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Sony's New DRM Technique
skochak writes "Sony has introduced a new DRM scheme. You can burn a CD-R from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy." From the article: "The concept is known as 'sterile burning.' And in the eyes of Sony BMG executives, the initiative is central to the industry's efforts to curb casual CD burning. 'The casual piracy, the school yard piracy, is a huge issue for us...Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs, which is why making the CD a secure format is of the utmost importance.'"
This isn't a NEW technique: Philips did use it years ago with their DCC digital compact cassettes
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Will this allow us to play the new cds in our old players?
It only took a week to crack their last attempt at enabling copy protection with nothing more than a pen.
:D
Who's game?
This Copyright Method, Like Almost Every Single Other Copyright Method, can be circumvented with a simple winamp plugin.
Make music people are willing to pay for, and cultivate mature customers.
Oh wait, that means your greedy leech asses couldn't depend upon 14 year old girls for your revenue stream, doesn't it?
My little site.
I understand the impluse to optimize the amount of money returned on an investment, but this is bullshit. I guess I will have to start dumping my audio out to my hard drive and burn from there.
These guys need a serious kick in the ass. I'm buying my son a Nintendo instead of a PS3.
They aren't getting one more dime from me.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
How is this even going to work? Couldn't I just make a copy of the Cd-R I made?
Every single DRM scheme has been cracked before, so what makes Sony think they can outsmart everyone?
While selling music people want to hear is, presumably, of lesser importance than "utmost".
--
make install -not war
I hope no one finds out you can burn a gazillion copies from the CDR!
Does anybody at these companies know about mp3 or ogg? It's a waste of time unless you cannot read the cd. If anybody can read the cd then they can rip it to ogg and burn a regular cd or as many as they want from those tracks. This is a total waste of time.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Now, if they would release albums worthy of being copied as a whole...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Most casual users (like my mom) tend to store all their cd's on their hard drive for their ipod. Then when they want to listen to them in the car, they do a burn of a play list. What happens then?
They seem to be under the impression people want every song on a cd and will use windows media player.
Regardless, copy protection will not work. The only barrier is the energy barrier, and it constantly shrinks. Next?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
When will the execs stop wasting their money on all this ineffective DRM "technology"? If it can be seen, it can be copied. The profit comes from producing a complete package experience with liner notes and pride-of-bookshelf, not just the (approximate) digital waveform.
[
How many times can you rip it?
What if we want to copy Linux distributions to our friends? Huh, what about that?
Wait, or was that the Bittorrent excuse? I'm getting them mixed up now. I can't believe they're stepping all over our rights to do anything we want, anywhere, with anything.
For some reason, this is totally unreasonable!
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Yet another method to add to the masses bringing it's own incompatiblities and problems. Keeping one step ahead of the DRM crackers makes commercial sense for Sony as a business but not to the consumers who have to put up with more layers to potentially go wrong. Plus it's a Windows only format so where does that leave the growing alternative OS users? One step forward and one step back as per normal.
uhm...whats to stop me copying the discs bit per bit? how could it stop this?
What, do 3rd graders bring laptops with them to the playground, hide behind trees, and sell copies of word cruncher for lunch money now?
Wow, times sure have changed...
I have a right to listen to my music on whatever player, in whatever format I want to. Many of Sony's new discs are "incompatible" with Apple iPods, because the music is only available in DRM protected WMA format right off the CD (they are burned in CD Extra mode). There are many ways to defeat such protection, sometimes as simple as holding down the shift key.
If all else fails, I play the cd in a standard cd player, while recording it on my computer. I break apart the tracks later, and have the music in whatever format I want.
If only the record industry would realize that such actions are futile, and could just give up. Most people aren't evil pirates, I just want to be able to play back music that I pay money for on whatever medium I want to.
buy a CD, make a copy so you can keep the original in good condition (i.e. cds getting messed up/stolen at parties, cars, beaches, etc)... And when your copy *does* get scratched beyond readibility, you can't make another?
Um... no.
Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs, which is why making the CD a secure format is of the utmost importance.
I could be off-base here, but if you change the format for whatever purpose, wouldn't it by definition not be a CD anymore?
You probably shouldn't click this.
Think about this for a second.
People who were not computer savvy at all figured out about naspter. Bitorrent is popular enough to cause the federal government to get involved. audiogalaxy folders still exist in peoples shares on other file systems. A majority of people who have computer adeptness these days most likely gained that adeptness through their want/need to download music.
CURBING SOMEONE FROM GETTING THEIR MUSIC IS ONLY GOING TO LEAD THEM TO SIDESTEP YOUR POLICIES.
its been said a million times, i know, and there's nothing original about my response, but seriously. This stops no one from burning as many cds as they want, unless all they want is to burn the one cd.
note to self: never buy sony hardware that doesn't start with the word "play" and end with the world "station"
"when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold"
I wonder if its illegal to dicuss bypassing this morinic protection scheme, even though it isn't in use already.
Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs
But they're using high-speed burners, so that makes it at least four thirds, right?
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
...why people are upset about THIS one? Frankly, the way I see it, this still allows for fair use under the law as it's written. Who cares if you can't copy a copy? Hell, just a few decades ago, pre-digital, you never WANTED to copy a copy because it would just keep getting worse and worse as far as quality is concerned. My only worry about this new technique is whether is will break playability of primary copies like some DRM has with originals in the past. *shrug*
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
Last time I checked, CDex or EAC won't copy anything in WMA to a blank CD.
Workaround in 3, 2, 1...
What about the burned one? Couldn't we just copy that one? Sure, it would slow the process somewhat, and the quality might diminish over time, but it would still work, right?
-stalefries
It's not a waste of time if it prevents casual copying of CD from someone who doesn't even know about ogg or mp3. This is not about having a perfect barrier to any unauthorized use. It's about making things just a bit harder to increase sales.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
In some ways, it's a positive thing. If it's a "same old prevention" system coupled with a "way out" that allows users to make a limited number of copies, then that shows Sony "gets it" insofar as they recognize people do want to make backups, quite legitimately, and shouldn't be restricted from doing what they can to protect their own works. But ultimately, we need be[tt]er solutions. These types of thing will eventually turn into effective efforts that lock out alternative platforms and technologies, undermining innovation and making it much harder to do the kinds of things that lead to the invention of the MP3 player, MP3 CD, home theatre system, etc.
In that respect, part of the effort has to come from the grassroots music listening community. Those who have repeatedly proffered technologies that have put the music industry on the defensive in this way need to be denounced, not revered. People like Shawn Fanning are treated as heroes within the Slashdot community, but why? Making the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music via IRC easier via the replacement of Napster? How does that help anyone? For a few years, we've had access to so-called "Free" music, but at what cost? Restrictions on our technologies, a movie industry that has treated the GNU/Linux communities as hostile by default, and more and more draconian laws. Meanwhile the artists we want to fund haven't been helped in the slightest by these kinds of technologies. We want to encourage the creation of new art, but Napster and its successors such as Kazaa have done an extraordinary amount of damage to the ability of artists to do so.
In some ways, there's no such thing as the Slashdot "community". My guess is the majority of people reading this will be nodding their heads in agreement, but there'll be the usual gaggle of "Fight the man, why should artists be paid anyway, true art comes from love and money shouldn't exist" types itching to respond. The point though is that the system that created the vast bulk of the music we see distributed on networks like Kazaa is the system most harmed by it. And we can expect "compromises" that really don't meet us half way like Sony's becoming the norm if we're unprepared to do something about it, kicking out the rogues and piracy advocates from our midst. We need to disassociate ourselves with copyright infringement. We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks, and replace that content with new, original work, devising new and innovative ways to fund it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm sure everyone is going to point out that this will most definitely be cracked without much effort, what bothers me is why they're going after the casual copiers at all. They say that two thirds of all piracy happens from casual copying, how do they know this?! It seems like an excuse to go after the consumer rather than a legitimate reason. I think this statistic really amounts to nothing. We all know that what they should really be focusing on is the large-scale pirates, especially in EU markets where CD's are even more extravagantly priced than they are in the U.S. I can't imagine how much time and effort that this new protection scheme has eaten up. Shouldn't they be doing something more useful like seeking out the large-scale pirates?
CD is dead, long live wireless! use open protocols!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Now, how many people have one of those? The market didn't accept it, and if this isn't cracked, it won't accept this either.
I am trolling
Can someone explain how a thing like this is supposed to work? I don't mean whether or not it can be cracked, I'm sure it can. I mean, how does it ever work even on the non-technical user?
where there's fish, there's cats
Copy-protection schemes have been devised - and defeated - ever since people have figured out how to make money - and avoid paying - from software sales of all kinds.
An image is an image is an image, whether it is the ISO, or the "doctored" ISO that is burned onto a disc. Even "original" discs that are "pressed" at a factory have to come from a "master... copy".
It won't take long for this to be circumvented... just like every scheme that has come before.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet."
--Bruce Schneier
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Another reason it's of utmost importance is that making a couple of copies for you and your friends is either fair use, or near enough to keep it safe from litigation in 99% of the cases. While Sony can sue the pants off of large-scale pirates, it can't do anything in the courts to deter fair use.
So, it'll cripple its products. Note to self, keep not buying Sony stuff.
I was sort of a "late bloomer" for music. My older sister had bands that she liked, mostly picked up from friends, and certainly I had heard the Beatles and the Stones and the stuff that was on the radio. But I never really became somebody who listened avidly to music myself until I was maybe 15 or 16. I got into it after I developed a taste for the stuff that wasn't on the radio all that much. Some of the first bands I got into included old Oingo Boingo, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, GBH, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik ... connect the dots between all those bands any way you want, but the point is that I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff if it weren't for my friends who dubbed me off tapes of it. (That's right, cassette tapes, remember those?) Did I buy records? Sure. Did I buy more records than I listened to copies from friends? Maybe, but I can't say for sure that I did. But even if half the music I listened to wasn't paid for, it still made me a more willing consumer of music today. So how evil is this "casual piracy" really?
But then, more willing consumer is one thing; better consumer -- at least in the eyes of the major conglomerates -- is another. I think I'm far less likely to buy into a lot of the garbage that's forced down the primary media channels today and far more likely to buy from independent labels/genres than most Americans. All that piracy in my youth made me more likely to spend my money on music today, but it made me less likely to spend my money on "the right music," as far as Sony is concerned.
