Slashdot Mirror
Sony Japan to Abolish Copy Controlled CDs
Gridle writes "In a complete reversal of their policy and on the heels of Avex's partial cessation of copy protected CDs (translation), Sony Music Entertainment in Japan has announced that it will abolish its Label Gate CCCD format (translation) beginning in November 2004 and move back to normal CD-audio format discs for all future releases. Reasons cited are music users' increased consciousness about copyrights and maintenance of legality (conformity to the CD-audio format specification). In related news, Sony also released a slightly updated HD walkman (translation) due to pressure from the iPod, but because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback."
What happened to their promise that all new portables would do MP3, and they'd have firmware updates for existing ones?
Get off my launchpad!
See this, Bill Gates? Not ALL of you "biggies" think we're all crooks!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Especially when it comes from Sony, who are probably big enough to get away with a copy-protection practice if they really wanted to. Kudos to them.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I have a feeling half the reason (or the only?) reason Sony is doing this, is because they happen to be involved in the electronics business that requires you to have non-copy-protected CDs as raw material. Basically I think the decision may have that since there's shitloads of profit to be made off the hardware, it may offset greater piracy in their music biz. And somebody doing the math may have realized that this is financially viable. Thus Sony has no issues with this. Maybe the RIAA should stop prosecuting file-sharers, and instead get into some kind of revenue-sharing agreement with the Sonys and Apples of world. (ok, ok, stop scoffing at the words revenue-sharing, it could happen!)
My Favourite Meme
When you buy music and movies you are not allowed to return it to the store unless your buying the same title since you could have copied them. Would they now let you return discs with copyright protective measures for a refund since you are unable to copy them?
...but damnit they can learn if you give 'em enough time.
I'm glad to see AVEX cutting back and Sony backing off completely. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to get some soundtracks and Do As Infinity CDs without worrying about the discs being f*cked and horribly fragile.
Maybe Pony Canyon and a few other labels in Japan will follow their lead and stop shipping this crap on their CDs.
This could be bad though... I'd have no reason to not buy more stuff from them!
Nah. That'd too much hassle to sway many consumers. technically adept folks perhaps, but our purchasing priorities may be a tad different
I'd go for an OGG-capable player, but I'd like it if it could also do MP3, simply because of inertia (I have quite a few mp3 tracks already and converting, while possible, isn't something I'd be bothered to do. And I'm a geek. imagine what Joe Sixpack would think.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
In an industry where the corporations are suing their customers, there is PLENTY of room for large companies to take a new stance and embrace the now pissed off consumers. If you get in on that early enough in the game, as Sony appears to be doing, then people start rallying behind you against the companies who AREN'T taking that position.
All in all, its a very smart tactical move for Sony, and reading this has restored a sliver of the faith I once had in them.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I disslike Sony for hindering the use of their products with anything besides other Sony products.
Sony's "NW-HD2" music player only accepts their proprietary ATRAC* audio format. What about all my mp3's?
More often than not, in order to achieve a Sony product's "full potential" you must have a Sony Computer or at least a Memory Stick reader for your pc, or a Sony TV with memory stick built in.
While Sony innovates in some categories, digital cameras, televisions etc. Their design team dropped the ball on the PS2. The PS2 is simply two PS1 cpu's in one box. They didn't improve the controller design, nor did they include a hdd or network connection. Those must be purchased separately. And for kickers, they placed they power switch on the back of the system making it difficult to turn on/off in a media center. This awkward switch position placement allows Sony to make a few extra bucks selling an adapter which "moves" the switch to the front of the machine, where it belonged in the first place.
*Takes deep breath* I feel better now.
Free iPods? Sure.
Regarding players that crack the encryption through brute force: yes, they work, but there are DVD-ROMs out there that flat out refuse to supply the encrypted data! They return an error which basically says, "No, I'm not giving you this data unless you change my region code to match the coding on the disc." My PowerBook shipped with a Superdrive that did exactly that; I was rather peeved, to say the least.
One option: if you know what you plan on watching, and you have the disc space, you can buy a Liteon DVD-ROM and a FireWire (and/or USB2) case to suit, and you'll be able to rip your DVDs to your hard drive that way. Given that I'm getting a new iMac soon, I'll be making use of such a pairing (which I bought about a week before a firmware patch for my drive came out -- d'oh!) a fair bit, I suspect. Yes, Liteons come in RPC2 mode, but it's easy (under Windows, anyway) to flip them over to RPC1.
Hope this helps.
As a side note to your well put remark - whatever happened to /. crowd's usual dislike of Sony (member RIAA)? To read most comments posted here would make you think Sony is the New Angles Co. (tm).
This is just a simple decision to end a failing practice in the marketplace. Nothing more.
When I lived in Japan, there were quite a few CD rental shops. I made SO MANY flippin tapes from CDs I rented, it wasn't even funny.
They vanished before I moved back to the States in 1994, though..
Now, 1999 rolls around and mp3 is all the rage.
