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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/
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
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...
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
Well good for you. Obviously it is of some interest to you as you felt compelled to post your aversion to the CD format rather than just moving on to the next story as one would expect from someone who doesn't give a fuck about CDs.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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!
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
Oh please, they are unconcerned with how we feel. They are only concerned with how much money they will make
Correct. Just like any other corporation, they are concerned with the Profit and Loss statement as priority #1. If they aren't, they need to be fired. The reason why they don't care how anyone feels is because those same people that hate them continue to purchase the product; so obviously public opinion doesn't make a gnat's ass of a difference. (in their minds)
Right about now, everyone hates the oil companies, but do you think they are going to trip over themselves to lower gas prices so everyone will like them again?
These simple realities are lost on Slashdot.
By the way, it's "fair use" not "free use." The copyright holder still owns the work, not the public. There is a subtle difference, but an important one.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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).
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.
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.
Good feelings = good customers = many purchases.
Bad feelings = bad customers = no purchases.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
>> 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.
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)
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."
AT this moment, they're right. *Most* people don't care enough to circumvent this stuff.
Where they're wrong is thinking that public apathy will last. It won't. Computers are infiltrating more of our lives, and people will always take the time to learn how to do what they want to do.
All this amounts to is an escalation of the battle against consumer technology. Pretty soon the labels are going to have to stop fighting. This is not a war they can win in the long run.
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.
If I can hear it, I can rip it
You raise an interesting point, in that I recently shopped for a high-end audio system.
At the store, I was taken to a listening room with various speaker configurations, to get a feel of the different quality levels of each system.
The salesperson played various music CDs, and I thought I could hear some strange background noise, and the salesperson agreed. We checked with a more knowledgeable guy at the store, and it came down to the actual recording quality of the CD.
The audio system was actually exposing the shoddy standards used at the recording studio!
Now, if the RIAA starts implementing methods that further degrade the audio recording, the way Macrovision introduces crap on a tv screen if you feed the signal through something between the TV and the playback device, the audiophiles will howl!
Some might say that this is their way of trying to kill this distribution channel.
yeah, notice how nobody's using Microsoft DRMed files either?
I mean, you'd have to be a moron to rip your CDs as WMA files.
there's no place like ~
But that's what the RIAA would hve you believe IS bootlegging - particularly the "trading".
"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.
It's likely that they're going to try to limit the number of copies by screwing with the disc in some way that degrades the bitstream to the point that by the sixth time you copy it the disc is so badly damaged it is unusable. That way you won't get 5 copies of the fifth copy. Either way, you can still make more copies than anybody should need, although I bet the later copies will be very fragile (fail easily when scratched for instance) and will be difficult to play correctly.
I read the internet for the articles.
"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.
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.
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.
How will a CD know the difference between being read for replay and being read for copy?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
*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
That depends if the copy protection gets transferred to the new discs and the number of times you can burn it decreases with every iteration. You'd have something like this:
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.
You'd have one copy that could burn 4 discs, one that could burn 3, one 2, one 1, and one that you couldn't copy at all. Then you move on to the copies, and use those burns up, etc, until all your burns are used up. The end amount would be a lot less, but that's still WAY more copies than anyone really needs anyway.
It's really all moot, though, because the files are just going to show up on P2P networks and get downloaded and burnt anyway...
To anyone that doubts this isnt a joke, why do you think William Hung got a record deal at all?
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"
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!
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
Okay, someone tell me how a bit, a 1 or a 0 can be made 'less good' .. with digital it's either there or it isn't. If the pit or bump isn't as well defined, okay.. but it still is read as a 1 or a 0, so I don't think the situation is 'analogous to analog'.
Delphis
I'm not sure I'm tracking with you here. How does the data degrade? I'm assuming you're talking about the original CD and not the copy. By what mechanism does the CD have the intelligence to render progressively worse copies and yet not progressively worse replays?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
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."
and you know what? If these fuckers would only do something to make people want to buy the CD, say by lowering the price, or maybe actually producing good music, then there wouldn't be an issue. But no, it's easier to spend billions of dollars on R&D than it is to actually find and develop artists, instead of just spoonfeeding us the trite crap that they are now. BAH.
<singing>But I'm just preaching to the choir...</singing>
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.
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?
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.
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
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."
I don't see how some free software versions can be sued out of existance. As long as Unix-like systems retain the everything's-a-file system, a very simple program or even script eill be able to copy CDs. Or are you saying that Unix itself will be sued out of existence?