Breakfast served all day!
From TFA:
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
Sounds like 2 copies get burned, redbook audio data, and a second session of wma files for computer playback. I expect a mac or a linux box will have zero issues making copies of the copies, nor will windows boxes with cluefull users.
The US patent office banned perpetual motion machine patents since they were flooded with them and not a single one could work due to established physical laws.
Not a single media based copy prevention scheme has worked due to the simple law: If you can read it and you can write it, you can copy it.
The only copy protection schemes that are working right now are ones that take away the writing step by locking the player hardware and the all-important step of paying congress to make it illegal to reverse-engineer the hardware.
Unless they can somehow make all bit-for-bit copy programs illegal, all media based schemes are DOA.
-Ryan C.
There is really no way to prevent technically savy people from making copies of content which is distributed on media that does not have user specific encryption without owning the complete system that is responsible for playback. I am sure the long term dream of Sony is a transition from the relatively open CD format to something more proprietary like SACD. In the short term, they have to deal with CDs, which represents more than 99% of the music that is sold in stores.
Sony's goal is probably to make it difficult enough to copy coied CDs such that 90% or 95% of the people don't bother to deal with it. A copy protection system that is tedious enough to break can be commercially successful even if it is a technical failure.
Of course, the basic flaw in this system is that most people who copy music are not that conscious about the quality. Ripping the tracks from a copied CD to MP3s and then burning them back on to a CD would defeat this sytems with some loss of quality.
Like everything else they try, it'll fail. I'll just rip the CD using Winamp or iTunes or anything else but Winblows Media Slayer. No more DRM.
Honestly, the only thing that would get me to buy more CDs at the moment is if they stop wasting money on crap like this so they can lower the prices of the content. If CDs were $5-10 instead of $25-30 people would be more likely to buy them. It takes me an hour at work to get the money for that CD, but only 10 minutes to find it online. Make the two a comprable trade and I'll switch to the legal route of buying the cds.
As long as the music will play out speakers or headphones there will be the "analog hole." You will always be able to pirate music...
I wonder what research they've done to prove that stopping piracy will increase their profits. We used to copy cassette tapes all the time, low fidelity be damned. It was all about combining the purchasing power of 5 of my friends allowances which enabled us to buy and listen to more music than any one of us could by ourselves. Taking away our ability to copy music would not have made us spend more.
Its mine and ill do as i please.
If you dont want to risk people copying, then dont release it at all.
Screw off.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One thing is clear -- the resulting disk is not a CD! This means it will not work on the millions of CD audio players in existence. So what consumer in their right mind would want this? No one... so the next step for Sony is to figure out how to FORCE it on us.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
The only way to prevent anyone from coping your stuff is to make hardware or software look for some flag/mark/etc and then act on it accordingly.
With software, that is easily hacked or the stream can be routed through something that can copy the stream and not be blocked by a flag.
With hardware, someone can fix that too (though harder than software hack) but sometimes it too can be easily killed (like the example someone gave about using a marker on a CD).
SO, why do tech companies think they can implement copy protection...there is absolutely no way unless you force everyone to use a particular piece of software or use a particular piece of hardware that check for these flags/etc. I mean, if I have an old CD player, then it won't know about any flags so it will play it as normal...unless they've changed the CDs such that they don't even play on my old player.
Look at the Broadcast flag issue that was recently overturned...they wanted to implement a broadcast flag on hardware (especially video playback cards) so if you wanted to not have to follow the broadcast flag then you needed the older hardware that was immune to it. geez...RIAA/MPAA are idiots.
To make this really effective, it will require special drives to read the new format. Good luck trying to get people to buy into it if the only reason to upgrade is to "protect the industry" and puts more restrictions on the user.
HA! Ha ha ha ha ha!! Hee hee hee whoo whoo whhoo. Stop! You're killing me....
Someone ought to keep a list of stupid things people say.
Why choose white shoes?
You have to stop thinking in terms of absolutes. We don't live in a perfect world. This is not some utopia where every piece of IP is only used according to its EULA. Sorry, Sony, life is unfair. However, if someone was prevented from using StupidSoft BurnEasy(tm) on their $399 PC to distribute a CD all over the playground, then the DRM for this CD did the purpose. Whether enough money is gained to offset the price of the DRM is for Sony to figure out.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Fine, complain about CD prices, but stick the $25 to $30 number up your ass. What are you buying? Imports from Ulan Bator?
Why do they even bother? 24hrs.... DRM shot to hell... good riddance.
there is exactly one way this sceme could work, and software DRM ain't it. Hardware DRM is the only realistic option.
Locking down CDs ain't gonna happen either. Because there are already non-locked-down cd burners.
The way to do this is to make bluray, or some other future megaformat, single-generation burnable in hardware. It'll only work for the specific type of discs, you could rip to another format, but it will work.
The First4Internet CD copy protection technology destroys the registry keys (driver device names) associated with your CD-ROM devices. Then a monitoring app allows or disallows access to the device.
The monitoring app is buggy. If it stops running or loses your device references, you will have to reinstall windows to make your CD-ROM devices work again.
Also, by messing with the internal driver properties like this, many apps simply hang or crash the system when trying to access the device.
You can forget about using your legitimate buring software after putting one of those CDs in your computer...
-- anon DRM developer
"XCP aims to offer a reasonable level of protection against 'casual piracy' while working to provide the authorised customer with a quality digital music experience together with DRM features for controlled copying on their chosen platform. If data in any format is digitally written to a compact disc or DVD then it can be read from that disc in some way. XCP is designed to give a level of protection that will make it suitably difficult for the general consumer to copy and/or illegally distribute the content of the disc."
http://www.xcp-aurora.com/xcp2.aspx
...is no security at all. Wait ntil there's nice GUI click-here front-ends for automagically ripping from the CD and burning another CD.
To use it with your player, you need to go with the MS DRM. Doink. Try again please.
Meanwhile there's the puritanical language that's sticking out like a sore... uh, thumb, here.
Casual burning in the schoolyard needs to be sterilized! People, save your daughters now!! Pirates are coming for them!
Not people who share my perspective on the world, in short, and not ones I'm clamoring to buy from. Which makes kind of a contrast with the iTunes store, where I've paid a fair amount.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
She said she was 18! I swear!
Most of the pirates they are fighting against aren't even interested in purchasing the music, and wouldn't even if they had to. Most pirates I know do it just because it's fun. It's a challenge - who can get the latest Britney Spears album out on FTP, IRC, and P2P networks the fastest. Adding DRM just ups the anty, making the game even more challenging - the only people it really hurts is the consumer. The music lover. The honest people who want to listen to music.
I stopped buying new CDs of artists under the RIAA months ago, and couldn't be happier. I rip all my music @ 320kbps, so buying a used, slightly scratched CD doesn't bother me.
If you are willing to be patient and keep an eye out, you can make it being perfectly legit AND not supporting an unethical industry - I picked up the latest NIN album used @ Slackers this weekend, and it just came out recently. I live and breathe music, and have a very large, extensive collection.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you get pride from a particular CD on a shelf, you seriously need to analyze your life or something.
So they fix the problem by allowing you to burn a cd that is full of WMA files with DRM that disables the CD to be burned again. Where's the provision for fair use? If I buy a regular CD I should be able to copy it at the original high quality of sound that will play in all CD devices without having to install DRM crippled WMA files on a CD that would be nothing better than a coaster.
What about people that don't run Microsoft Windows? Can Mac's play DRM'd WMA files yet?
I can't think of a more stupid solution. Luckily Sony et al seem to have no problems finding people full of stupid solutions.
On the plus side, you won't have to worry about these DRM schemes until Microsoft finally produces a secure Operating System.
Hahahaha
John the Kiwi
"Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied."
,then i can copy it without the DRM .
,plain and simple
This restricts copying to WMA , which is frankly not a useable format for me . If i copy an Audio CD with this DRM , i will Copy it direct to a loseless format such as flac first then to as many Discs as i see fit for backup or fairuse. If it plays in my machine
This will not work
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
So either rip the original to your PC and burn lots of copies or rip the copy to your PC and burn another copy.
It's like the generational copy protection on Sony Mindiscs - you can circumvent it with a Line In jack.
Does it works only for PS2 (or 3 or P?) games or what?
Because if it can be read, IT CAN BE WRITTEN!
From the article:
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
This entire scheme depends on people using WMA for their burned copies. It will therefore have no effect on people like myself who simply make an exact copy of the disc. What's kind of funny is that I use Veritas RecordNow DX to do exactly this, and that software came with my Sony DVD-RW drive.
Not to me. If it will not play in my CD player then I am not going to buy it. The more important thing is that I like the music and I do not have to pay money for a new CD player to hear it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/user/stupidDRMCD.iso
or
just rip the mp3's at high quality (192kbps) and save them for burning for friends later.
Personally, I think this is a road that should be travelled down a bit.
The sterile burning method allows the fair use for you to make backups, and even to make a copy for your friend to try out. What it doesn't allow is for your friend to give a copy to his friend, etc.
However, this particular implementation of the method is lacking in some ways. I don't think you should be limited in the number of copies you can make from the original. As far as compatibility goes, I hope they are truly compatible. Lastly, I don't like how they use Windows Meda files.
I think this is a good first step into an interesting copyright protection method.
We can only hope they require help from MS to make sure their plan works. That way, people will switch to other OSes that allow them to do what they want and I will get less spam. Go Sony!
As long as the CD's must remain compatible with the the original CD specifications, then DRM will -never- work. The CD spec doesn't have provisions for DRM, which means that enforcing it requires software. And so anybody who is not running Windows will be unaffected.
This is just another market force -- people want freedom, they want to be unrestricted in what they do. If Windows becomes a restriction, suddenly Linux and MacOS will become a lot more attractive.
We're not totally screwed yet, I hope capitalism can save us from technology...
They keep trying to introduce DRM without invalidating the huge installed base of CD players. At what point are they going to say, "We like DRM, and we think you like our music so much that you're going to buy a new music system to get it?"
