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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.
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 hope no one finds out you can burn a gazillion copies from the CDR!
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.
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
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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 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
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!
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.
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
Philips is serious about maintaining CD compatibility, and has forced the purveyors of incompatiple DRM schemes to clearly label that they are not compatible with the standard.
See, e.g., http://www.spectacle.org/0702/evan.html
--kirby
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.
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.
The problem is that they are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to prevent "casual pirates". A "casual pirate" will buy a CD, just to rip it to an MP/3 file or to give it to their friends.
If they really believe this will force more CD's to be bought, they are idiots. If it is impossible to rip the CD to some other form, the desire to buy the CD goes *down*, not up. The "casual pirate", knowing that the CD is worthless for them, will spend their time searching the internet, to find the "professional pirate" who has the necessary sound-proof room and microphones to do a high-quality rip right off the digitally-encrypted speakers. They will not buy the CD any more!
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
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)