warner, etc.) music industry's favorite mantras, where poor album sales are concerned, is that CD copying and file downloading are largely to blame.
Did it ever occur to these same executives, even ONCE, that the REAL reason their sales are in the crapper might just be because much of today's alleged "music" (and I use the term loosely) is utter crap?
How long has it been since we've heard a band with the raw talent and power of, say, Boston? How long has it been since we've heard a singer who is also a real musician and actually WRITES THEIR OWN WORK? And performs it? Jimmy Buffett, just as one example, is still going strong today doing just that.
The music industry seems to be a lot more interested in "packaging" a voice, and selling it in concert (pardon the pun) with homogenized electronically-produced soundtracks that should be banned by the Geneva Convention, than they do in giving real music talent a chance. Witness shows like "American Idol" as a case in point. All they're doing is rehashing material that was written by others, and focusing on nothing but the voice. Horrid....
I can count the number of CDs I've bought in the last TEN YEARS on the fingers of one hand. Prior to that, in the late 80's and early 90's, I was buying several per month.
It's not because I've lost interest in the medium, nor is it because I'm into downloading MP3's (I'm not -- I literally don't have the time, as I've got enough to do maintaining my day job, side business, and my 'net presence).
No, the real reason I've not been buying many CDs is simply because I'm not finding a whole lot Out There that's worth buying. I blame the mainstream record companies for being more interested in quick sales than in promoting real talent.
GOOD music and REAL talent will sell themselves. The mainstream music labels should be concentrating more on fixing their own (very serious) internal problems than on buying up legislators and getting useless laws put into effect.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Completely off-topic, but I love your sig. Way cool. :)
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
The RIAA can burn in hell for all I care. They are all a bunch of jag-off's that don't have anything better to do with their time.
The original CDs price should be halved, and the blank CD tax should be doubled or tripled.
What are blank CD used for:
- Data Backups
- Program CD backup/piracy
- Music backup/mixes/piracy
Most backups are done, I think, only occasionally. I mean, if a big company needs professional backup solution, they will not use CD-R. Thus, doubling the blank CD taxes would have a quite small impact on people using them, because they don't use tons of them daily.
Wouldn't this make everyone happy?
- Probably more original CD sales
- More revenues to music artists (I guess)
- Copying a CD will no longer flag you as a criminal
perception is reality
If I can download the music and burn it to a CD for only a few cents, why would I buy a CD?
It's cheaper, faster, and more flexible (ie a mix CD).
If the RIAA wasn't suing and shutting people down, most people would burn their own, or have someone burn it for them. There really isn't much added value in an 'official' CD.
The reason they haven't yet is burners weren't widely available, you can't trivially pick up all the songs you want, the average person still has trouble burning stuff to CD, and the threat of legal action.
Take away those problems, and I can't think of a reason to buy it, unless you have some sort of cover art fetish.
I can't imagine the glee he might have felt for being so clever as to chop a compound word in half...
I think most technically savvy people are like this nowadays - I have probably upwards of 500 CD-Rs in my vehicle, and ALL of them are disposable. Someone could bust my window, steal my CD cases, and I'd be more pissed about the broken glass than the CDs.
FC Closer
I was out with a friend the other day, and we stopped by the dollar store to pick up some cheap toys for his kid. While there, I noticed that they had a bin of old software...hey, it's a buck, I thought, so bought a few of them.
Afterward, I showed my friend what I bought and his immediate reaction was "Cool! Can I make a copy of that; my kids would like it." Pointing out that he could get his own CD for about the same price as making one -- and with no fear of making a coaster -- had no impact. He wanted it *now* and it beat remembering that he could get it as cheapy at the store *later*.
Ease of use beats cheap; having to do anything special (such as buying it) is sometimes too much.
That said, I personally would buy CDs on a regular basis if they were $5-10 and not just the garbage of the week pop crap!
That means we don't pay the tax on CD-R anymore?
For me, it isn't even about whether I dislike the music enough to turn me off from copying. I've been turned off from music in general by the artificially-high monopolist prices and the RIAA's efforts to curtail my use of the product I paid for. In fact, I don't even bother scouring the p2p or IRC networks anymore; there's plenty of other forms of entertainment that's worth the time and expense to invest in (consoles, PC upgrades, movies, going out to dinner, etc).
But I also hear you about not being able to afford the music. Regardless of what George W. Bush is trying to tell you in the hopes of getting re-elected, we're still in a recession. And you're not alone if you can't afford to spend $15 on a CD, when there are plenty of other things to spend your money on, be they bills, loans, or other forms of entertainment besides music. My guess is that if the price of music came down to a more reasonable level, and the quality remained as high as it is today, you would see more people willing to buy music, which would probably increase overall revenue. But until the RIAA buys into that idea, nothing will change.
What a free market does is maximize the performance/price point. A perfect market would not stabalize at no profit, because if there was no profit to be made, then the product would not get made.
In a free market there are two ways to increase your profits. 1: increase your sales (this can be done by advertising, lowering your price, making a better product than your competition, etc...) and 2: lower your costs (be more efficient in making your product).
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
Assume that it costs a dollar to press a CD and ship it to your local music store. Say it costs two dollars to produce a custom compact disc and art, and ship it to an individual's home.
Back of the envelope math says that the record company makes fourteen dollars per disc under the first pricing scheme, and two dollars per disc under the second. Will they sell seven times as many discs under the new model? No? Then they're not going to change.
Well, part of the reason they might not sell more is because you're pricing it so low as to be an impulse item. Impulse sales, however, rely on fast and convenient. If a user has to be online, go to the site, select the tracks or album, etc. it no longer becomes a fast, convenient thing. Will they buy more albums? Definitely. They'll practically fly off the shelves I bet. The real money though is in making music an impulse item. Heard that catchy new single? Get the album for $4-5 near the checkout counter. The recent plans to make concert recordings available immediately after the show go right along with this in the same way as buying a cd for $10 off the merch table because you liked the band.
This is already sort of being done with DVDs. Go into almost any Best Buy or other big box electronics retailer and you'll see a rack of $10 DVDs by the checkout just begging you to think about that one movie that you sort of like or haven't seen in a long time. It's not fully there yet because it's not quite as cheap, but it's a step in the right direction.
Obviously I won't be upgrading my current burner and software soon.
Of course, I can check cdrecord for evil nasties, but I still won't be upgrading my burner in the future.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I haven't used a CD since I bought my first MP3 player 3 years ago! I use it in my car, my home, at work, etc. I think the RIAA is worrying about an obsolete problem. They need to join us because they sure as hell won't beat us! "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." Ernest Hemingway
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
About 12 years ago, at the New Music Seminar in NYC (it was more of a trade show than a seminar at that point), I saw a demo of exactly what you're describing: a kiosk that would burn CDs to order. Juke-box interface, custom artwork, etc. It was called iMusic or eKiosk or something suitably bland and forgettable. Not more than six months after I saw that demo these were deployed at a number of Tower Records stores.
It failed miserably.
Part of the problem was that this was the late '80s/early '90s and Moore's Law hadn't caught up with the concept. Expensive hard disks limited the amount of music available. Early CD burning tech led to long waits and unreliable discs that wouldn't play in everyone's CD players. On top of this all, it cost more to rent the floor space in the record store than it did to construct these kiosks.