Will some music company eventually say, "We're making the next Famous Music Artist album available only on iTunes?" Or introduce some new DRM'ed format designed to force you to upgrade your system, equivalent to CSS in DVDs?
As long as they're trying to hack DRM on top of CD formats, they're destined to lose. Perhaps DRM is destined to lose no matter what. People broke CSS and Fairplay, and I suspect that's the reason they haven't tried to force DRM yet. But it seems to me that as long as their market strategy is based around "we're selling you the rights to listen, but not the rights to copy", they're eventually going to have to abandon the CD format. Sooner would be better than later for them, wouldn't it?
I don't know if their marketing tells them they'd lose. Perhaps that would be the tipping point where people said, "Nah, forget it; we don't want a new format no matter what artists make it and no matter what features it has." I dunno, but I'm sure they do (or think they do).
"he concept is known as "sterile burning." Copy and paste the whole sentence next time. ;)
This is a guess, but this whole thing will be a hybrid of various copying utilities.
1) They'll introduce errors on the disk making copying difficult (i.e. it will break iTunes)
2) The disc will have some sort of DRM wrapper that invokes either WMP 10 or installs the equivalent of a device driver. Remember how the spokesmodel said "the disk will have other content". That other content will include DRM'd copies of the music.
3) They'll use WMP10 to create the copies, since it already has DRM built in. It will produce disks with the same sort of errors. If they're nasty, in step #2, they'll silently put in device drivers that prevent you from copying these disks entirely.
The easy way is to use EAC or something like it, and then use a winamp plugin to grab the audio. I suspect it will break some CD Software, and they'll have you use the WMA tracks on the disk as the mechanism to import the songs into WMP10. The key here is the comment about "we can't license Fairplay for use on the disks" tells me that what you'll copy is a 128kb version to WMP, and WMP will allow you to copy it 3 times.
Or better yet, use OS X or Linux.
It will stop about 25% of casual copying. It won't stop real piracy even a little bit. it seems mainly concerned with stopping a minor amount of piracy and pissing off the bulk of their customers.
Peopel with a brain will simply rip the disk without the WMA tracks or DRM wrapper. Trivially easy.
...in related news, the stock of Sanford, creator of the Sharpie market pen, has soared to record levels.
Just kidding, Sanford is not a publically traded company.
respek
Martini Glasses
I have a very specific system when I purchase a new CD.
I resist the urge to play it in the car, and do not open it until I get home. Once home, the seal is broken, and it goes right into my computer.
Then, I rip each track into a 192kbps MP3 for listening on my computer or my MP3 player.
Then I burn an exact copy of the CD onto a blank CD.
The original CD goes into a protective binder and is stored away.
The burned copy goes into the jewel case and into a space on my cd holder tower thingie.
So, the original is only used to make a backup copy, and the backup copy sees everyday use. If for whatever reason the backup gets lost or damaged, I just pull the original out of the binder and make another copy.
All this is perfectly legal and is within consumers' rights. This new system will take away those rights, and will only serve to piss more people off.
My spoon is too big.
While I agree with you on some points there is one glaring problem with your argument, and that is what a great perpetual motion machine the recording industry has become. Artists / their supporters who say, "Well, I want the system to work for me," are looking at the top .01% of their profession and assuming / dreaming that they will someday be there. If the system reaches its collapse sooner rather than later, I'm all for it. It's not like there will suddenly be NO revenue stream for artists. The streams will simply be different.
However, since the industry is propelled to its incredible heights of profitability by fux0ring 99.99% of the artists, through creating a limited monopoly built upon advertising and rather shady market squeezing, I'd like to think that I as a consumer have been rather deserted somewhere along the line. Ergo, I am deserting the system IF, and I'm not a big pirater, so I don't do this much, but IF I go through other channels for music acquisition.
My little site.
Does Mr. Schneier own a refrigerator?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"We want to encourage the creation of new art, but Napster and its successors such as Kazaa have done an extraordinary amount of damage to the ability of artists to do so." None of the musicians I know seem to be having trouble creating music these days. Oh wait, you meant top 40 "artists". If you want to support the creation of art, buy demo tapes/vinyl and go to a show and buy merch there.
Bungo!
"Sony has introduced a new DRM scheme. You can burn a cd-r from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy." From the article: "he concept is known as "sterile burning."
When reached for comment about what this new technique will be called, officials stated that one of the two code names for the Standand Technique DRM (STD) might catch on, Syphilis or Gonorrhea.
"Who's to say what will catch on" a spokeperson said, "Sony has to Protect itself".
For the last time: if it will play in a CD player the disc has uncompressed, unencrypted PCM audio and a valid table of contents. What this means is that you can rip any CD, regardless of some cute new DRM technology, with maybe a few trivial modifications to the ripper software.
A friend of mine used to copy CD's this way because his CD didn't have "digital read" enabled.
:)
Nothing new under the sun
These CD's are actually using WMA in data mode or whatever the equivalent is.
From the article:
"Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied."
So you don't really get to burn a CD that can be used with your Ipod, old CD player on boat.
Am I missing something?
Is Sony even *trying* to outsmart anyone?
Sometimes I wonder if these companies aren't actually so stupid to think these schemes will work, but instead maybe are just doing it with full knowlege it's meaningless, just for public appearances...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Hope it's as easy as the last lame brained idea they came up with.
Instead of burning the protected CD to CDR, rip an ISO. Then you have a nice file which can produce an unlimited number of CDRs and can be distributed quickly with BitTorrent.
So sony have devised a scene that will make almost all music lovers turn to the net before attempting to buy a CD; Your FLAC, OGG or MP3 torrent files are easily converted to whatever format you want, eventually playable on everything. Meanwhile, Sony's cruddy WMA files are locked in a pathetic audio-format ghetto. You wont even be able to play these files on Sony HD Walkman devices.
If people would simply grow up, stop expecting something for nothing, and pay for value received, we wouldn't have all of these DRM issues to contend with in the first place...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
quote FTFA "Among the biggest headaches: Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device" Secure burning means iPod users have no motivation to purchase music from SONY, when an unencumbered version will be available on p2p networks within hours of the cd reaching the public.
"You can't just make a copy, pass it to your buddy"
Right, because high school and college kids would never catch on that if you use EAC that it ignores the whole copy protection scheme.
And they'll never be smart enough to use P2P to download an MP3 copy.
They're so smart over in Riaaville.
> Why is it that tech companies are the biggest idiots when it actually comes to technology??!?!
'cause after the dot.com bust, all the 'tech' companies are run be 'transferable skills' idiots with MBAs, who have zero (I'm being generous here, it's actually quite negative) technical aptitude.
Meanwhile, those with actual technical aptitude are regulated to the salt mines since they prove the emporer (mba) has no clothes (technical skills).
Yeah, the above is a rant and poorly thought out. Bite me.
The CD is no longer the best storage medium for music. Sure, they cost only $0.20:GB (for quality CDs that last more than a couple of years), but they're split onto 6-800MB volumes. Which must be managed by hand, or by inadequate jukeboxes, which are large, very expensive for real automation, very slow for "random access", and have limited capacity even at the (consumer) high end. While hard drives cost $0.38, with a combined random-access volume (PC + 4 EIDE drives) as little as $0.60:GB.
With the automation comes convenience, including playlists of all your music, accessible from any Net connection (including your smartphone, plugged into your car stereo, etc). When they change the physical format from 25-year-old "Compact Disc (TM)", your harddrive can ignore the change, and accommodate the new data. When they change the data fromat from CDDA, just run a converter app. None of that works with CDs.
CDs are still a great distribution format. Putting something in people's hands, that they can just pop in a player for music, will remain popular for many years. Virtual distribution has its own virtues, but even cheap, ubiquitous, transparent, wireless, superbroadband won't replace the physical ritual of handing someone something shiny anytime soon.
Sony is obviously blind to this distinction. They're stuck with the CD they invented (with Phillips inventing the data/software) as just "the medium", the product, without seeing its collapse in face of competition with online storage (as opposed to "nearline" storage in CDs). Like the rest of the inbred recording industry they lead, they're working against the distribution benefits of simple CDs, trying to hold on to CDs as storage media. Perhaps to their dying breath.
--
make install -not war
Let me guess: the "single descendent" technology behind this was developed in China?
while CD burners were just about to become mainstream. there was an article in some mag. that said that each copy, a certain string would change until it rendered the disk unreadable (copy of a copy of a copy of the original in the example)
I never saw it.
If you can listen to the music, it can be copied. end of story
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
All I see in that article is some guy saying that you cant copy his CD's. I find that hard to beleive with the utter lack of technical info or other such explaniation. In my book, ANYTHING that can be read by a computer can be copied. Its like saying that you have a a book that cannot be copied: The very idea is dumb assuming that the book can be read in the first place.
None of this really effects me since 95% of the music I buy is vinyl. The other 5% is mostly demo CD-Rs I bought from the band themselves. I'll worry when they come up with a DRM scheme to keep me from copying my Chain Of Strength 7"s.
Bungo!
You can burn a CD-R from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy.
Nice scheme there. It's simple, elegant, does exactly what Sony wants.
I guess it works by voluntary compliance, but let's not get mired with the details.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
The main difference between the two interfaces (other than the obvious -- S/PDIF is on unbalanced 75-ohm coax and AES/EBU is on balanced RS422) is that S/PDIF machines have to honor the SCMS ("serial copy management system") bit in one of the control subframes. AES/EBU does not.
SCMS works in the same way as this "new" scheme. As you record from a digital source (over S/PDIF), the recorder looks at the state of the SCMS bit in the incoming data stream. If the bit is set, then the machine will refuse to record. If the bit is not set, then the machine will gladly record -- but it inserts a set SCMS bit into the the recorded data. So when you go to copy your copy, you're locked out.
This, in and of itself, didn't kill DAT. DAT was killed because pro machines were substantially more expensive than the consumer machines (I remember paying a grand for a TASCAM DA-30 when DAT was still very much a viable format). Consumers weren't willing to pay a lot more to get a feature they wanted -- the ability to make copies of copies.
"Those that ignore history are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.