The CDs in the rental shops were plain ol' audio CDs. No DRM, no copy-bit, no need for a Sharpie. None of that crap.
Interesting to at least see part of that past come full circle..
It really depends on how it's presented. If you go in to a long winded explination on why it must be converted to .ogg files, and what advantages .ogg files have over .mp3 etc, make each step a manual process, then I agree that Joe Sixpack would probably not do it. But if there was a program where all Joe sixpack had to do was drag&drop their .mp3 files, and it would auto convert their .mp3 to .ogg and put it on on their new media player for them, I don't think they would have a problem using it.
chown -R us.
because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback
What kind of hardware are they running it on that isn't capable of decoding a 128kbit MP3 in real time (which is all most people want out of an MP3 player)? An 8MHz 8086?
I mean, seriously, I used to play MP3s on my old Pentium 100MHz, while doing other work with them... their hardware would have to be very limited to not be able to keep up with that.
...and while doing so abolish selling CDs in general. From now on your SONY Music will be available solely on MDs in ATRAC format.
I was just being a bit utopic, but that's what they'd really like to do, isn't it?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Pity for the producers.
Not for being profiteering bastards, not for losing profits (What am I a moron?). No but for the fact that mp3 took off and it's NOT an open codec, Sony doesn't want to include it because if they do then it will be THE codec FOREVER.
And those nutbars at Fraunhaufer will be laughing their heads off.
Sony is part of the consortium that owns the patent on DVD ($1 per dvd player and a tiny fraction of each blank disk) which is increadibly lucrative, they also have their fingers in the next gen Blu-Ray pie.
But I still feel sorry when someone has to pay money so that others may share for free, hats off to Sony! May this journey to the dark side of copywrite law leave you enlightened.
I have always wondered why they didn't press hybrid CDs with a CD-ROM part that contains the MP3s for the album, and eventually some bonus material (bitmaps, video clips, interviews, etc...).
Of course it would make piracy a little easier, but they should know that pirates can rip/record any CD (even protected) in the blink of an eye. Only the poor non-technical fellow would truly benefit from that and it would make his life so much easier with is mp3 player.
Of course, this is all utopy as they would all release their compressed tracks in a different format, making is effectively useless.
Oh well...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Sony forcing such an action only brings to surface the impnending formalities of music copy righs...etc
Here they have done more to free music rights by making the first wrong move... and that is trying to bring to public's attention the restrictions. A bad move that backfired. Thank God.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I bought a netMD minidisc player because it was cheap, and because - get this - it said that it supported mp3. It does in a way - if you can get the (apparently) godawful sonicstage software to install (not on a win98 machine, whatever the box says) then it just takes your mp3 collection and decodes/encodes to ATRAC3 on the fly as you're connecting to your walkman. I never got to try it out (still use win98) but I expect it's not the speediest transfer. It went back the next day and I got an iPod mini, and sync'd it to my wife's ibook - and got what I paid for. It's bizarre, Sony claim pressure from the iPod as a driver for getting a HD walkman out and expect the mainstream consumer to go for their product, that arguably has less market visibility that Apple's, and doesn't support the mainstream file format. And Sony won't officially support a windows installation that hasn't been factory installed - even upgrades of OEM machines aren't supported. Damn them.
It sounds like the war between its content producing arms and consumer electronics groups has been decided in favor of the electronics group.
Let's hope the outcome is the same in the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD field since Sony now owns TWO movie studios, it would be wonderful if blu-ray came to market with either no copy-prevention or something that was as ultimately half-assed as CSS is.
Somehow I think that internal battle is going to be a lot more bloody than the copy-prevented CD fight was.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Actually before everybody goes off hailing SONY for being so great and good: From everything I have seen here in japan I honestly don't think Japanese people *DO* any piracy. Sure there are the niche "maniacs" that does that, but in general the population shuns pirated software and music and movies like it's a bad disease.
Some examples:
* I bring back stacks of new movies unreleased in japan (back when LOTR:ROK was not in theatres yet), DVDs bought in china. Everyone is interested until the moment they realize it's pirated. "Oh it must be bad quality," or "ahh it's ok i'll just wait for the theatres." etc
* Japanese in piracy capitals doesn't browse the bootleg shops. At ALL.
(side note to above, they also pay full price for Luis Vuitton crap even when there are immitations for 1/100th of the price and absolutely no discernable difference). There are also no market for said immitation products in Japan.
* us foreigners are downloading movies off bittorrent that we can't get here, and we always get these looks of amazement like "oh you guys are pirating again!"
This is compared to pretty much all of my acquaintences in the US (including everyone who is not even considered "tech savvy") who downloads from kazaa or torrent or whatever. Why do you think the announcement is that they will simply end the copy-protect from Sony Japan, but not globally?
It's a moral problem, boys and girls.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
When I was in Japan last March through April, a friend bought a Janet Jackson CD that was copy protected and the damned thing had problems playing in all of her players... in her car, in her computer (especially) and in her stereo. After looking at the CD's case, I realized it wasn't due to accidental defect but due to intentional defect instead.