I also think that the developers of the kiosk overestimated the market for what is essentially a digital "mix tape". Most customers of large record stores (and discount stores like [K-|Wal-]Mart) just want to grab the latest pop sensation from the rack without having to choose artist, song, order, or wait for their disc to be burned.
While I think the kiosk would be more cost-effective were it built with today's tech (or even last year's), due to the greater commoditization of pop music (as compared to 1990), the grab 'n' go factor is even bigger.
Just my $0.02.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
--driver generic-mmc-raw --read-raw --source ATAPI:0,0,0 (etc....)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Your computer will only boot an approved OS which will only run approved software. If you have a computer capable of running linux or other unapproved software, you will be thrown in jail for a long time.
To truly get rid of those obnoxious Britney Spears or N-SYNC cd's, you have to make sure you burn at a temperature of 1000 C for at least 30 minutes so they're completely carbonized. Otherwise the evil will live on, freddy kreuger style, and return as Christina Aguilerica or, *God forbid* another J-LO album.
If I copy the track(s) to my hard drive, and then burn from the stored track, does this mean that the data will degrade on the drive?
I've had this argument before with music people. Any 14-year-old with a soldering iron can figure out ways around hardware restrictions, and software is just code that can be rewritten. Unless there is some way to persuade people that burning is not as good an option (without trying to sue them, thank you, RIAA!), then ways to circumvent the technology will be found.
But what do I know? I still own vinyl LPs and turntables...
I know it's going to be a great day when Mammet is quoted on Slashdot!
...Mammetesque for some)
Here's another great kicker from that movie (though maybe a little too
Mickey Bergman: Everybody needs money. That's why the call it money!
fs
Do you own the actual CD? If so,you can do with it as you choose - including copying.
Or do you own a "license" to use the content on that disc? If this is true, then the content provider should provide me with replacement media when my media is lost or stolen. After all, I do own the "license" for that content.
I would accept copy restrictions if the latter were true. Unfortunately the CD industry wants it both ways. They own the music, you don't own anything - not the disc - and not the content.
The RIAA can go to hell for all I care. I've stopped buying new CDs. I buy only used CDs now.
-ted
Maybe not. While you're trying to keep me from making copies of MY CD's, I'm taking MY CD's and putting them on tape. Copy protection? I can still feed my tape deck into my PC and record it if I really need to. The sound may not be as good, but that is debatable since I'm not a dog and don't hear as well.
Regardless, once DRM is integrated into everything (and I'm betting it will be) it'll be another story: "RIAA researching ways to keep hackers from bypassing DRM. More news at 11".
Whenever you read this sig someone's refrigerator light turns on.
Yes. The point isn't to stop piracy but, rather, to drop CDs into the impulse buy range. Who cares if everyone who buys a CD distributes copies to five hundred of their closest friends if all five hundred of these people are also buying two or three CDs at $5-10 a pop every time they walk into a record store?
Seriously.
/. all the time.
:) Music has a much larger affect on folks than they know or are willing to believe, don't listen to shit, it only screws up your day.
Never heard of it before and I read
I don't watch TV, listen to the radio or read anything printed by the 'Media' in the USA.
(Stopped watching approx 3 years ago)
Could have a lot to do with why I've never heard of it.
My music? I listen to all kinds of music.
FROM EUROPE!!!
No. I haven't bought a CD in years because they're too F'n expensive and I don't want what's offered.
I want music I like. That's it. Not extra songs.
No stupid ass DJ's. No commercials for shit I'm not going to buy anyway.
Just GOOD solid music.
Classical, Old classic rock, Rockabilly, Trance,
Techno.
No. No rap, (can't even stand it in foreign languages) country or shitty hip-hop junk.
Take your 'popular' or 'top-hits' in America and shove them up your ass.
The artists suck and the music is terrible.
I'm not too concerned yet. At some point, someone is going to get tired of dumping research dollars into developing copy protection schemes;
The three demons that don't want to go away are:
1) the specific copy protection scheme doesn't actually work
2) the specific copy protection scheme works, but breaks playback on a whole host of devices
3) the specific copy protection scheme is too easy to circumvent.
the only one i'm afraid of is number (2). Here's the kicker: "easy" is a relative term. As soon as someone comes up with a clever script that completely bypasses, or better yet removes, the built-in copy protection and tosses it out on the web, all the research put into developing a better lock is instantly and completely negated.
Think about it: 6 months and $250,000 of research negated a week later by some 19 year old hacker in russia who reverse engineered the copy protection in his spare time. How many iterations of invest/develop/negate can they go through before throwing in the towel? It certainly speaks to how much money they think they're losing and how much more they think the have to gain.
I'm quite happy that they haven't given up questing for the holy grail yet, because that means less money to prosecute my brethren.
Bypassing any particular form of copy prevention may be supremely difficult, but it is not impossible.
..... and nothing anybody can ever do will ever stop it.
Copy prevention is impossible. Not very, very difficult - it is impossible.
That is not a limitation of present-day technology, it is a limitation of the universe, and is as fundamental as the law of conservation of energy. If something can be listened to, it can be copied.
Any attempt on copy-prevention is a waste of resources. It only takes for one person to "beat" the scheme, and every work it ever used to "protect" is potentially suddenly "unprotected" again. The instant someone defeats a scheme -- possibly even by something as lame as pointing a mic at a speaker and staying very, very quiet -- then can make as many copies as they want
All copy-prevention does is push up the cost -- and occasionally, spoil the audio quality -- of CDs. Ironically, the high cost of CDs is why people copy them in the first place {when did you see anybody photocopying a Harry Potter book one page at a time?} If the ratio (cost of a pre-recorded CD):(cost of blank CD) could be brought down to about 3:1, then there would be little or no "piracy" going on.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's just that you only get to hear about the successful ones. (Which is precisely why they're raking in the profits...)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
They also don't need to know for another reason. With ClearChannel as it is, people simply don't listen to the radio. Why? Because its the same homogenous crap. They can get the stuff they like from the record store for $15 or from a P2P service for free. And since they don't listen to the radio and can't try before they buy... That's a massive incentive to use P2P, right there.
And what the recording industry doesn't seem to realize is that by using these two-bit copy protection schemes, they're making the piracy problem worse.
The people who are most likely to be deterred by these measures are those who have the least to gain by circumventing them: the people who have already purchased the CD. The real pirates have a great deal to gain by breaking the DRM, and they won't be stopped. The worst case scenario for them is making a digital copy from the analog output.
You're pretty much guaranteed to get DRM free copies distributed by actual pirates, so the music will get out there. Except now you've inconvenienced your paying customer, who can no longer burn a CD for his car, or download to his MP3 player. Now your paying customer, who in giving you his money has already indicated his desire to be honest and do the right thing, has an incentive to seek black market sources for the music. "Damn, I can't make a copy if this CD I just bought!" "Haven't you heard of Kazaa? Just download it from there." And he'll do so guilt free because he's already paid for the music. Maybe he didn't know how to get pirated music before, but now he does.
Next time, will he go through the song and dance of fighting the DRM restrictions on the CD, or just click that little icon on his desktop?
I think today I'll go to my boss and propose spending millions of dollars developing a technology that annoys our customers, doesn't effectively protect our IP, does nothing to improve our profit margins and exposes us to legal risk. Let's see how long I keep my job.
This is an excellent point. DVDs loaded with extra features are now, often, cheaper than the soundtrack CD for the same movie. And compared to the DVD content, the CD content's trivial to track down on any P2P service.