Now, of course, S/PDIF still exists. I know that some S/PDIF interfaces (the CardD Digital, for one) let you disable SCMS. The most common use for S/PDIF these days is digital transfer from a DVD player to a home-theatre multichannel amp. Dunno if you can route that audio to a digital recording device and have it record.
how does this qualify as DRM?
/bin/bash
#!
cdparanoia -B;
for files in *.wav; do lame -b 192 "$files" "$files.mp3";done
now i have both the raw wav of the cd (lossless) and nice mp3 copies. who needs the original? If it's data, then, um, man dd.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
I made a comment, then actually bothered to RTFA and found this
.wma files...
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
this means it only protects if you rip from a protected CD to the HDD, then burn back to the CD. Which still doesnt make sense, since normal CD players cant play
yet another reason I stick with winamp
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
This is the original technology used to keep DAT Audio tapes from being copied (or cloned if you're into dat trading). Generally most portable audio dat recorders implement this technique, as to do most mini disc recorders from what I have found. Basically allows you to make 1 copy and then that copy is not able to be transferred again. Now with DAT, SCMS was a switchable option (At least on the Sony PCM-M1 since it was a professional portable deck, where as on the Sony TCD-D7, D8, and D100 were the consumer end brands of portable dat recorders). Unfortunatly (or fortunatly, which ever side of the fence you are on), SCMS could be bypassed by using special made digital coax cables. these were known as SCMS strippers. Overall, not a bad technology, but like all. Poorly implemented. So, i imagine this is where they got this new idea from.
I'm not in school anymore but is this schoolyard trading more popular today than it was in the 70's where we copied our favorite songs from vinyl to 8 track and cassette and gave them to our friends? I'm having a hard time thinking it is as big a problem as the music isn't as good. Or maybe I am just biased as a hissy 8 track full of Meatloaf and Frampton is more appealing than a perfect copy of the latest Jessica Simpson.
'Same speed C but faster'
Just doing a server test to see why posts aren't showing up, please ignore.
You can't say, "Don't say you'd move" because that's the problem. The correct solution is to move. Just like a distrobution based business model is no longer viable; they need to move. Businesses have a right to do business, but there is no right to profit. There is no value-added from their distribution and it's no longer required. Their business model has gone the way of the milkman and the icehouse.
Never confuse volume with power.
How long until an open source version of a CD-RW or DVD+RW (or many of the other writable DVD formats) is started? It's not like there aren't other open source hardware projects.
Man, maybe I'm being too picky here. Happens all the time, but it looks like you're saying that books are viable because they're too tedious to copy digitally. Forgive me if that's now what you mean. But if it was, that's fucking out there.
I mean isn't it very likely that books are everywhere because they predate digital media rather than because they're too time consuming to copy. There are zillions of books available on-line already not to mention that hundreds of thousands of textual publications, especially reference materials, that used to be printed now go straight to digital.
Books work because they were here before the "age of mechanical reproduction" as Benjamin referred to it. That's about the only reason books "work".
surely it can't be recursively implemented...
Considering the amount of "coasters" we all own... They are putting a lot of faith in perfect copies every time...
How many CD players out there are conventional? I've been burned big time by some CD's that would not play on my car CD player. Exchanged them only to find the exchanged CD's failed/skipped in the same way on the same tracks in the same places. Finally had to just ask for my money back! As far as I can tell my car CD player is conventional.
I'll continue to buy CD's, but if I can't rip them to mp3's, and they don't play on all of my CD players, I'm asking for my money back! I find it ironic Sony, co-creator of the Compact Disc (tm) to be one of the companies to come back to pollute that standard.
As near as I can tell, a truly compliant CD should play on all CD players, conventional or otherwise.
Even though this "allows" some first-generation copies to be made, you can't make a true back-up under this scheme. A copy made under this scheme is NOT a back-up, because if your original is ever damaged, you cannot use the back-up exactly as you did the original (i.e. to make additional back-ups, or burn copies for your own legal fair-use personal use).
....yet again. Buying up content companies is seriously damaging Sony's hardware market. All attempts at making decent hardware get screwed by the media division insisting on locking up everything Sony hardware plays...
Want a multi-region DVD player? Don't buy a Sony. No hidden menus to manage the region, you have to get the player chipped.
Want an ebook reader? Sony have a Librié: nice hardware, apart from the small detail that books that you've paid for evaporate after a few weeks, by design
Then there's the minidisk. Didn't I see something about someone recording his kid's birth/first steps/whatever, then finding out the player refused to let him copy the files....
Playstation? They want to keep all the software locked up
Sony's hardware business is bigger than its media division. Why does the media division decide what the hardware will do? Until they see sense, don't buy Sony.
I mean, that's what they've been telling us. Its not the casual one-on-one that's cutting into sales, but the semi-anonymous sharing of files over p2p networks that is costing them so much revenue.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And then burning from the hard drive? (Aside from the probability that "casual burners" can't figure out actually ripping the CD.)
And, no, I haven't RTFA...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
From the article: Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs
The recording industry seems to be spending most of their money on whatever consitutes that remaining 1/3.
Also: As for more basic CD player compatibility issues, Gilliat-Smith says the discs are compliant with Sony Philips CD specifications and should therefore play in all conventional CD players.
The quote is a distraction that misses the point: copies of these discs are not compatible with audio CD specs. They've really offered us no new useful rights, only the right to keep a low-quality WMA backup of our CDs.
Sony Mini-what?
I just, for the fun of it, picked up to CDs that I bought a year ago that has copy protection. By then, I was not able to rip them to my Linux box or my Apple PowerBook.
Now when I put them in my PowerBook (with Tiger) they both play and rip perfectly! Obvioulsy Apple must have built software that circumvents the copy protection, cause I'm quite certain it didnt work with early version of OS X.
Can anyone else try/confirm this?
Gilliat-Smith says the discs are compliant with Sony Philips CD specifications and should therefore play in all conventional CD players
However, their stated goal is to prevent casual (read "non-technical") users from copying CDs into a free format. So it probably is some auto-run program and/or the data on the disc doesn't match the iso spec so it confuses pc cdrom drives.
It will accomplish this goal, but this idea won't stem piracy. It's an ill-conceived plan sold by a startup that probably knows it won't work to an industry thats grasping for straws. It will force casual users to start learning how to use P2P, which will cause the problem to snowball.
I'm tired of being f*cked up when I buy a CD in a shop, and the CD doesn't play in my Discman or my DVD player.
Protection schemes are only applied in the mainstream production. For the labels that cry they don't earn enough $$$. Crap about that, I don't buy anymore mainstream production. I *much* prefer spending my money for more underground artists who deserve my money *much* more than Britney does.
...you seem to have gotten some stupid in your hyperbole. Just thought you'd like to know.
Casual copying may be aka "Fair Use" to you, and that's part of the reason content providers won't take the opinions of the slashdot crowd seriously. Fair use has a specific legal definition that covers excerpting parts of copyrighted works for research, criticism, reviews, etc. IT DOES NOT COVER COPYING ENTIRE WORKS TO GIVE TO YOUR FRIENDS and no amount of calling everything you think you should be able to do "fair use" makes it so. And before you bring up the Sony case, that only legalized time shifting for personal use, NOT archiving, and NOT sharing with friends.
Some of these things should be made legal, sure, and the RIAA (and MPAA) are a bunch of greedy jackasses. But so are people like you who post on message boards that piracy (which is what you're describing) is "fair use" if you - and the thousands of others who think like you do - only do it a little bit. Stuff like that is exactly what the RIAA needs to justify their heavy handed tactics.
Somebody still has to remind me why CD ripping is different from the 70's & 80's when we would pool our funds for someone to buy the album and make lots of tapes...
Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.
So this will only affect you if you use Windows Media Player. Darwin in action?
If that 90% problem goes away, and the music industry giants stop complaining, we can return to business as usual!
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
It's widely recognized that preventing analog copies is not possible. With an analog copy, there is some quality loss anyways (whether or not it is perceivable is one thing, whether or not people care is another (and people probably don't care considering the popularity of mp3)).
The way I see it there are three types of music artists who are affected differently from record sales. Basicaly there are two revnue streams for an artist, concerts and albums.
The first type of artist makes almost no money, plays small clubs, and maybe has an indie record out. This type of band wants his music to be copied and distributed as much as is humanly possible. Since these bands at best break even, and likely take a loss on recording sessions to make CDs they need the word to spread. When enough people have heard of them in your town they make a couple of bucks playing at the bar on the corner.
The second type of band has a major record deal. They are seing revenue from their album sales and they like it. They think that piracy is bad because their label tells them so. They make most of their money from touring, plus they're living the rock and roll lifestyle (or hip-hop, or whatever) so they really don't care about piracy, so long as people pay to see them in concert.
The third type of band is too popular for their own damn good. They make loads of money from albums and sell out stadiums. They might actually stand to make more money if piracry was made impossible. But can you really feel bad for bands like U2 and Metallica who supposedly are doing it because they love the music, but then bitch about not getting whats theirs?
The moral of the story is the only person who piracy is hurting is the label itself. They see declining sales and have to attribute it to something. Of course their ability to recognise, recruit, and foster talent hasn't waned, so it must be the evil internet.
Look at the the state of rap. When it started with Snoop and NWA back in the day it was edgy and said something about the artists culture. I don't know how it got mainstream exactly, but once it was there we got Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark. Well fortunately that died out quickly, but now that rap is fully main stream we have Ludacris rapping about the Number One Spot, Eminem and his Balls and Every rapper and their cousin talking about Krystal, Bentleys, and rims. No one can honesly say that rap has gotten better with increasing comercialism.
The solution? Get clear chanel radio dismantled under some kind of anti trust lawsuit or something. Allow independent radio stations to take back some ground. Get said local radio stations to not play shitty music (*cough* Ashlee Simpson).
So the summary is that corporate radio (MTV included), and bloated record labels are killing music as an artform. And pircay is biting the greedy bastards in the ass. People will always pay to see a concert. People won't always pay for shitty CDs.
Music is not so interchangable (unless it is one of the manufactured bands).
Yeah, right.
Yeah, uhuh, really looks like they've come up with something solid this time!
Damn I need to get into this DRM developing scam, theres hot profits to be had..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
They claim that 2/3s of their unauthorized copying comes from CD rips. I'll buy that, but they also mention burning CDs in the same sentence. It is this second part of the equation, the CD burning that this DRM addresses, but I don't believe that part of the equation is accutate due to a simple economic analysis.