I told her what she should do about it.
1) Return the CD
2) Voice her opinion to the record company
3) Tell all of her friends
Maybe I didn't make a HUGE difference but I still like to THINK I played a small part in that.
Will Sony be re-releasing the titles that were shipped with their non-conforming copy protection scheme?
Chip H.
The difference is that games like Doom3 take thousands of man-years to produce so there's more investment to protect.
Sony can just bang out a top-selling music CD with maybe 3 man-months of mediocre songwriting plus a day or 2 in a recording studio.
Given that, plus the relative size of the games and music marketplaces, and the fact that games usually come on multiple CD's, its outrageous that a single music CD can still cost as much as a game.
Another reason might be that, er, it didn't seem to actually do anything. I rented a few CDs (yes, they do that in Japan) with the RIAJ label (no CD label), so I'm assuming these were the copy-protected CDs, since they had a sign about copy protection near the CD racks. I had no problems ripping these on my iBook, and even my host brother could rip them with WMP on his Windws machine. I wonder what the copy protection was supposed to do?
Lalala
What is "Sonic Stage"? My Sony network-walkman came with OpenMG software to convert to atrac and check in and out music.
It sucks.
This is one of the problem with proprietary DRMed formats - I need the software, the software sucks, and it's never been updated. So if this is some new software (I'll check out Sony's site) that works with my old player, I'll have to check it out. Right now my $300 "digital music" player sits unused because of those restrictions (for the record, I didn't pay for it - it was a door prize).
I wonder if they'll let me trade it in on a real mp3 player.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Gnagnagna,
Phillips SO saw this coming.... they sold polygram years ago (Their music business), then masively promoted CD burners, THEN issued warnings that CD protection fails to meet CD Audio requirements, adn demanded the removal of "CD Audio" labels on protected CD's.
They sell mucho car CD players, for exmpl...
I always wondered WTF Sony was thinking...
"/Dread"
Fast-forward to today: I get my Color Computers back from my parents house, and I have the grand idea to convert all of my old floppies from my Color Computer days to a current format (CD-R), and build an emulation box PC so I can still have some fun and nostalgia with my old friend. Most of my data converts fine. Some of my disks are coasters (hey, it is to be expected!). But then I get to the game I loved most - Gates of Delerium...
This game was an Ultima-style clone for the Color Computer 2. Two floppies for a whole lotta single-player RPG fun. The problem was, it was copy protected, in a way that made backup of the floppies impossible with the ordinary RS-DOS floppy backup command. You were expected to keep the main game floppy "in a safe place". The player disk you were meant to make backups of, so they were in a normal format (you had to play off of a backup, because the game would modify the data on the floppy as you played). My player disk and all of its backups appeared fine. My game disk - well, it wouldn't load anymore...
I have posted several times about this here on /. - how I own this game, and want to play it again, but the copy protection screwed me, and it appeared that I had an unplayable copy. To make matters worse, it appeared that this was one game that nobody else had EVER heard of, so my chances of ever playing it again were nil. I had contacted the former owner of Diecom, Dave Dies, who at the time told me that he had no problem with me distributing the game, or creating a clone, or anything - if I got it working. But things didn't look so good...
Here was a game I had bought and paid for, that I had a license to use - but because of the copy protection, I couldn't make a backup of it, and over the years it had degraded, and wouldn't work any more on my original hardware, let alone an emulator. I was almost resigned to accept its fate as being lost.
Recently, in the past couple of months, I was contacted by an individual, who had saw my posts here on Slashdot. He had wanted to know if I had any success with restoring it or anything. I had to tell him "no", and that I thought it was beyond reach. We struck up an email conversation, and it turned out he lived in Canada (where Diecom was located), in the same area as Diecom, and apparently Dave Dies as well. It was an interesting coincidence. As we talked, we tried (well, he suggested, I tried - he had owned GofD at one point, but had since misplaced the floppies, but had fond memories about it) various things with the actual floppies. I found that tracks 17-34 (35 track system) were readable as standard tracks, but tracks 0-16 were anything but standard. As we dissected things, he made mention of a conversation he had with another individual who was a contributor to MESS - to the Color Computer emulation port. This guy had apparently done some work with MESS and Diecom copy protection, and knew his way around.
Well, to make a long story (!) short - I got in contact with him, and we all began an exchange of information and such that eventually culminated in the successful restoration of Gates of Delerium. We later got an email from Dave Dies giving us permission to distribute this piece of abandonware (as well as any other Diecom Color Computer software) - if you are reading this, thank you, Dave Dies!!! It turned out that tracks 0-16 were written in a special non-standard format that couldn't be copied with the regular RS-DOS commands. It was possible to alter the ROM (in what is known as "all-ram" mode on the CoCo) to allow us to read these tracks, and transfer them to another f
Reason is the Path to God - Anon