So you're charging more for something with less value which the black market can provide more easily. And you expect anyone to buy your product WHY?
Actually, they cost the labels next to nothing to make. Most of the real costs come out of the artist's share - recording, copying, promotion, and distribution. The label's share is almost pure profit.
Why should I have to pay the recording industry
fees for my blank media?
90% of all CD's burned in my household are DATA!!!
The remaining 10% are burned with EUROPEAN music
that doesn't have one fucking thing to do with the RIAA or any other jackoff in America that thinks I OWE them something.
No problem. I'll just start bringing my blanks across the border from Canada from now on.
No, not the pronoun, but a band with the unlikely name of "The Who".
How can people afford to pirate music? I thought the only way to distribute music was on CD, with all its inherent costs. Wait a minute! Is this new method of distribution much much cheaper? It's just a pity that there's no way for the record industry to utilise this new distribution mechanism and pass on their savings to the consumer!
It didn't work for DVDs. It certainly won't work for music.
;-) (which end up about costing what DVD would cost to buy)
Like everyone else has said...why didn't this work? I buy all sorts of DVDs now because they are so cheap. I've started buying new releases too since they are usually on sale and I can avoid giving Blockbuster my rental + late fees
I love them. They are protecting the ability of my former big 5 record excutive's tough job of gossiping all morning and having a "conference" with their mistress in the private conference room only to call out for bottles of water a bit later before they leave at 3:30 everyday for another "meeting." I can see why every penny is sacrid to support these hard workers and their proud ethics. Hat off everyone in the record industry. I just hope that you haven't taken off for the day yet so you can read this.
Yes. My point is that, with ClearChannel gone, the market and airwaves open up again and have room for small, locally-owned stations. Yes, they're going to have a harder time attracting ads than ClearChannel did, but there's no reason they couldn't suppliment that by asking for donations from their listeners... A model that has, strangely enough, worked really well online.
Jockeying CD and DVD discs has gotten to the point of annoying me. Hence why I have a simple remote controlled jukebox/Tivo style system that can play or display anything I want, whenever I want.
Except as a purely academic exercise, why would you want to defeat it? Although not intended that way, they're providing a public service.
But even that is unnecessary since, the gang of 5 has already implemented the only truely undefeatable copy protection scheme - crap content. That's why I haven't bought any of their stuff in years and give my custom to independents. Once consumers catch on to the wealth of vastly superior independently produced music, the gang of 5 will have no copying issues to worry about. They'll have no business either, but - who gives a flyin' monkey?
At the risk of being marked a "troll", I'll tell you what the real reason for lost sales is: the new music being published today is largely crap, and folks aren't buying it.
Once upon a time, I bought a lot of new music each month. Many were albums I heard at a friend's house, while others were bands I was familiar with, and willing to take a chance on. Now, I can't find anything that interests me enough to spend the better part of $20 on something I may have heard only 1 song from. Now, on top of that loss, they expect me to buy CD's where I can't even turn the few songs I do like into MP3's for my portable player?
Sorry, no sale. Get back to me when you have a clue.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
you have it exactly. They COULD have been making money on volume, by selling CDs with music or video for like 2$ retail-and everyone knows they could do it, too, with economies of scale. And they would still make profit. Same with software. A LOT of people wouldn't even bother downloading and copying and burning if they could go into any store they normally go into and pick up a dozen CDs for real cheap. They should also have pick and chose and burn your own kiosks set up, for the same price, pick your tunes or vids from a menu, burn it, check out, split, for cheap. The way they are trying to do it now is a rip off, that's the main deal most people see. I know I never buy new Cds, never, but I probably would have been all along if they were 2 bucks or something. The music guys lost me as a customer a LONG time ago with their ridiculous prices. I would pay an hours pay to go see a live concert, but for a 25 cent copy on a plastic disk? Not happening. Screw 'em, they are going obsolete anyway, although there will be a flurry of pretty strange legislation and schemes they try before their buggy whip pseudo industry finishes it's crash and burn.
As far as I am concerned, they are economic terrorists, using bribe money to get laws passed, and other general goonish behavior. And they have always been that way, too, as far back as I can remember, always using bribes, black mails, pay offs, etc to maintain a lucrative monopoly.
So, I just boycott paid for music in general. I just quit. I listen to it on the radio, maybe there's some advertising during the music shows that will get me to go check out a product, but as for paying for copies-I just "say no". They want to get real on what stuff really coists, get a clue on a real business model, I might reconsider, but so far, everything they do has pushed me further into the "I won't buy it anymore" camp.
I couldn't even stand burning 25 discs to backup my precious porn.
so get a dvd-r, i can fit my entire stash on 8 discs! (and then burn another one every few days...the things that happen when you mix a fat pipe, usenet, and too much free time...)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Remember... People are sheep. AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"But then Apple came through with iTunes and all-of-a-sudden, we've got a new format that is gaining ground while the old stand-by is losing ground"
Let me get this staight...
Apple invented what... downloadable singles? No. DRM? No. Cheaper prices? Not even close. Nice interface? Huh? "nice" DRM. Don't make me laugh.
What new format is that? AAC? No, that's a generic standard. Uh, how about FairPlan. There you go. Apple has FairPlay.
And guess what... the majority of the market can't even use it. Apple is the biggest MP3 player maker, but they don't own a majority of sales.
As to this format's "gaining ground", well compared with a year ago, sure. But compared with CD sales, iTMS is a cute little sideline for the RIAA members. iTMS could go away tonight and it wouldnt' affect the industry one iota.
You overestimate Apple; they've managed to convince you of something that you can't even express logically, but in your mind, Apple has saved the RIAA.
Copy the original then copy the copy ...
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
"No, they DO. I make my living as a "copyright holder" - I am an illustrator and a designer. I sell copyrights on my work to my clients, I have often had people "steal" my work, using it commercially without compensating me..."
You proved him right. You said the magic word... "COMMERCIALLY".
If a magazine publishes your work, they'll pay you for it. If I like the work, I'll rip the page out of the magazine put it in my scanner and copy it, making it my screensaver.
That's okay. You may wish you could get money for it, and if you're clever (probably not), you'll convince me to pay money for it. But the fact remains that I can scan yout picture and use it for personal use without your permission.
That's the way it works. That's the way its *supposed* to work.
1. It is less work for me to download and burn then go to the local CD store, and I live in the city.
2. Longevity, download them again.
3. I did mention cover art as an issue, but I don't care about it.
4. Download the live tracks, download the download. Ticket discounts is a plus, but it likely won't exceed the CD price.
5. Yawn, good vibes I'll buy a ticket to the show.
6. Quality is a plus, but you could always put higher quality online.
7. Supporting the artist, I'll buy a ticket to the show.
8. Legality, if the law wasn't enforced people would think it is okay. Now because of the RIAA they know they can't legally do this.
I only agree with #3 and #8 as being valid reasons. #3 isn't worth $20, #8 is.
So does the RIAA. They 'give' artists up to a buck a cd sold.
Complete bullshit. They make these things called "contracts." Artists willingly sign them.
They take 9 at least for themselves.