The analsysis is quite straightforward. Where I live the price of DVD blanks is the same and in many cases actually lower than that of CDs due to the DVD format being the high volume blank disk at this point.
Being that cost is an enormous motivator for all levels of society and even more so for younger people than older I conclude that from this point on into the future as CD blanks only rise in price compared to DVDs that most ripping of CDs will no longer being done one-to-one, but into compressed formats stored on DVD blanks. This DRM scheme they have outlined does not address this technique at all.
Here's your Dr. Phil -=Get Real=-(tm) moment:
The artists I know personally make a living by composing a tune, booking gigs and playing at least a few nights a week. They don't make a living by writing and recording one song/album and living off royalties.
As such, perhaps the Industry should Get Real, and realize that their fantasy of preventing people from copying music/videos just isn't going to work out. Face reality, and restructure the business model, folks. Most people I know who do copy music/movies still spend a lot of money each year buying movie tickets, albums, software they really like/love, and spend money to see live concerts and merchandise.
[...] the school yard piracy, is a huge issue for us...
It's those damn first-graders with their laptops, burning copies of Eminem for each other at recess!
...would just be to record digitally from a high quality audio stream.
I'm sure most people wouldn't care or notice the difference.
Down with IP and all that. I'm a bit more sane now.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
But water is not wet -- only something saturated by water is wet. Spill water on your shirt, your shirt is wet. Pour water on some soil, the soil is wet. Pour water into more water, it's still water.
Ya know I would gladly walk into a store and shell out the $15 for a brand new cd. I have just recently(the new SOAD is awsome) but the thing is even thought the cd I bought was perfect in all ways as System usaully is. I have been burned many time by bands having a great single and the rest of the cd being shit(*cough*Velvet Revolver*cough*)and if bands and labels keep doing that then there is no way that I will stop downloading cds. if I did that I would have know that the cd sucks balls and wasn't worth my hard earned cash. so I say F^CK YOU man i'll grow up when more bands release a good cd not just one or two good songs. then I would gladly pay for a new cd.
ps. I don't have any respect for any companies who want to limit the capabilities of MY computer. sometimes without me knowing.(INTEL)
http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2001-all/samuels-2 001-04-all.html
What's so different about this other than it prevents burning on a CD-ROM? If you want to burn CD's to your heart's content without fear from the man, just follow the law http://www.virtualrecordings.com/ahra.htm.
Link to previous comments on this issue.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=104952&cid=893 7703
While Fair Use does not cover copying and entire work to give to your friend, that act is perfectly legal if you use Music CD-Rs with the music tax on them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
What willstop people from creating iso (.bin, .nrg ect.) images of the discs in their entirety and and uploading/downlaoding them?
On the other hand, if someone made an exact duplicate of all the items in my house, leaving the originals intact, I'd probably shrug and go on about my way.
Repeat after me: COPYING MUSIC IS NOT STEALING. It is a Copyright violation.
Thank you.
Yeah, right.
what about the personal licensing involved?
I remember awhile back, a former employer was getting strong armed into some pretty outrageous licensing fees from BMI and ASCAP. He owned a dance studio, but the music he used wasn't owned by them (for the most part) and they wanted some hefty blanket fees.
Anyways, in the process of researching to help him find a solution, I remember reading about the inherent license that is granted when you purchase a recorded piece of music.
IIRC, playing a recorded piece of music is considered a performance by that artist, hence, they should be reimbursed for that performance. Since the performance is on a recorded medium, the consumer license is granted such that the purchaser can have an unlimited number of personal and private performances (i.e. play it on your stereo). This license was one of the justifications for the high cost of CD's.
So, back to my question: If I've purchased a CD, I've purchased that performance license. So, if I lose my CD, don't I still own the license? So shouldn't I be free to obtain another copy of that song/CD without paying those license fees again? The only relevent costs should be in materials.
So if I purchase an MP3 from itunes, etc....am I granted that same license? And if I download a CD that I've already paid for (maybe pre-order), am I actually breaking any laws as I should be granted the right of performance?
(For those who remember Bresenhams flailing hammer.
If they had any brains left (but lawyers or brains may be an XOR), then they would offer a $10/month you-may-copy-freely free instead of.
They would be making sooo much on that one.
...Then everybody else can download it from bit torrent. DRM has to be 100% leak-free in order to work, and this method is not.
Slashdotters are used to computers, where information is like water in bucket: leave even a tiny hole and it will all leak out. A piece of software is either 100% secure or it's 0% secure.
Lawyers and merchants see things differently. They know that they're going to lose a certain amount of sales to theft/copyright infringement/shrinkage. All they want is to keep it to a manageable level.
So perhaps "copy prevention" is an inaccurate name, and this debate is full of loaded terms, like "piracy" and "copyright infringment" (the first dramatically overstating the case, the other using six syllables to make the fact that you're getting something you didn't pay for seem like an inconsequential legal technicality).
I'll call it "copy inhibition". It slows down copying a little bit. Maybe: once somebody puts it on P2P everybody who wants it can have it nearly instantly. It only takes one person to do the work. After that, it really is like water in a sieve.
If the discs are compliant with the red book specification, then you can rip the tracks to an unencumbered WAV or MP3 with the software of your choice (cdex, EAC, cdparanoia, WMP10, etc. etc.). If the discs are broken so that these programs won't work, then they're not redbook compliant and Sony is lying.
Or maybe that's why they're saying the "Sony Philips" specification rather than the "Philips" specification--maybe that's their bastardized version of the official spec that explicitly allows attempting to break computer recorders.
I guess it could be a valid CD if they just take the SunComm approach--install malware with an autorun program--but that's easily defeated, at least until the RIAA buys a law that forces computers to ignore the Shift key...
Well, it was funny, but I didn't think it was that funny. However, your post sure has inspired me to try write even more funny comments! It sure will be difficult to beat your response, though. Thanks for the feedback!
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Actually, I don't mind this copy protection scheme, which allows you to use your copy and keep the master in a safe place.
The worst aspect of most DRM schemes is that they actually encourage piracy. Consider Windows XP copy protection scheme--it's the reason I haven't bought a copy of XP, and continue to use my old copy of 2000 (hurry up and get games to run on Linux!) Copy protection schemes that prevent CDs from working on old players have made buying CDs a risk. You're much safer just to rip a friend's copy or grab it off the web, since CDs in the stores may now be essentially defective.
But I still prefer digital distribution, because it doesn't require manufacturing. If Google wants to make a buttload of money, they should set up a repository of IP where quality is user moderated and intelligent user profiles will alert you to new music, fiction, etc that you may not have heard yet. Google is the natural for this because of their specialty in data management and searching. The artist sets the price, Google gets a cut for hosting, and you can kiss the Man goodbye.
As for copy protection, forget it, there is always a way around it. We just have to grow up and realize that there is no free lunch. If you don't want to pay for the music you like, well, don't blame anyone else if all the music you hear is stuff that you hate...
First off, this may be fine in the UK or somewhere, but in the US (and possibly Canada) it is perfectly legal to give copies of CDs away. You are not allowed to sell those copies, or "broadcast" (upload) them, but you can, in fact, give them away legally.
Secondly, if you're not going to give it away, why do you need a second copy? BECAUSE DRM MAKES YOUR CD FRAGILE. I bought a second hand copy of Led Zepplin's first album (after buying it several times already in LP and cassette format and having the copies stolen) only to find that tracks three and five on side two wouldn't play in my car, my boom box, or my personal CD player. There were no visible scratches or imperfections, but my inspection did reveal a second data ring, indicating DRM.
You need a second copy for the car (which is a horrible environment for a CD) and one for your house, because you WILL eventually destroy the original if you use it for anything but making copies of. The beauty of digital is you can back it up, and DRM prevents this.
As to my Zepplin CD, I ripped it with Exact Audio Copy and resampled the bad tracks from cassette, using the same (free) software, and added some extra tracks from some other Zepplin CDs. I have yet to find anyone who can tell which tracks are ripped and which are sampled.
DRM is simply evil, although not as evil as bribing congrespeople and senators with campaign cash.
you can copy it. The only way to truly DRM something is to put it inside a listener/viewer's head.
From their website:
XCP aims to offer a reasonable level of protection against 'casual piracy' while working to provide the authorised customer with a quality digital music experience together with DRM features for controlled copying on their chosen platform. If data in any format is digitally written to a compact disc or DVD then it can be read from that disc in some way. XCP is designed to give a level of protection that will make it suitably difficult for the general consumer to copy and/or illegally distribute the content of the disc.
"When it started with Snoop and NWA back in the day..."
Back in the day??!! You're not very old, are you.
As far as I can remember, it all started with Wonder Mike, Master Gee, and Big Bank Hank - three guys known as The Sugarhill Gang, followed up with artists like Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5, Run DMC...
"People will always pay to see a concert. People won't always pay for shitty CDs."
I have to agree with you there.
I have a Windows XP Home CD; I bought it to upgrade my OS in 2002. I had a 8GB hard drive at the time, was stupid and put the install on a 2GB partition, not realizing how much more disk space applications take when they want to be installed on the C: drive...
I bought a new hard drive, made one big 20GB partition, installed XP again. The old drive was formatted and thrown in as a slave.
Last year, the computer was acting up by randomly hardware faulting the USB device, so I got a new computer with a new copy of WinXP Pro. I copied everything to the new PC, and mothballed the old hardware.
I start it up last month to be a spare PC; get the old hard drive, install WinXP Home again, and a week later the damn motherboard shorted out. I buy a new barebones system, throw a new hard drive in, and install WinXP Home again... only this time, Microsoft's install process says that my CD Key is no longer valid.
Now, I've grossed at least 4 installs with a net of zero working installations of WinXP Home... How is DRM and these sorts of copy protections supposed to help me, the legitimate and honest consumer? I didn't spread around copies of WinXP, I had legitimate problems with the installations. Do I really own my own software if I can't get past the authorization?
Messing with CDROM drivers is scummy enough, but could they be messing with network drivers too?
A pass-through NDIS driver would make a grat tool for spying on, oh, say, p2p traffic?
