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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."
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.
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 solution to piracy is never going to find success in copy protection.
/. can see this coming but the general public could give a rat's ass, for the most part. They can still play their unprotected MP3s with their iPod so they could care less. However, they when they won't be able to create unprotected MP3s from unprotected CDs, they will finally see what's going on. But it will be too late. Of course, it will still be possible to make unprotected recordings using the "analog hole" that we all know and love.
It already has.
Right now, it is easy to pirate a CD because there were no anti-piracy measures implemented when the format was developed. The installed base has become too large to ignore so CDs are still distributed today. 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. 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
Other than my DVD player and my PC, I no longer own any native CD player device. It isn't necessary anymore. This is what the industry has been waiting for.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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?
Exactly.
A good friend of mine is a music studio middle-manager and I bounced this idea off him:
Imagine if you could go to a web site, select some tracks from various artists, click on: burn and send, and the whole CD was burned on high quality disc, and custom jacket with lyrics made, and the whole thing shipped to the customer's house, including shipping, for 3.99 (yes, the whole CD).
He looked at me funny for a second and said: But we'd lose money!
To which I replied: You're losing money now.
Then it dawned on him that millions of people would love that, because for the price, it's cheaper to order it that way than to download off your favorite p2p, listen for quality, burn it, and go to kinko's to photocopy the artwork.
I asked him what it would take for the studios to implement a system like that, and he replied, half jokingly: An Act of Congress.
Supply and demand are where it's at. The market laws apply to all industries and all countries for all commodities. What makes music industry execs think they're immune to it?
They should go jump off a tall bridge and see if they're immune to the laws of gravity.
"Piter, too, is dead."
The labels should consider selling their product the way DEC used to sell software: licenses and copies on media are two separate products. Then I could:
o buy a package deal (license+1medium) in the store and just use it;
o buy a license and make my own copy legally, from someone else's copy or a download;
o buy additional licenses and make more copies when I want 'em;
o make licensed copies on any medium which suits me.
All with the blessing of the copyright owners.
Yes, I would buy licenses if they were sensibly priced.
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.
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.
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!
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.
whether the duplicates will also have copy limits.
Well, back in the 80's the TRS-80's TRSDOS operating system supported a scheme like this. Your floppy could be "backup limited" and the system would permit only, say, 3 or 5 copies, after which the OS's disk duplication software would flag an error. In that case the OS would not copy a back-up copy.
How much this copyright protection helped Tandy realize its destiny as a world-class computer maker is left as an exercise for the reader.
"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."
Actually, artists make very little money from record sales. The majority of their money comes from huge signing bonuses, concert revenue, merchandise sales, etc.
One could argue that file sharing allows more people to hear their music, and thus more people to be interested in going to their show.
I heard something really interesting the other day on NPR. Apparently, the record companies willingly withhold royalties from their artists. In the event that the artist actually notices that (s)he is missing money, they have to spend thousands of their own dollars to hire a lawyer to get an audit, and even then, they only settle for a fraction of what they deserve.
I'm not trying to justify "piracy", but I have a hard time sympathizing with a company that's fucks its employees over that much. Instead of getting Britney Spears on commercials condemning file sharing, they should be giving her what she rightfully earned according to her contract.
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?