They take that much in order to pay:
The studio
The artists having a place to stay
New equipment for the artists to use during recording
The producers
The mixers
The level of hardware used in the studio
The mastering studio they send the music to
The art department
The marketing department
The pressing plant
The distributors
Coverage of expenses on all the thousands of other acts they fund that don't return on their investment
And much, much more
Yet there's rarely bitching about that.
Rarely any bitching? I constantly hear Slashdotter non-artists bitching about it all the time. The only people I hear "rarely bitching" about it are the artists themselves, the ones you claim to be protecting by ripping off. Nobody here knows any artists or has met any or asked them, yet everyone claims to be their guardian angels--somehow accomplished by ripping them off and making sure they don't get paid for their work. I'm sure John Carmack will thank you so much for "protecting" him from the evil publishers when you pirate Doom 3 to make sure those evil execs don't get a share.
Hell, let's pirate everything just to make sure these select unnamed execs don't get a share of money. That'll sure show them--and the artists as well.
You people claiming that 'pirates' are stealing from artists are only partially correct. They're mostly stealing from record company executives.
Uh, if you steal an artist's work, you steal from an artist. The artist is not going to get paid their share. There is no "partially correct" about this. Listen to your own insanity. "Technically I'm not stealing from artists because mostly I'm stealing from the share the execs get!" What a weak argument.
Stealing from record company executives is no less illegal or inethical either. You don't have the right to violate people's copyright just because you're in college and have some naive, anti-capitalist slant. If you don't like the business model, introduce a new one or try to change the system or support only systems you like.
I don't personally think it's ok to steal music from anyone, and I think any artist who gives up 90% of their earnings to some record company exec deserves to get screwed
90% of earnings aren't going to some single record company exec. This is one of those false memes that pirates spread so many times that it magically becomes "truth" in Slashdot posts, presented as evidence of a point. Like I said, a lot of the sales of CDs goes to all the people who make those sales possible, not just the artists. Artists sign their contracts willingly to a record label and distributer who will pay a lot of money to make sure the band is known, heard, and that their CD is available everywhere in stores. I get the impression very, very few of you if any even know how the business works.
but really it isn't the downloaders who are exhibiting 'pirate'-like behavior.
You've got to be kidding me. Pirates aren't acting like pirates? It most certainly is the pirates exhibiting pirate-like behavior. Man, what a spin.
Who cares if the music is good or bad or indifferent? If it's distributed by the major labels, a.k.a. head ripoff practitioners, I don't buy it.
So you pirate it instead? Are you implying it's okay if others do as well?
I buy only from independant artists because they get more of my money. If you want to truly support artists, rather than help some exec buy his second hummer, buy independant.
It's funny you rag on nameless execs so much when it's the artists and their gold toilets, huge mansions, classic car collections, and second hummers I see on MTV Cribs all the time. You want to pa
"Sufferin' succotash."
I agree with you but #3 is built on the premise that pop stars are actually artists who live and breathe the stage and have other venues to explore.
Pop music is about finding a suitable image for your product and marketing it...a live performance is not necessary. How many years was Janet 'singing' before she got all 'excited' about her first tour?
In most walks of life, you have to work your way to a certain position.
You dont become an engineer without going to school, doing assignments, tests to prove your understanding and then internships to learn your craft. No one goes "Hey Joe, wanna build a bridge?"
Same applies to sports. No matter how good you are, you learn your sports though different ages groups and if you are good enough once you reached a certain age, you might play professionaly....but all of them follow certain steps which usually insure that those at the top have the prerequisite training to work in their field.
Popular arts like music and tv/films can create stars with them skipping the growing-learning process. Thats why you can have so many 'models' switch to acting. They would bust their ass if they tried theather and tried to do Strindberg or Wilde but film and tv with its staccato format can be made to suit the 'talents' of Jessica Simpson and other thespians.
The idea that an artist starts off in small clubs, hones his musical talent, singing and writing and stage presence and moves to bigger and bigger venues is totally alien to the pop music industry. The Dead or other bands like Dave Matthews Band, Phish and others have nothing to do with the boy bands and bimbos of the month.
zack
The fact that I can *play* a CD means that I can pipe the output to say oh a file somewhere and use that as a master copy. If I can read the data even once then I can get around the copy protection. Of course they could start making unreadable CDs but I don't think they would sell too well.
I think they are going about this all wrong. People are willing to search, download and play low quality MP3's from the net. They don't care about cover art lyrics or silk screened CD's. Not everyone of course, but the people they are going after. If people want lyrics they go online.
They should just sell generic black and white CD's in a small in paper envelopes. Put them behind the counter so they don't get snatched and charge half price. Like video rentals, you browse the covers, but go to the desk to get the plain product.
They would still make buckets of money at $4 a copy and would save all the production costs of cases, graphics and stuff. Do this along with the current CD's and see how it goes.
Exactly. The labels only pay for production, marketing, etc. if the album doesn't make enough for them to recoup it out of the artist's share. In fact, its pretty common for artists to discover that they aren't being paid all of their owed royalties, only to realize that it will cost them thousands of dollars which they don't have (because they haven't been paid all of the royalties owed to them) to stand a chance of collecting a fraction of the owed amount as a settlement offer from the label (aka: "settle, or you'll go bankrupt before you collect anything from us").
etc.
...or is the headline associated with this Slashdot article essentially meaningless?
"Recording Industry Hopes To Hinder CD Burning" -- that has been true for several years now. Why not give us a headline that refers to some of the new information in the article(s)?
RIAA forgets to pay royalties
RIAA sues consumers but forgets to pay artists
RIAA members forget to pay pension for artists
RIAA redefines online sales to lower royalties to artists
There is a dispute brewing because the RIAA has arbitrarily defined online music sales as an extension of CD/Album sales, which cuts the royalty rates to the artist significantly.
I find the RIAA's crocodile tears about protecting the artists, er, Amusing.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Maybe they're the real artists, making music for the joy of doing so, not for the money.
So, if they are not making music for money, why do you have your panties all tied in a knot because they are not getting money?
So what about the thousands (millions?) of servers currently running some flavor of Unix? Installing Windows on all of them would be incredibly expensive and cost billions.
"even though CDs have dropped in price over the years."
Even though they've stayed the same.
The cost of production has plummeted on CD's, and yet the price goes up.
They're screwing the artists out of royalties, publishing rights, and now even concert revenue and they're still pricing the CD's just as high.
They claim they're losing sales, they claim they're lowering the price, but guess what. The price is still the same.
Me thinks you're a shill.
The RIAA is a much bigger threat to artists than the fans are. The RIAA collects money in the name of the artist, and then they "forget" to pay the artist.
Maybe you're a shill, or maybe you're stupid. Either way, you're irrelevant, and wrong.
They're trying to remember, but they're all very old and they tend to "forget" things.
Just because you can show me a thousand links about how the RIAA "forgets" things, its pretty clear they're running a big business and they can't always get it right.
They're basically like a bid teddy bear; they're misunderstood, they do their best to help the artists, and just because they're careful with their money, and they want to help the artists, you keep talking about artists not getting their money. But you forget that without the RIAA these guys wouldn't have any money.
In reality any money the artists get is a bonus. The RIAA pays the artists. How much did *you* pay the artist? None. You know why? Only the RIAA cares. And so they make mistakes because of their age.
You make it seem like the RIAA members are purposely trying to avoid paying artists unless they get caught. Its crazy. It doesn't happen every time, which is proof of what I'm saying.