Seconded.
You only have to look at the "no brand" food in a supermarket in the UK to realise that the price of "branded" stuff is 50% advertising. Whilst a market predicated on satisfying the needs of brainwashed 14 year old girls is undoubtedly profitable, it is also a far more reliable indicator of "The end of days" than any loony branch cult prediction. Any half observant god would be dropping twin towers sized chunks of sodium chlorate from orbit by now in order to exterminated the weeds and get a good clean restart from a sterile base.
Shares in EMI music collapsed on the rumour that the new Coldplay cd was going to be delayed by a couple of months past year end. The new Coldplay cd could be utter bollocks musically speaking but if its a bit like the last one then it will sell ten million copies on the back of advertising and massive hype. (actualy not realy my taste but it sounds fine to me).
Speaking with a degree of expertise that the status of old git entitles me to : Something the music industry does not seem to have recognised is that most of the youth of today think that music as a thing in itself is bollocks. No one talks about it and no one is interested in it. I dont know why this is but outside of a passing interest in boy/girl bands knowledge of and interest in recorded music is zero by the time people start work. They buy boxed set dvd's of tv shows instead. This may be because pop music has now matured and has ceased to be culturally relevant - in which case the desperate attempt by the music business of today to screw the brainwashed customer one last time is irrelevant. Recorded music is finished, relegated to the trash heap of quaint old history like the music hall and fox hunting. On the other hand it could be because todays brittiny spears sounds just like yesterdays brittiny spears and just like tomorrows brittiny spears and we would probably get more entertainment out of projectile vomiting than listening to her (and I mean doing it not watching).
The one thing that does seem clear to me is that I cannot afford to buy any more recorded music, I spend the money I have on live music. They could start burning file sharers at the stake in front of the local Tower records and I wouldnt buy one more cd, not even if they put their eyes out with battery acid first. Meanwhile I will be tuning into one of several thousand available internet radio streams wondering when they are going to be stopped in order to entice me to buy more cds.
Bugger that, its time I had another go at learning bass guitar or better still the Djembe - its more sociable.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Or the fact that the law, or logic for that matter doesn't constitute the act of taking something without payment as theft, but instead it is taking something without permission, payment being A FORM OF permission, as theft. The reason being if the definition was so simple, everybody would in some way be guilty of this moral and legal crime, and have to face punishment, so it was made much more specific to some people, while others, like the RIAA and MPAA/BSA perpetuate this idea to this day.
Stating that copyright infringement is not theft is not only a legal technicality, but also shows people don't buy into over broad definitions either.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
the cd audio standard is by itself completely without DRM (if you ignore the pathetic copyright flag that all software ignore). in order to hack on a drm scheme that's truly effective you would have to break compatibility with 99.99999% of all cd audio players in the world today.
so you can see why this is a complete and utter failure. even on a windows machine... people use their own software to extract audio and write to new discs. and with autoplay turned off or disabled temporarily, this hasn't a chance in hell of working. even modestly smart computer users can break this in their sleep. and those who aren't can simply ask one of their more capable friends to do it for them.
dvd-audio and sacd though on the other hand, those are worthless DRM-encumbed formats that are anti-customer. hopefully they'll never become more than a niche.. even if the RIAA were to be disbanded, DRM shouldn't ever be used by anyone.
robbing us of our cultural heritage is high treason as far as i'm concerned.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
their ATARC thingy didnt work the first time... in fact i believe they released a public admission it was a failure... yet they are back to their old games. when will companies learn people wont buy DRM crippled stuff when their are free non-DRM alternatives.
Mike
I heart the RIAA & MPAA, im sure its mutual...
I guess all the time and money I put into ripping my cd's into a central music server so I could play streaming music to all rooms of my house was wasted.
As for a workaround, couldn't you just use a bitwise copy of the CD (a la, copying PS2 games) to make perfect (uncopiable) copies? I also don't think it will be very long until someone writes a nifty little program to tell your CDROM not to read the data tracks off of a CD, thereby defeating the ripping protection.
As of today (it *is* 2005, isn't it?), I thought everybody *knew* that DRM is a cryptographic impossibility. After all, Bob and Eve are one and the same... How do you send a message to someone if you don't want said person to hear?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Get an audio CD burner that ignores SCMS (an old retarded DRM system that sets a no-copy bit on audio CDs) and can use plain CD-Rs that accepts digital input. They can be pricey, though, as they are marketed as pro equipment (the "consumer model" ones you can find at Circuit City and the like typically honor SCMS and require those "audio" CD-Rs). The one I have is a HHB from several years ago. However, it can blast through any DRM brain damage because if a CD player can play to a digital output the recorder can copy it. The resulting copy will be both SCMS free and free of whatever brain dead DRM scheme was used on the original. This copy can then be ripped normally to MP3 or whatever.
Sure, this can also be done entirely with a PC if you have the correct setup, but as a standalone audio recorder is not a PC no DRM scheme that could cripple a PC can affect it. Also, your copy is better in general since the recorder is designed to be high quality audio equipment.
Although as a developer who has some experience with Microsoft's DDK I'd expect that if they started working on an intermediate NDIS driver in late 2002 they might have a prototype ready as early as 2006.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
slow day at the
I agree with your point, but your timeline does not support your argument. "N.W.A. and the Posse" (NWA) came out in 1987, so the timelein works for you there. And "To The Extreme" (Vanilla Ice) came out in 1990, so far so good. "Music for the People" (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) came out in 1991. But Snoop first appeared on "The Chronic" (Dr. Dre), which was released in 1992. If you subsitute "Ice-T" for "Snoop", then I think you make a sound argument.
However, I believe it was the phenomenal success of "The Chronic" and Snoop's album "Doggystyle" that brought rap to the mainstream. Once the record industry saw the huge amount of money they could make, all the formulaic rap artists started appearing. I wouldn't even stretch to call Vanilla Ice or Marky Mark "rap". I believe there is a big difference between that dance-oriented hip-hop and rap. The line is blurred often since the same artist will produce both styles of music, and both styles will even appear on the same albums.
I can't wait to see how this copy plays in my car player.
For that matter, aren't WMA files just files? Can't the be copied like any other files?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sony is losing money on their sales of CD burners, Sony begins demanding more piracy to cover the losses.
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
somebody mod parent up, this is important.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
If you have a non-Windows machine that doesn't autoexecute anything because that's clearly a security risk, the DRM is completely ineffective. This sounds like either a major oversight, rampant ignorance, or both, on the part of the developers. Or maybe they believe "this linux thing" is just a fad. It amazes me that this sort of serious security risk would be employed as a method of controlling data access at a time in US history when security is a major industry.
i think what they're missing is that there is always a digital equivilent to "rip" to. And then ofcourse anyone can burn that back to a CD. I guess the argument is that this prevents casual copying but any moron who can visit download.com can use this method.
netkev.com
For a few years, we've had access to so-called "Free" music, but at what cost? Restrictions on our technologies, a movie industry that has treated the GNU/Linux communities as hostile by default, and more and more draconian laws.
As long as the big industry lobbies can get away with it, any technology will be restricted, any competitor will be hostile and any law will be draconian. In defending your economic interests, restraint is defeat. Counter-pressure is the only remedy. If there was no CD burning, we'd be looking at 50$ per album. If you call this cynicism, you haven't understood that "Free Market" equals "Extreme Competition" equals "War".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks, and replace that content with new, original work, devising new and innovative ways to fund it.
It's beautiful posts like this that make me sad. This is the exact thing they are trying to prevent, the RIAA only sees new and innovative methods of distribution as making them obsolete. They have lost their original focus of bringing music to the masses, instead they are trying to dictate culture and control what we see and listen to.
Whatever happened to the talent scouts that would live out of trailer houses scouring this country for that awesome local bar band or church group that would take this country by storm? Whatever happened to the love of music that defined the music industry for the first 60 years of its existance.
Are people like Barry Gordy and John Hammond really gone forever? Sure they wanted to make a buck, but more importantly they wanted to bring the joy and healing power of music to the masses. Is this sort of idealism really gone to be replaced by a race to mediocrity?
I just saddens me that there is no one willing to stand up against the established system to bring the old ways back. To bring the love of music back, to enrich and strengthen our society through music.
Besides, all it takes is one person to realize that you can record ANYTHING coming out of your sound card and *bammo* these songs are available for illegal download. All this technology will do is infringe on the rights of all honest consumers. The dishonest consumers will find a way around it.
I agree that copyrights should be protected, but not at the expense of consumer rights.
Either the music industry is performing really bad studies on copyright infringement or they haven't done any studies at all and are just making up numbers to scare people into thinking a problem is bigger than it really is. I hate it how the RIAA and its friends are always shifting what the big problem is in order to compensate for their outdated marketing model. Yesterday it was online piracy, today it's school yard piracy, tomorrow it will be non-commitment piracy because you didn't buy your government-mandated 3 CDs a month to keep the recording industry alive.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Even without the auto executing program the disc is still hard to copy. All the programs I tried CDEx EAC and ISO Buster all see the tracks as data and refuse to read them.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
I'm sorry, but I'd argue that p2p only costs major label sellout bands, and doesn't touch small local artists who actually need that cash to succeed.
Say I download the new Oasis album. They're all millionaire twats, so should I feel guilty? Buying that CD is only going to put more into their smug pockets and that of their major record company.
I have to buy CDs for small, local, upcoming bands because their material isn't avaliable online. Proceeds of their home-produced CDs and ticket sales go to buying them equipment, getting them further gigs, and hopefully that band will get spotted and eventually make it big.
I won't feel guilty downloading their platinum album on Sony, knowing that two years ago I made or breaked it for that band.
You only need to be able to rip the original CD once. Rip it with clonecd, use that to produce an ISO file, then re-burn that file to as many other blank CDs as you like. After that, it won't matter if you can't extract an ISO again...although I'd have serious doubts about not being able to, because how does the machine distinguish between that an ordinary reading?
Back to the old drawing board, guys.