Occasionally, my ass.
What if I'm using blank CDs to transfer content THAT I AUTHORED, to a mastering plant? Besides, they already get their money from Music CD-Rs, leave my Data CD-Rs alone plz.
FC Closer
Wow, that makes a lot of sense. So, if you download the Debian x86 ISO set (which is, I believe, 7 ISOs plus the update one), part of the money you pay for that data should go to the RIAA?
Yeah, right.
FC Closer
The way I look at it, it's not right to assume everyone is a criminal just to pay for the ones that really are breaking the law.
As long as I am within the law, I will continue to buy data CD-Rs, and if I hear plans of them actually adding a 'music tax' to data CD-Rs, then I'll stock up on a few spindles before they can sink their claws in.
FC Closer
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.
This part is a problem (for the record companies). Degrading the audio only prevents people from making additional copies of copes, you can still make as many copies of the master as you like with only 1 generation of loss.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
Granting them the benefit of a doubt, you just may not KNOW if a new artist is going to sell, because there's no experience. Nor can you be timid if you're really going to PUSH a promising artist, because the chain to stardom has many links, and breaking one breaks the chain.
No one can know for sure whether a new artist is going to sell. But their job is to try to predict it the best they can by doing market research and having informed opinions on what a profitable artist is. Television studios, movie studios and book publishers all have to decide what to produce and what not to, and these industries aren't complaining about the "cost" of being wrong. Why should the music industry be any different?
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
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.
But the big question is, how does the CD know how many times its been copied? How can a read-only CD know if its being "read" for playback vs. "read" for duplication?
And as for the copies, how does it know what generation it is? AFAIK it has no way of telling the copy software to decrement a counter or anything like that.
I'm really just trying to figure out how this whole scheme is supposed to work without relying on a centralized "DRM Server" to keep track of copies.
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.
Complete bullshit. They make these things called "contracts." Artists willingly sign them.
History is rife with 'contracts' that people willingly signed but which are not legal. If you sign a contract that states you will give up your firstborn child to someone, it is not legal just because it's a contract and you signed it.
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
That's funny, I was talking about profit, not total revenue. All of those people/things are paid BEOFRE it becomes PROFIT.
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.
Actually, I do. I know several artists who are doing what they can to make it on their own, because the deals that record companies offer are not fair to them. It's harder to make it on your own, but you can sell cds for 5 bucks each and still make 4 bucks, if you're not chained to a megalabel.
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.
I never said a single thing about game companies. As far as I know, John Carmack is not a member of the RIAA. Also, I never advocated stealing anything. You have attributed that to me because I don't like the RIAA. Yet you talk about knee-jerk reactions. Funny.
So you pirate it instead? Are you implying it's okay if others do as well?
I don't pirate anything. Why do you equate 'I don't buy' with 'I steal?' I never said I get it without paying, I simply don't get music released on megalabels, either by paying for it or by not paying for it.
90% of earnings aren't going to some single record company exec
90% of the PROFIT is not going to the artist. The total earnings figure is different, but the PROFIT structure for those companies is heavily, heavily weighted towards the execs. Sorry if you don't believe it. Ask A Tribe Called Quest about it sometime.
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 paint this portrait of the evil execs stealing the food right from the poor starving artists' mouths. It's a complete lie and not how the system works at all.
You're the one believing the lie if you think artists really live like that. Sure, if they're a huge, established name with many years of successful records under their belt and smart money managers, they're doing well. However, many of the houses you see on MTV Cribs aren't paid for. Don't you ever watch 'where are they now?'
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.
Yeah. It's so much like taking over another ship at sea and relieving them of physical goods. Arr!
You must realize by now that calling copyright infringement (and I'm only loosely using *that* definition) 'piracy' is ludicrous. Of course you will keep doing it, because it connotes what you would like to convey. Just don't accuse *me* of spin when I don't want to call an apple an orange.
That entire rant about where you want to put your money was pointless. Why would I give a shit if you buy RIAA or non-RIAA? It's irrelevant to the discussion.
Maybe to your side of it.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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.
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.
Quoted from grandparent:
"I wasn't aware that free-use included allowing a limit"
Who's ignorant and uniformed now? Jackass.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"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?
Just rip the DVD onto disk within the 48 hours, and you dont need to worry about how long it'll last once on disk.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.