What the RIAA dont get and you point out - is that they dont sell music - they sell convenience The record was great - but tough to take with you and scratched easily, the 8 track was easier to carry but sounded like crap, the cassette was easy to take w/ you but inconvenient for individual songs and the CD was easier to carry AND easy to get to the songs and now the most popular is MP# which is the easiest to carry AND get to the tracks. Will people PAY - yes look at i-tunes which still has tons of issues for the consumer better yet look at ALLOFMP#.com which combines CHEAP and easy - for sure you couldnt charge those prices in the US but even at a higher per song cost it would be great to just be able to download the songs I want EASILY and affordably - and for sure the RIAA would make up in volume (Read - 20 Gigs) what they lose in price. And think all theyd save in R&D
Er, I think you must have me mixed up with someone else...
But don't you think that creators of good music should be rewarded somehow? How many people are there who would be creating great music that would please lots of people, but can't because they don't have the time?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I happen to really, really, really like Black Sabbath. Surprising, right? I have this box set of Black Sabbath: The Ozzy Years. Had it in my car's CD changer for twelve years. Now, it was a hard set to find, so I use burnt copies of the CD. In those twelve years, the changer cart has been stolen once, been sat on once, and the discs tend to wear out about every six or eight months. So, yeah, twenty copies are easy to do, if you like one album and don't want to keep on buying it.
That's what I mean, it seems like the DVD makers have figured out a much more resonable price point for movies than CD makers have for music. Especailly now that it's so easy to distribute a song, and take relativley little human effort to produce a song, they really need to drop brices about in half to bring in the maximum number of customers. Right now they are way far down the bell curve of wher ethey could be sales-wise (and even net revenue).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Man, if music CD's were $5 each, I might actually buy some. I bought the Dialated Peoples CD to help out a local music store. 1 good track, that I already had in MP3. Thats what I get for buying music.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
And when I can buy 3 DVDs for $20, why would I bother pirating most stuff?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
> technology that would limit the number of times that a given CD (or copies of that CD) could be burned.
Why would this "hinder" CD-R burning?
I thought that a vast majority of CD-R burning is from MP3 (or similar) file sources.
Since it only takes one CD rip to generate the MP3 file, I don't understand how this could have any significant impact on total CD-R burning.
Let me share a theory with you. It's the same theory I share with one of my best friends who is the head media purchaser for a chain of department stores. He tends to agree :)
When new music file formats really hit mass market the media dinosaurs went apeshit. "They'll steal and rob us blind!" was the common consensus instead of "Interesting, now this is a real challenge, but also a real opportunity!"
Imagine the following scenario:
We (the recording industry) recognize that our distribution model is running into senility (I apologise to the music retail industry, of which I was a part until 1987, but that's just the way it is), we however have an asset. A huge asset, which consists of our catalog. Digital - for good or for bad - happens. Lossy compression is real, sounds good enough and is wanted by the consumer. So: Let's offer it!
Imagine Itunes, just larger. The whole fscking back catalog of every esoteric sound you could have ever wanted. A good lossy (or even lossless) audio format, a buck a song (Euro and US). Say, 8 bucks an album and no half assed digital restrictions throtteling. Like allofmp# (as you call it), but with a more realistic price for the western hemisphere.
The execs would have been bathing in cocaine (gak!) in their stretch limos (yuk!) They wouldn't know how to spend the money pouring in. If the system would have been cheap enough they would have had multiple sales to each enthusiastic customer, since she didn't have the tune along and had the urge to listen to it NOW.
Would there be trading and stealing? Probably, but never that excessive and there would have been a bonus point for the music industry.
Maybe this point of view is naive, but what the hell: They would have the moral high ground. Not the laws on their side (they have that anyway) but the moral authority to whack and wahck hard if there's massive, unauthorized file trading. I for one would support them.
But as it goes in reality (and I switch back to CaptainZapp mode here) they leave their customers no choice then ripping them off. Because they demand from me to pay top $ for a crippled product, which I can get far more convenient and unthrottled from my russian friends.
Sorry for being so long-winded. I guess you hit a nerve.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I'm starting to believe that a part of the reason people pirate is just sheer convenience. People are generally lazy by nature..most of our technology serves to make our lives easier..we can't even vacuum our own homes now..we have robots..and I think that for a lot of people it's just a lot more convenient to click to download a song or album, then click to listen. They don't have to leave the house, deal with the mall crowds, the stupid packaging on cds, or even to hit eject on their pc or player to put the cd in. I don't know about you, but it's also a lot easier for me to categorize and sort my music in digital form than it is to go looking through a book of cds, or a pile of cases, open it up, try not to scratch or fingerprint it, put it in the pc....it's just easier to use plain and simple.
And as for most people who supposedly won't put forth the extra effort to use a workaround, well..try telling that to my 60 year old mother who now cracks her own games...the internet, search engines, and tutorials make this far easier than it used to be.
Price is the biggest factor by far for most people I know when deciding to buy a CD or DVD. It doesn't matter how much you love a group when it costs more for an audio CD than a DVD.
DVD: Hundreds to thousands of support staff, actors, recording, sound, audio, video, foley, and F/X artists with budgets in the millions.
CD: A half dozen schleps in a room for a week or two to record an album with maybe a dozen people supporting the effort.
Yet both are $20-25? The RIAA thinks people are morons, but the only fools are the execs who think people are stupid enough to pay $20-25 for an item whose real cost coverage point is only $2-3, including promotions, advertising, roadies, groupies, and drugs.
Sure I prefer older music, especially blues. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying the occasional spark of talent from current styles. I even like some of it enough to buy it.
Real talent has no age, and plays multiple styles as their career progresses. I just have no more use for the bubblegum stars like Spears than I did for their equivalents when I was in high school. Every generation has it's useless, talentless candy fluff whose major "skill" is looking good enough in front of a camera to be built up into a teen idol for a few years.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
From the article:
> In addition to adding a new layer of copy protection on CDs, SunnComm and Macrovision each say their CD burning limitations could be applied to digital download businesses such as Napster or Apple Computer's iTunes, which do not put any restriction on burned CDs.
So they want to apply more restrictions to the legal services?
Won't that simply drive more people away from the legal services toward P2P?
Most burning is done via MP3-to-CDR copying, which has no limit. One of those two formats, therefore, must be forcibly changed to impose a limit. If the MP3-to-CDR copying isn't addressed, then they're failing to address at least 90% of the "problem" of CDR burning.
"You can only burn this CD 5 times! Problem solved!"
No, it isn't solved. Observe:
Step 1: Put CD into stereo.
Step 2: Plug wire into stereo out
Step 3: Plug other end of wire into recording device input
Step 4: Push record on recording device
Step 5: Push play on stereo
Step 6: Convert new recording into MP3
Step 7: Give bird to mindless content industry spending millions of dollars to copy protect their stuff.
THERE IS ONLY ONE FORM OF COPY PROTECTION THAT WORKS. And it is to make the content inaccessible. If you can view, playback, or otherwise access the content *IN AN WAY*, you can replicate it into any format or media you desire.
The price may be a drop in quality, but anybody with the right equipment can do it. The energy barrier isn't sufficient when you've pissed people off as much as they've pissed us off.