Here's the thing. I agree with everyone who's replied to me so far, I'm just trying to explain why Sony would do such a thing. They believe they're being robbed, they believe that copyright infringers are thieves, and this gives them the beliefs that they have the rights to protect their "homes" any way possible and they're not moving. I believe that I won't be playing devil's advocate anymore.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
> if someone made an exact duplicate of all the items in my house, leaving the originals intact, I'd probably shrug and go on about my way.
including your financial records? the computer containing your email and im logs? the Great American Novel you've been writing for 4 years?
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
How about, instead of trying to rationalize why I should run Kazaa or something else that uses up all my bandwidth to download free songs, movies and other trash, I simply don't bother wasting my time? I don't download crappy content I know I won't enjoy, and my decision costs me nothing.
The MPAA isn't pleased with people like me, who throw $6.50 their way via a matinee showing every two years, and that's only if I get dragged to the theatre by my workmates. To add insult to injury, very few of the DVDs I buy pad the coffers of the MPAA. Likewise, the RIAA is pretty pissed at people like me, who just STOPPED buying mainstream CDs 10 years ago, and only buy used CDs these days. But the RIAA doesn't have too much to gripe about, seeing how they're getting 75% of the iTunes Music Store money I spend, and even then it's not the hundreds every month they'd -really- want me to spend.
If something regarding the content is problematic (WMA-only files, no true a-la-carte cable channel selection, 100 channels of digital turds posing as a cable "product," highly-priced cable, movies and CDs, 20min of commercials before the previews, etc), I'll learn to live without that content. This philosophy works (for me), after all, and I get to keep my money. It's my very small way of letting offending entities know that they should eat shit and die without breaking any laws, real or imagined.
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
All they do, is supply some software (which I bet only runs on one single platform -- guess which one) which will encode the music in some weirdo proprietary format that most CD players cannot play. Then they let you make one copy of those unplayable files.
And somewhere, some snakeoil salesman is snickering that idiots in the music industry bought into this "technology." This is yet anecdote that makes me think, "ya know, I really ought to try out evil, at least for a few months. Just defraud a few people, then retire. It looks so damn easy!"
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, new art needs to be supported, and that means paying the artist their due for whatever they produce that you enjoy. However, when art becomes coopted by business, it is no longer art per se. It is instead a money making scam, sold under the guise of art. In order to avoid this, we need access to the art before purchase, in order to discern between a cleverly designed smash and grab pop album meant to thieve money, and a thoughtful considerate and sincere album, made to sell on its own merits.
The so called heroes you refer to are doing exactly that, allowing us to discern between art and business scam, and they deserve their fame for doing so.
Needless to say, "if you like it, buy it", should be a mantra most file shares abide by. This does not mean purchasing an album of which you only like one track. It means purchasing something that on the whole strikes you as good art. When this happens, the only money being lost is the stolen money from corporate marketing scams, and when it comes to that there is no sympathy.
I predict the following scenario: Nobody will use any of their suggested DRM software to burn CDs but stick to the regular CD burning software using proven file formats. Sony and others will have to give up their DRM technology simply because nobody uses it.
"Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs"
and here I'd been brainwashed into thinking that it was mostly from P2P networks...
House of Pain sucks. I only listen to legitimate artists like Will Smith and Lil' Jon.
I've been a fan of Bruce Springsteen since 1976: owned every thing on vinyl and even bought the 45s (to get the B-side songs) and 12-inch remixes in the 80s. I bought my first cd player forty minutes after I bought the Springsteen 3 CD Live set (the person at the register was the drummer for Toad the Wet Sprocket, trivia fans).
I didn't buy the recent release because it wasn't a standard CD. (And no, I haven't gone and downloaded it from the net.) While I listen to my music from ripped mp3s on hard drive, I like having the CDs, because hard drives are a little too volatile. Should I ever make an administrative (obviously dumb something you would never do) mistake, I can live with re-ripping the cds. All these schemes to try and prevent some presumed nefarious activity on my part which increases the hassle factor for my enjoyment of music will not be tolerated and my dollars will go somewhere else.
I'm also not too crazy about buying a movie ticket and being yelled at in the theatre before the feature about the movie downloading I am clearly not doing, but that's another story.
From "The Article":
"The industry is keen to make sure that is not abused by making copies for other people that would otherwise go buy a CD."
I wouldn't otherwise go buy the CD, so....hand me another blank please......[click][burn]Thanks!
Glad they finally realize that not everyone who wants a copy is a prospective paying customer.
"here is no value-added from their distribution and it's no longer required. Their business model has gone the way of the milkman and the icehouse."
If that's all you think a music label does, then you're too clueless to be posting about the music business.
Vote for Pedro
As stated earlier in the thread, the TOC is slightly malformed. Not malformed enough to stop the CD playing on a cheapo CD player, but enough to confuse ripping programs. Enough to confuse them for about a couple of weeks, that is.
Ah. So you have permission to download Mandy Moore's latest album off P2P. Good to know.
go to a show and buy merch there.
Yes, do not forget to feed The Merch.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
"I'm tired of being f*cked up when I buy a CD in a shop, and the CD doesn't play in my Discman or my DVD player."
It's happened often enough for you to get tired of it? As in "more than once?" Ok, or you got tired the first time (I would, sure).
What were the titles? What labels were they on? What retail shop sold them? What were the prices?
My argument against DRM is from the other direction. I don't want recording devices to abridge my rights or impede my access to material that I write, perform and record. And in order to preserve these rights, I must pay sustantially higher prices for recording media and recorders, because while consumer recorders would be good enough, they come at the cost of my rights to MY digital product, or impede my access to my product, or both.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"And we want to put all our songs into a player -- an iPod or whatever. This method seems to support neither -- though it's not really that clear about "discs" vs. tracks in the article, which is a pretty basic point to be vague about here. Still:
Among the biggest headaches: Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device,
To use it with your player, you need to go with the MS DRM. Doink. Try again please. "
Here's the full quote:
"Among the biggest headaches: Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device, because Apple Computer has yet to license its FairPlay DRM for use on copy-protected discs."
Vote for Pedro
Well, at least its not as bad as forcing the casual movie renter to supply their fingerprint that must be embedded onto an rfid then the renter has to put in in their dvd device which will also require their fingerprint to playback only once. These corporations are worse than commies! Way worse! Pfff, Sony Baloney has had the worst formats. The worst: MD DVD+R BlueRay PSP UMD Mememory Stick Betamax
By making it temporarily inconvenient for Joe Listener to burn CDs, this scheme will create an incentive for *more* piracy.
People don't want CDs any more. They want some convenient/useful format. And few people will want to go to the trouble to digitally capture the audio at 1x and segment it based upon someone's track times. Then, I suppose, someone will develop a player that "plays" over USB2 or something.
So, to hell with it - we'll just get a copy from someone who bothered.
I hate paying $15 for CDs that have two or three catchy tracks on them, so normally I buy used CDs. That is a bummer for the artists, but I can't own 800 ripped CDs any other way.
when will the record companies get a clue, people don't want this crap
they want to be able to take any CD they have spent hard erned $$$ on, and do what ever they like with it
not be forced to use windoze (wma is windoze only, right!), not be able to copy tracks to the ipod etc
in my case, I have a huge CD collection (all legit!!) but have ripped every track I like into mp3 and play them using itunes on my laptop, which makes life much easier when traveling
to me, the first one of these CDs that I make the mistake of buying goes back to the store
they think this crap is going to stop piracy, total BS, its going to drive more people to illegal downloads
on the positive side, it will be cracked wide open eventually
Ok, so this is really Yet Another story of how p2p can advertise and promote artists, but somehow with an extra twist.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
"The casual piracy, the school yard piracy, is a huge issue for us,"
Schoolyard piracy? I thought all this was about stopping organised crime and those making large amounts of money from copying CDs *tongue firmly in cheek* ?
So what happens if you had a bad CD when you first burned the disk. Now your SOL.
Damn, stop infringing on my rights to make a freaking copy. O'well, I guess there are going to be a whole lot of returns to the local computer store.
Just a little fucking "heads up" for Sony, here.
If you pull any kind of shit like this with Blu-Ray, you can just squat right down on one of those Japanese toilets of yours and pinch off a loaf. Blu-Ray will look just like that, and you'll god damn flush Blu-Ray, just like that.
I'll take a cheaper 12GB per layer if it's not any worse than 25GB per layer. Your call.
If you're feeling paranoid enough, how about some other questions that same developer has asked around other forums. Try piecing something together.
So we are left with the Happy hackers' method: dd(1) the bits, chop it up into songs, strip of the headers. Then you've got .raw files to play with, and can burn them to anything you want. 'Casual' users on windows are driven crazy, the rest of us mightn't even notice.
Of course, the probability of the music on these disk being something anyone would want to hear is infinitesmal.
Local Office Depot raided on suspicion of possession and distribution of circumvention paraphernalia- hundreds of crates of illegal marking devices were discovered, valued at at least 20 cents each.
As long as media has to get proper information out to the viewer in its original format, no copy protection will work work 100% you can go ahead and make it a hassle, like the Game companies have on the PC, but in the end does it ever work? Do you think this has stopped bootleg copies of works around the world? No. Companies just need to grin and bear it not develop orewelling technologies. Most sane people know that if they dont pay for music then the people making the music will stop doing so because it is unprofitable, but enough people still buy music that the justification for anti-piracy is stupid. They just want to squeeze more dollars out of the teens from or their parents.
* sell us reasonablely priced music
* give the money to who earned it, the musicians
there's always going to be a backdoor, more hardcore theives will always find a way. but if you sell music that is not outrageously priced, i bet more people will buy it rather than pirate it.
This simply wouldn't last.
The reason? In the end you need D/A converters to turn digital streams into analog, needed to produce sound.
Unless the record pimps find a way to bribe electronics manufactorers to only sell D/A converters DRM-ed to hell and back (and even then, some rich geek could use a laboratory grade ultra-high-precision A/D converter to resample), you could just grab the digital stream from the D/A's inputs and store it.
It takes just a single DRM-free digital copy to spread music to the world, no matter how much DRM it had before it was ripped.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
You can burn a CD-R from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy.
Wanna bet?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
yeah , but the new SOAD album is also a big fat 36 minutes , and some of the song have turned way too mainstream (well , ok mainstreamer , SOAD has been mainstream for a long while)
YEAH!
