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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 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!"
While selling music people want to hear is, presumably, of lesser importance than "utmost".
--
make install -not war
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
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.
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.
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.
From TFA: 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."
But I still don't trust it and even moreso, I don't like my CD's to be crippled in any way, even backups. What if I lose the original, and can't backup my backup. Ugh. My head hurts.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
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.
They're not wasting their money. They're wasting our money. When you buy a new PC now, you're paying for the DRM that they put in it that you didn't ask for. This will just be another thing rolled into the price. Then if they can strongarm the big PC manufacturers to include it, the only way to avoid it will be to build your own system. I really recommend the Shuttle xPC form factor - small, quiet, cheap. ;')
Tricky wording in the article, but I believe they're saying you can't copy the copy; you can only make verbatim copies of the original.
Still stupid though! Repeat after me, Sony:
If you can play it, you can copy it.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Because it makes it hard enough.
Sometimes, the object you want to protect only needs to be broken once to get everywhere -- i.e. mp3 trading on the internet. However, in the cases where this isn't true, you don't need to make this impossible. Just hard. You can photocopy a book page-by-page -- there's no DRM tech there. But it's hard, and so books worked. There's no reason to expect that you can't curb non-internet CD ripping this way; if they make it hard enough for the average Joe to rip a CD, schoolyard piracy mostly vanishes. That's not an unsolvable problem like p2p seems to be.
So I hadn't heard the two-thirds figure. That sounds kinda crazy.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
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.
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?
No, fair use allows for any use, so long as it is fair. There's some tests to check for fairness, but there is no kind of use that can never be fair (or that always is).
As for who cares, I care. The point of having backups is that you expect that eventually you'll lose the master. In such a case, you'd better be able to make further backups from backups.
But more significantly, what happens when the copyright expires? I can then lawfully make as many copies, from whatever source I have handy, for any purpose at all. Will this DRM magically evaporate? Or will it keep me from enjoying my rights?
That's the problem with DRM. It is inflexible, it is permanent, and it is designed with stupid assumptions in mind. We're better off getting rid of DRM altogether.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
"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!
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?
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.
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.
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
Sony has a simple solution: STOP SELLING Sony brand CDRs!! -of course, theirs has such a high error ratio that I usually buy TDK...
To use an analogy: if a company sells super fast car engines, then wrings hands about all the terrible speeders on the highway, hypocrisy has found a new watershed.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
But I still don't trust it and even moreso, I don't like my CD's to be crippled in any way, even backups. What if I lose the original, and can't backup my backup. Ugh. My head hurts.
Notice how none of these folks hoisting DRM on us are even trying a little bit to help us with these concerns? They're telling us that they're giving us limited licenses to music, movies or software, but they have very few, if any, provisions to help us get replacement media if ours happens to fail.
The reason for this is very clear to me. They make money off of me buying the same music more than once. Furthermore, by limiting the copying of digital music, they're actaully guaranteeing that I'll need to buy the same music more than once if I should ever have to, or just want to, replace my computer.
They're complaining about casual piracy, but what they're giving us in return is forced obsolecense for something that shouldn't by its nature have any shelf life at all. They won't come out and say it, but they're happy that Vinyl, tapes and CDs were so fragile and they're kind of pissed that the technology exists for us to keep our music forever. Remember that line from Men In Black? "Now I'll have to buy the White Album again." They actually count on us paying multiple times for the exact same product. It's a business model.
Look, if it's just a license, then give me a way to keep that license if my media goes bad. If it's just media, then let me treat it like it's media and stop treating me like a criminal if I want to copy it. If you're going to declare war and force me to upgrade my media every few years, don't be surprised if I take your challenge and find a way to, well, not make that upgrade. You already got my money once so leave me alone.
Ripping the tracks from a copied CD to MP3s and then burning them back on to a CD ...
... is probably the most stupid thing i ever heard. If you rip the music from the CD why would you save it as MP3 instead of a lossless codec before burning it back to CD. BTW, Sony's New Copy Protection is nothing special. It even adheres to RedBook standards. The only thing preventing copy is a program running from the CD when using a certain Redmond OS.
Move Sig. For great justice.
Too bad that the use of said pen is a violation of the DMCA (circumventing access control).
The whole IP issue has just become disgraceful. How long will this go on before people realize that the model is fundamentally flawed?
I watched testamony given to a U.S. Senate subcomittee by a researcher (from MIT, IIRC) where he bluntly said that whatever can be heard can be copied. The only way to prevent unauthorized copies is not to let anyone hear the music. All attempts at labeling unauthorized copying as "stealing" have fallen flat because of the lack of logic (to the layman) in "stealing" something without quantity. At some point we have to acknowledge that this problem is unique and requires a unique solution.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
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.
And how exactly do you propose to fight them back? In courts? You will be buried instantly under paperwork and litigation costs (see Bruce Almighty for example).
Well, actually I was refering to a fight that's a bit more subtle. I'm normally a pretty good boy. I buy CDs. I avoid p2p. I've even downloaded from iTunes (though it's not my preference because of the aforementioned forced obsolecence and because of the lower music quality). But if my iTunes music goes belly up because I can't get a proper backup then I won't even consider buying another copy. I'll "pirate" it.
Right now I have a few hundred cassettes. Some are in fairly bad shape because cassettes are kind of fragile. I'll be damned if I'm going to rebuy all of U2's and the Talking Heads' early work just because the music industry is going to lable me a "pirate" if I don't. I bought that stuff once and I'll continue to use it, through downloads if neccessary.
It pisses me off because I really do try to do the right thing. I know it's not fair to just download thousands of dollars worth of music that I never paid for so I just don't do it. But I'll be damned if someone is going to tell me I have to re-buy music I already own. Think about it, they're doing this and at the same time labling _me_ the pirate. Just who is robbing who?
TW
- Bob buys new Carrie Underwood CD.
- Bob puts new CD in his Windows boxen.
- Windows Media Player auto-runs.
- Bob selects Rip from WMP.
- WMP recognizes some Clever Sony Bits on the CD and adds some Clever Sony Bits to the WMA files, making them WMA+CSB files.
- Later... Bob decides to make a copy of his new CD to give to his friend.
- Bob puts blank CD in his computer selects burn from his computer's default CD burning software
- The CD burning software goes through Windows to convert the WMA+CSB files to wave files for the CD.
- Windows sees the Clever Sony Bits and adds modified ones to the CD being burned, indicating that this CD is a copy.
- Bob gives the copy to his friend.
- Bob's friend tries to rip the CD on his Windows boxen, but Windows recognizes the Clever Sony Bits and shuts him down.
Of course if you don't use WMP to rip, or even if you do but choose to rip to MP3, then I don't know how any of this still works. Clearly Mac/*nix people have little to worry about, but that probably doesn't matter to Sony.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?
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)
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.
Stripped to its essentials, what you really want is a free upgrade of your collection to CDs.
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but stripped to its essentials, it seems you're saying the RIAA has a right to use DRM to lock purchased music to a piece of media and do away with fair use rights. This is how people lose their rights - one small abdication at a time.
I'll paraphrase the GP and agree with him: If the industry doesn't provide a reasonable path for full fair use rights, then they deserve to lose the copyright protection for whatever product is on the DRM'd media. Corporations should not be able to claim protection under a law while disregarding part of it.