I can't believe the RIAA is wasting time and money on yet another DRM wet dream. We have been down this road before, none of it works against the guy with a computer who is determined to make a copy. The DRM will be cracked within a few weeks. The crack/workaround will be posted on foreign web sites, out of the reach of DMCA. We will all download the crack, and continue to make DRM-free copies (for our own personal use, of course) to our heart's content. How are they going to overcome EAC, Nero, CloneCD, etc......? This is silly.
Dateline Jan 3, 2021:
John Blake today was arrested for humming Britany Spear's "Oops I did it again...again" in public. Standers-by were charged with second-degree music piracy after overhearing the tune. Authorities said that Blake's illegal reproduction of the song violated RIAA authorized laws requiring all music be played through DRM-enforcing players that plug directly into the brain. All involved will be given a copy of the music file and be fined 10x the value as punishment.
The RIAA chairman is quoted as saying, "It's punks like this that make enjoying music hard for the rest of us."
In other news, Kid Rock Jr's latest single, "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" has been declared today's top hit by the RIAA. Enjoy!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
You're right, but there's one thing they understand that this discussion doesn't
They're not just looking at the short term (although ironically they are)... If they limit DRM-free channels, and convince people that controls are necessary and normal, then they're one step closer to pay-per-play pricing models. That removes any possibility for an alternative business model because they're no longer people who find and create music, but they become the defacto distributors.
Right now they distribute through channels they can't control. That means competition, which means no profits (in the economic sense). If they control distribution, which pay-per-play inherantly allows, then they control every use. Fair use is damned, and so is any alternative business model.
This isn't just about losing fair use rights; it's also about destroying legitimate business models at the bequest of a failing one. It has no legitimate legal justification. It's politics and they're winning.
I predict one of the following things will happen.
1. People will throw out CDs and switch to a new media, because of the copyright protection, just like they did for DAT and SCMS.
2. People will override protection. The end.
3. Nothing.
In any case, maybe I don't fully understand it, because if its CD-DA, I can rip it, and if I can rip it, I can burn it unlimited times.
I don't think $10 a CD is too bad either. By saying half, I was thinking something like $7-$10. I also like the new trend of bands inlcuding DVD's, then I feel like I'm really getting something for my money and it does not cost them a lot extra.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i made the decision not to support the american music industry a while ago, and chose to support legal music trading like http://www.furthurnet.com (all the bands agree to it, its all live, modern "Dead tape trading" except with a ton of bands). this satisfied me for a while, but i needed some music that was not part of furthur. such was my problem, didnt want to pay and support the industry, didnt want to steal (even though the artists already have all the money they would get from a disc).
so i found a good local used music shop, yah it sounds lame, but i only buy discs of top quality, they have been buffed, contain all orig packing and books. this is an all win situation (but not free, but not thieving) you support local business, you get your music, you get the orig promo package, you are assured quality, you get a "punch card" (at least i do in burlington, every 10 i get one free), you are recycling - the discs are already in circulation, and best of all you are completely boneing the riaa - no additional profit (some other sucker paid full) and no legal case against you.
since i found this great shop, i dont thing ive bought a new disc of any type (but for another copy of tribes and NWN). i feel better, my wallet feels better (a bit lighter), my cause feels better. hey, is $3 a disc that much? $7-8 if its "new"? the only thing lost is the sense of being robbin hood saving the damsel of music spirit from the clutches of evilcorp.inc; well i guess i still am...(stealing is fun though, wrong, but fun)
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Not Naive at all - 100% correct, the name of the game is convenience - why do people pay for itunes when it is still relatively easy to steal every song offered. No not b/c people are honest - please 50Million people a day were using Napster No not b/c they care about quality rips - S/A/A No not b/c of lawsuits - people still steal cable and sat TV and they've brought many more cases (and easier to prove) over the years Answer - because i-tunes is convenient (and now it is even hip) - for anyone with an Ipod it couldnt be more simple to FIND music and download it, and for that they are willing to pay 99cents. (more we shall see) So why are people still stealing music? Not because they are cheap - people spend $100+ for a concert and $40 for Broadband Answer = Because if you dont have/want an Ipod or you like to listen in your car or off CD - itunes IS NOT convenient, it is more convenient to download raw MP3s and use them as you wish. When(IF) the RIAA ever decides to stop with DRM and all the other crap and sell convenience, they will be overwhelmed with the flow of $$$$ S
Why would I buy CDs and not be able to copy them, when I could download them off the net? Also, I guarantee the first person who buys a CD and decides to burn a copy and can't for whatever reason will sue!
Give it a catchy name like "CD-Spoofer" and you can sell it for $9.99.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
what would prevent one from making multiple copies of a CD already copied from the original?
Sometimes I'm really glad that I have an audio CD player with digital output, and an iRiver H120 with digital input. Any CD that will play in my stereo can be ripped to WAV on the iRiver. Result!
"If consumers want a backup of their favourite album, they should buy another copy" (or something very close - it's from memory).
:( This makes me a criminal, which is stupid - I bought the #^@!ing CDs didn't I?!
In New Zealand, it's illegal to make any unauthorised copies of copyrighted audio works at all. Nobody gets charged for doing it (not for personal use anyway) and the Govt is considering changing the law to allow 'personal transcoding' but of course the recording industry is getting mighty steamed up about it.
So, here it's illegal to legitimately buy a CD and rip the tracks to mp3 or ogg/vorbis or whatever to play on my iHP-120
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
The point I was making is that videos in general eventually found a price point they are at now, where people don't mind buying them. It's true that you might not use a DVD as much as a music CD, but that's only part of the equation for the buyer to help determine how much they are willing to pay. If you actually figure in total time spent in attention to the subject matter many DVD's might come out ahead of CD's, where you would watch a few hours of movies and a few hours of extras, while some CD's you might just listen to a few times, or a few tracks more often.
If the makers of CD's would similarily seek a more comfortable price point then many more people would flock to buy them rather than download stuff all over.
Basically I agree with you that the music industry deserves to die, I just think they could prolong things by drastically lowering prices and create a rush of buyers. Perhaps that's a doomsday strategy they are holding in reserve.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Copy it "Once" to your harddrive, and then you can make infinite duplicates? When will they finally learn that computer files and information can be duplicated forever and ever and ever.
Burn CD 1 from master: 4 burns left on master, 4 burns left on copy.
Burn CD 2 from master: 3 burns left on master, 3 burns left on copy.
Burn CD 3 from master: 2 burns left on master, 2 burns left on copy.
etc.
That is still only going to be (counting on fingers) 14 copies? As opposed to make one copy, make 2 copies, make 4 copies, make 8 copies etc. until you run out of computers to make copies on. In these terms limiting it to 14-25 copies is limiting it, and even limiting it in a reasonable fashion. I'm not shy about making copies of stuff for friends, but I doubt I would make more than 25 copies of the same CD.
It's really all moot, though, because the files are just going to show up on P2P networks and get downloaded and burnt anyway...
Which introduces the irony of people who legally purchased music going out on the p2p networks to download extra copies of something they already work because the DRM doesn't let them play their legally purchased CD in their car or whathaveyou.
Meanwhile, anyone that is going to be doing serious piracy (making thousands of copies of a CD and selling it for profit, rather than making a couple copies for friends.) is going to find a way around any DRM that they could possibly come up with.
As long as you can listen to it, there will always be a way to copy it.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
It's only about money. It's only about increasing profits and not about increasing consumer demand whilst still remaining profitable.
How about this RIAA: if you don't give a shit about us...we don't give a shit about your bottom line.