This kind of copy protection is usually full of ...W sub-channels in non-standard
shit; if you look at the CD spec, you will find
dozens of different formats + lots of ways of of
using the P,Q
usage _but_ the cheapo cd-player firmware usually
assumes a (final) TOC with CD-DA tracks without
mute in Q-subchannel. as its world.
If you read a CD on most burners you can get
(a) all TOCs + the complete interim track table
(b) the write calibration data
(c) all track data
(d) all sub-channel data for each track
(e) inter track + inter session, ie lead-in/out
data
(f) ATIP data (absolute time in pre-groove)
With this you can ignore the junk, and just rip the audio data you want,
and usually it is trivially easy ie set session/track/mode read data
and then re-write that data as a vanilla CD_DA track, withoute mute.
Alright my rap argument might be a bit off, and extremely simplified, granted. It was off the cuff, and your I'm in my early 20's so I am going with what I recall. I know there were earlier rappers, run DMC not least of all, but the point I was trying to make was that $$$ is bad for art. I think Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark saw the commercial success of earlier rappers and saw a market. Now I dont' think it was as contrived as all that. But I doubt Vanilla would have felt drawn to it if it was still a bunch of under appreciated kids from LA.
Now while I didn't mean to imply a racial link as one poster pointed out, eminem is the first serious white rapper I can think of (unless you count Sno.) Its just so easy to laugh at the goofy white kids (myself not excluded)... And while I think he legitametly is driven to produce for the sake of the music I think the quality has gone down as his bank account has soared.
IMHO, and I'm not that into the genre, rap hit its golden age w/ Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, and Dre. Those guys made some serious cash, now those that came before them might have had some success, but it was orders of magnitude different. Those that saw the success of gansta rap were undoubtably influenced by the money.
It was post gansta rap that we started hearing about benzes, then bentlies, then yahts, planes, and anything that was bigger and better.
Now hopefully this is just part of the ebb and flow of the genre and it really isn't all downhill from here.
Honestly, what could reading the disk do differently when you copy a CD as opposed to playing a CD? Worst-case scenario, you make an image of the CD before you burn it. Either that, or you hook up a cd player to your Line In jack. Anywho, if disks like this actually come out, I'm sure the Open Source community will find a way around it.
It's called "read/write-many". You copy your digital medium as many times as you please, use it however you please, and best of all it is backward compatible with common hardware!
IIRC isn't there already a surcharge on blank CDs... JUST IN CASE they're used for that sort of piracy? Or is that just urban myth?
... does that mean that anyone caught defeating it is a "professional" pirate? Imagine in court:
"Your honor, we have measures in place to defeat the casual pirate, the regular joe who copies the occasional CD. The only people who can defeat these measures are intelligent and corrupt individuals who seek to destroy the music industry for their own gain. Since the defendant has successfully broken our protection, he is therefore a professional pirate! This is why we are seeking ten million dollars in damages, rather than our usual ten thousand. We must send a strong message to those who would steal from the wallets of hardworking sound booth technicians and CD press workers to pad their own bank accounts."
But ultimately, we need be[tt]er solutions.
Yes, lets just throw beer at a problem and hope it will solve itself.
OB Simpsons Quote: Alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Try dd_rescue, it is designed specifically for reading from media littered with read errors.
You mean, like playing it only on licensed players running only on some operating systems and not on anything embedded at all because the market was too small to bother? Not able to copy a song to a car radio and then retrieve it back after somebody broke/lost the original medium? Not able to do $function as the makers of the $whatever didn't think the consumers should have that much power over it (see DVD players that refuse to obey fast forward over certain parts of the disk)? Not able to buy $whatever on another continent (see DVD zoning)? Enough, or should I continue?
You don't have to go there. They are all eager to expand their policies to you, wherever you are - some places they conquer, other they strongarm through trade policies and international "threaties".
Are you not happy to comply? Then you must be a terrorist.
eminem is the first serious white rapper I can think of
What about Beastie Boys? And you think "Informer" (Sno) is any more "serious rap" than "Ice Ice Baby". I can buy Sno's album in Japan for under 1 dollar. That is not the sign of a good artist.
There are, however, known distortions in markets. Some of the biggest ones are monopolies. This is exactly that case (well, an oligopoly anyway): when very few conglomerates control both the product and the means or distribution (or at least an overwhelming percentage of them), they screw the market by leveraging that power into nearly impassable barriers to entry by potential competitors.
Of course, for many monopolies to succeed, another great power is needed: the backing of the State. Considering the current Intellectual Property laws in several parts of the world, and most notably the US (where a very significant percentage of the most popular entertainment media is produced), they also have that backing.
So, in the end, this is a problem that should be solved by well-functioning markets (although that is a hotly contested definition; many of us believe that markets need a certain amount of regulation to make them work "right"). However, the previous two distortions are creating artificial scarcities and screwing the many for the profit of a few.
Actually, I don't mind this copy protection scheme, which allows you to use your copy and keep the master in a safe place.
No it doesn't. Not unless your boombox and car CD player and CD-walkman and your Mac and your Linux box and everything else can play Microsoft Windows Media DRM files. Oh, and of course if you bring your CD over to a friend's house you better hope his CD player can play Microsoft Windows Media DRM files as well.
This scheme forbids you to burn actual audio CDs.
Copy protection schemes that prevent CDs from working on old players have made buying CDs a risk. You're much safer just to rip a friend's copy or grab it off the web
Yep, absolutely no point in buying these Sony CD's. Sony is refusing to allow you to pay for a normal working product, you have no choice but to download it for free if you want a functional product.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Scan it. Run the bitmaps through a script that converts the page to grayscale and then normalizes it - voila, black/white. Print on a laser printer. Most of this can be scripted, so you have only to flip pages, if your scanner can't do it automatically.
Copy protection doesn't work.
Return my tax on Music CD-Rs. That is, unless I can copy these things infinitely onto Music CD-Rs, that I pay a tax for piracy.
It's not a problem for guys like you and me. But once my mom tries this and has to reinstall Windows. Watch out. That is one pissed off customer.
And all to stop music piracy.
Every new DRM just makes it harder to listen to your damn music.
or else!
Like I don't do that every few months anyway.
We need to devise ways of keeping unauthorized music away from the P2P networks
Toss in some magic pixie dust and we'll solve "peace on Earth and good will toward all men" while we're at it. Chuckle.
compromises
The problem is that there isn't really a compromise to be had in the battlefeild they have chosen to wage war in. The problem is that they are not actually targeting infringment. This battle is NOT about infringment.
They are targeting abilities. Not a battle about crime - a battle about abilities.
Aside from the fact that the RIAA's primary motivation is to prohibit your very suggestion, they desire to block the rise of indy music, the RIAA is refusing to accept anything less that total control and denying people the ability to infringe.
And on the other side there are people who will refuse to be denied the ability to LEGAL AND NONINFRINGING USE.
The line between infringment and noninfringing often lies in intent. Nothing short of a mindreading DRM system can determine something is intended for a perfectly legal educational classroom use, and nothing short of a full blown AI mindreading DRM can detect humor and satirical use.
DRM and the targeting of the ability to infringe inherently means targeting the ability of legal noninfringing use as well. There isn't any posibility to compromize in in this region. If people have the ability to make infringing use then the DRM becomes completely worthless, then the DRM loses any ability to prohibit anything.
The really big point is that attempting to legally enforce DRM itself inherently requires criminalizing innocent and noninfringing people. If noninfringing use is legal and the ability to noninfringing use is legal then the ability to infringe is available. You are then back at the original situation of only prosecuting infringers. Back to the challenge of identifying actual infringers. Back to the hassle of prosecuting actual infringers. Back to the bad PR of actually prosecuting infringers. Back to the exactly what the RIAA wanted NOT to be doing.
If you don't have a law saying that noninfringers go to prison then people have the ability to remove DRM. If people have the ability to remove DRM they have the ability to infringe. You are then back to enforcing actual copyright law against actual infringers.
The RIAA refuses to accept actual copyright law.
I, and others, refuse to accept the notion that you can imprison innocent people simply because you don't want to bother with the hassle of actually going after the guilty.
The right of the innocent not to be imprisoned comes first.
I'd also be somewhat more sympathetic to the RIAA if they hadn't created their own damn problem. They conspired to deny any online sales at all for over half a bloody decade. They imposed a market vacuum. Well, nature and markets both abhor a vacuum. By conspiring to abuse their power and by refusing to sell their product online, they CREATED the P2P explosion. A black/grey market sprang up to fill that vacuum. For five+ years they denied any legal market. Had they SOLD their damn product in the first place online sales would have been booming. P2P would not have become what what it did. And on top of that, now they are trying to compete with 'free' by selling a crippled product (not to mention an overpriced product). You *can* compete with free by offering a better and faster and valuable service (not to mention legal service). The legit sales would have been been booming for nearly a decade now, and P2P would have been developed at a snails pace, and lawsuits against the handfull of people using that P2P would have had far more impact. But you can't compete with free-AND-better. Especially not after giving people no choice but to become entrenched into P2P for half a decade.
The RIAA tried to abuse their monopoly power to deny and control the internet market - and they did so largel
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Yeah actually it happened twice. It's *way* too much for me. I agree artists and even the music industry need to protect their work from stealing, but CD was *not* designed to be copy protected, back in 1982. So new copy protection techniques will only upset legitimate customers.
It was a joke I don't think Sno was a serious rapper. As for the Beasties, I don't really think they fit in the rap genre, I think their influence extends further in the rock world. As to why this is I don't know, but hey just my opinion...
The thing is - are sales of albums with copy protection really higher than those without. Do we continously see BMG music higher up the album sales charts than someone like Island who actually add features to help computer users, or do we see them lower?
I'm not convinced BMG sales are higher.
I thought it was just the Bush Administration ;-)
> "When it started with Snoop and NWA back in
:-)
> the day"
I don't recall Snoop and NWA being around in the 70s.
(Not that I would mind a Snoop/Dre cover of "Rapper's Delight", anyone heard of one, maybe a live cover?)
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Just copy the copy? Who cares about the original if you can just use the copy for your "sharing" needs?
I also don't think that Eminiem is any more serious than the others who came before him, like 3rd Bass and House of Pain.