Like all such security measures, this one contains the same exact problem all the others do - it realies on the end-user application being willing to play along with the scheme, and *that* means only proprietary software will be invited to play, and that means, again, open source software will be automatically deemed 'evil' and to be used only be pirates. (when the real problem was making a security model based on the notion that a good citizen is an ignorant citizen. Writing CD playing software is something that only big companies should be allowed to do, right? People who know how to do it themselves are an irrelevantly tiny part of the marketplace, so who cares if we screw them over, right?)
I am so sick of this crap.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
"Or more invasively, it could write a hidden flag on your PC's hard disk"
That doesn't make sense.
If you stick a CD in your Windows PC, it will (for most people) auto-execute. So provided you don't let it execute its DRM shield, the CD disk cannot be protected in the way they describe.
I rarely say "can't" in the computer field, but this time I say "can't".
Its like the last Sarah McLaughlan album. It tried to execute its copy protection, and the copy protection was a lame 2 session CD, with the first session data, so it didn't look like an audio CD. So I just copied the CD, but told the copy program to ignore the first session. Boom. Instant Audio CD without the protection.
Why does the RIAA think my HD is an appropriate place for their DRM crap?
1) music's been around forever, only in relatively recent history has it been controlled (by people who purchased the rights from artists) and regulated (via copyright). it could again change in the future, if peeps feel strongly enough to help evolve the process :), and precious resources such as disk space and bandwidth are cool with that, as is happy our throbbing, music-lovin members (note to self: isn't sex why p2p happened anyway, it had no real roots in music) /. can see this coming ". the old labels are not dumb at all as perhaps implied by many in "what they should do" comments posted on every music board and blog
2) a while back some very cool things began to evolve such as radio, enabling peeps to passively LEARN what they like. recording technology evolved, vinyl became CDs which were more portable and didn't damage as easily. CDs became, well you know
3) the owners of the music developed and influenced the LEARNing process by instilling play-for-pay, station/venue ownership and such, helping to sell their recordings.
4) being intelligent creatures, the record industry figured out "distribution" controls were also key to making money, as is controlling price
5) copying of physical media (i.e., making mix cassettes of hormone-elevating tunes for prospective girlfriends) was a problem in that it created "illegal" copies of recording however the problem was not as massive as what was to come (*genuflects to Karlheinz Brandenburg*)
6) enter the Internet and a data compression routine. it's becomes easy to make digital mixes (and be a...magnet because you can deliver more easily and widely than casettes
7) the recording industry, rightly so, becomes unnerved - not only because the copying problem has worsened but also because their distribution scheme is jeopardised. by halting the copying they might preserve control over distribution - key btw, because distribution control helps price control (will Apple et al get squeezed into raising retail download prices?) as well as audio-format control: "When the old format has lost enough ground, the industry will drop it as a supported format and we'll be stuck with the new. Everyone on
8) in a perfectly natural reaction the record industry, that is to say the big old labels, band together to fight off a nasty challenge from an environment that suddenly technologically evolved the rug out from under them.
so what does it all mean? who is right?
a) it only takes one bad guy to break the "protection" technology, enabling others to have music for which they would have otherwise had to pay the record labels. given the inability of a technical solution to sustain the record industry's economic motives, they need an alternative
b) since technical doesn't work, try suing (LEARNing) those who threaten by going after uploaders (and downloaders). fear is a great motivator, it works on many, however not all. it only takes one bad guy to enable those who would rather not pay (for whatever reason, from criminal instinct to inability to pay to pathological addicts). given the inability of a judicial system to sustain the record industry's economic motives, they need an alternative
c) alternatives such as reducing retail prices, and whatever else a reasonable person might consider may be pursued by the record industry, it's their business and it's their call. they know the peeps would like lower prices, that's a given. they just don't believe the model. if they deny this option and they are correct and manage to maintain their economy via technical, judicial and psychological methods then they are smart, by definition. they survived.
d) it's easy to forget that the record industry is made up of a small handful of deep-pockets companies who can act in league via the riaa. these companies own copyrights to a lot of music (and like properties). if we stop the clock for a moment and have another look we can see that this is all history. whereas in he past the
is making music worth buying.
latest crap I wouldnt buy in a million years, except for a friend.
but never for myself, I hate most modern music because it all sounds the same, just variants of pop.
the industry is trying to make punk all pop-like now with avril lavigne, all the rock sounds like pop,rap is becoming more like hip-hop pop, etc
we need selection, not something that sounds like someone else. I hear like 5 different songs by 5 different female vocalists, and they all sound like Britney Spears. it's annoying.
The industry needs to remember who its serving. and stop trying to make music conform and kill off all non-conforming music.
Josie and the Pussycats is a great movie to show how the industry thinks. might be exaggerated somewhat, but it gives the general message.
anyways, another major question, What about us who DONT burn music? but burn cd's for backup files, and put linux systems on them, etc?
oh wait, that would be ok because it would benefit microsoft, who's technologies are used by the RIAA.
There are two ways that they could go about controlling the CD burning.
1. They use some software that uses autorun and installs upon the first install of the disc.
Less intrusive, can be bypassed by the windows shift key, and would not have any effect on Open Source OSes like Linux.
2. They encrypt the music and require a plugin to be installed to listen to the music.
Very intrusive, wouldn't be compatible with Open Source OSes or any currently available CD players which would create an uproar of unsatisfied customers.
Either way, the software would only be effective with windows computers and would still be able to be bypassed, either through the windows shift key or some DeDRMS type decryption program. In the en,d, the RIAA will fail.
No, people are The Great Unwashed. Don't belittle the sheep.
I never had the card, but I had a copy of their software program by the same name
That was great!! I am crying from that!
--Joey
Recording Industry Hopes To Hinder CD Burning
That looked like a dupe at first but then I just realized it's the same old RIAA.
If I had my choice I would pay the musicians directly and hence let the musicain pay the record companies. Seems the RIAA faithful fear this as much as CD ripping and burning IMHO.
The RIAA remain purposefully ambigious on just what I pay for when purchasing a CD (licensing vs data on the CD). Likewise they seem to have a distinct problem breaking down just what the dollars they get for the product go for, e.g. recording studio, engineers, press/manufacturing, distribution, musician salaries, etc...
I would prefer to pay the artists directly for the material they provide and let them deal with the media companies in a position of power (or not - many musicians are clueless on subjects related to business while others can be quite savoy). IMHO the costs of producing a quality piece of music that is sufficiantly engineered can be done for much less than the RIAA would have us believe. The musician could bear the cost of the initial production and let the Music Labels do what they are really best at - Advertising and distribution.
Look at it this way. In the world of art (painting, sculpture, etc) most galleries take between 40 to 60% of the cost - pretty much a 50/50% proposition, wherein artist makes the work and the studio provides the venue and access to the patron. Only in the Music industry does the studio take 90% plus of the profits - a very good deal is 5 points on a contract.
The RIAA is running out of avenues to continue to lock in the artists and audience. Between indie labels, online distribution and users creating their own media (aka the CD) the big music labels are losing their grip - I say so be it. I would be much better if the Artists were allow to get the lions share of the monetary harvest since It have yet to see any Record industry exec that was able to create any music that I or others would be interested in hearing.... Let alone pay for!
Wouldnt you just be able to create an iso image and than burn that image as many times as you want? or make a new iso every time your previous ISO image has 1 'copy left'
The Recording Industry hopes to sodomize your grandmother. She politely replies, "No thank you."
click...unauthorized distribution...click...unauthorized distribution...click...Yes, that's what it soulds like...a broken record. Just how many times does it need to pounded into your heads that unauthorized distribution is NOT the issue. It's about stamping out self distribution. By outlawing the tools that make it possible. Here's a little story that just might help you (the editorial you) understand what they're really are trying to do. The pirates who sell copies will continue unabated with their CD stampers that record exact copies, protection and all. It seems that the RIAA is trying to protect their business. How ironic. Other people, much more eloquent than me(I?) have posted on this. Try to look them up. They are indeed insightful.
What?
If the price stays the same, the price has gone down.
If the price goes up, but not too much, its the same.
What do you call it when the price goes down?
www.bmgmusic.com
If you wait for their monthly sales, you can get CD's for just under $8 each, and that includes their ridiculous $3/disc shipping.
So basically after discovering this service, I've started to add to my CD collection for the first time in 5 years.
It is the price. $15 is too much for a CD. Not worth it.
They'll use one of the many and varied methods games use to be "uncopyable" (hah) and then you'll have to load an application on your PC/Mac to burn the DRM'd sound files to another CD.
It breaks down in two areas:
1) There's no way to prevent copying CD's. Particularly Audio CD's, since they have to ultimately be mostly compatible with Redbook. So the copy protection has to work against PC's. A smart copy program like Alcohol (or dozens of others) will have this defeated in less than a week.
2) The RIAA doesn't control the media or the PC, making any kind of DRM on Audio CD's a big target of reverse engineering and likely to be defeated within 4-6 weeks. I'm sure they'll have variable keys, but honestly, people will be more interested in the raw wav files, not the DRM'd crap.
Th isis mostly a way for record companies to piss away money and then brag about it like they did something important.
2)
"I would much rather pay for a harddrive, and a backup harddrive, or some sort of RAID setup, so that my music is always available, digitally."
Sunshine, wow would that work when I listen in my car. Do you I have to take the hard drive? What happens when I want to make a copy for my wife? Or a copy for the kids so they don't @#$ the original? What happens if I drop the hard drive down the stairs.
Or do you think people actually sit around the computer and listen to music?
CD's are around because they're a better deal for consumers. Great sound (not like the iTMS shit), no DRM (not like the iTMS shit), and I can make backup copies to listen to in my car in the living room, at my friends apartment. Not that the iTMS shit.
Start thinking things through for a change.
"lready would probably encode it with some kind of shifting technology that distorts the CD if the format is changed."
Riiight. Do you realize (a) how silly an idea that is (b) how impossible it would be?
Deep Breath here. Think through the implications of what you're saying and why it can't be implemented on CD's.
Nice deep breath. It will help your thought process.
This copy protection assumes the CD will know the difference when it's being copied and being played (by the same laser, no less). Ermm....
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
hear, hear! *wobbles away on cane*
That's a really stupid idea. I mean... as common as this idea is, how can they have not thought of a flaw in it? So they can't copy a CD more than say.. 4 times? Think that's going to stop someone from making 200 copies of it? Hell no. For one, they can make a copy of the copy.. as many times as they want. And again, they can import all the music files to their computer, where they are free to make as many also.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Hopefully this isn't a sign that CD's will go the way of DVD's. There's a company that makes disposable DVD's ( http://video.movies.go.com/ez-d/ ) which expire after 48 hours.
Aw man. The original DivX people are gonna be back for their name any day then.
It's OK. The Project Mayo people will probably get to have 'DivX' back again in a few years (Is there *anything* from Mayo that didn't start out being directly stolen from somewhere else? "It's OK. We re-impleemnted the string 'DivX' from the ground up, so it's all ours now.")
Why not just stop releasing on CD, which is infinitely reproducible with no ill effects? Instead, go back to magnetic tape. Gee, even without copying, they will degrade after a few years (if you use the cheap shit). Hell, even 'honest' users will buy multiple copies!!
Can I patent this business model/process?
Actually, most labels don't even pay for production and marketing now. The cost of reproducing the CD comes out of the artist's share, as does the cost of recording, and much of the cost of marketing. And since most labels only advertise a tiny fraction of their artists...
I'm going to jump the gun a little here and assume that it is at least partly software and that the answer to the rest of my questions is a "no"
Doesn't this make the software a corporate virus. Also, since there is no license agreement, does that mean that you have the right to reverse-engineer, decompile, and otherwise screw around with the software :)?
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Just because you see a copy gives no indication of how many people actually make use of it.
Even if I could download a movie rapidly, it would still be more annoying to burn a downloaded DVD than to just buy a nice double pack in a good package! I don't feel like companies are being overly greedy when I buy (most) DVD's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
because someone is getting payed lots of money promote this kind of (in my view garbage)
in reality how is this even going to work is the cd going to be selfaware as to how many times it can be copied ?
i think that question alone sums up the garbage that goes into this kind of antipiracy marketing.
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
Bush to Iraqi insurgents: please stop bringing it on.
You could in fact argue that this is the whole point of this scheme. Joe Average User now will also break the copy protection mechanism and in the eyes of the industry will be a pirate. This in turn underscores the RIAA's argument for tougher legislation: "See, everybody is ripping us off now, not just a couple of geeks. We need better laws and privacy intrusion without a warrant to save our, errr, millions of jobs in the industry. We have to protect the clones, errr, artists from getting ripped off."
I feel so sig.
In droping the price of the CDs, the profit margin for the end seller will most likely be reduced. This will put the squeeze on independent record sellers, possibly closing them down and leaving you one option: stores packed with RIAA-backed discs.
You may not care, but for those of us who enjoy music that is not blessed by the RIAA, it could close off the only option that we have.
Of course, the independent sellers should probably get on board with this internet thing and do a little innovation on their distribution model. Somebody here suggested burning high quality mix discs on the fly and printing out custom booklets based on the content (and selling for $4-$5). If the independent labels could be brought on board (and agree to a compensation scheme), they could have something serious on their hands.
--Mx
Except now you've inconvenienced your paying customer, who can no longer burn a CD for his car...
and, he has now paid more because he's aslo paid an extra 12 cents or what have you for the r&d and implementation of the protection
no win for anyone
Ask yourself: what is the kind of music I like? What music evokes a lot of response in you, what do I dig? Be selfish. It's your taste, and nobody elses. The biggest hurdle is to find out exactly what you are looking for. Then find bands who do that kind of music. A good resource for starting your hunting is to put your favorite artists to All Music Guide and checking out the artists from the same genre.
You might be surprised how many good artists there are in various small labels and generally outside the "evil media machine". Depends on your taste of music though.
And besides, if you buy quality music that you very much like mainly for listening (because it gives you something personally), and not just some noise engineered for instant consumption, you'll be much happier.
The point is NOT to just buy music, but to find from a store music which gives YOU nice experiences.
I do not moderate.
Silly, but implemented and put on some CDs already (especially in Europe). Look up CDS-100 and CDS-200 encoding (stands for Cactus Data Shield and is now owned by Macrovision).
My understanding is they add "spikes" to the wave at mixed intervals that are supposedly not perceptable when the music is played. When the music is compressed and/or converted into a different format, these spikes join together or are somehow elongated into the audible range and distort the sound.