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Artist Suggesting Ways Around Copy Protection
fanboyslayer writes "Switchfoot's new album Nothing Is Sound shipped from Sony with copy protection software on the CD, much to the dismay of thousands of iPod-wielding fans. The band posted a response on their official forum apologizing for the protection and detailing ways to circumvent the protection and rip their songs to PC. Switchfoot linked to open-source program CDex's download page with instructions on disabling the autorunning protection and ripping the files to MP3. Many of Switchfoot's fans have been upset by the copy protection measures, and it's nice to know the artists seem to care about the issue."
So..
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Artists dont want it.
Consumers dont want it.
When will they learn? It's such a pain in the ass to get any media, especially DVDs with diff region codes that I am literally FORCED to warez movies to play on my mac. If I buy the DVD, I can not play it (I am in the UK - I want to buy a Region 1 DVD...)
that bands at least care about their listeners. Maybe artists can pressure their labels into getting rid of this crap? Now that they've posted instructions on getting around the copy protection, is Sony going to sue them using the DMCA??
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It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat, and tears over the past 2 years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding this new technology. It is also unfortunate when bands such as ourselves, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, etc... (just a few of the new releases with copy protection) are the target of this criticism, when there is no possible way to avoid this new industry policy.
[Bolding mine]
Not sure about there being "no possible way" - perhaps when it comes time to renew their contract with Sony they'll consider going to alternative solutions. Worse comes to worse, perhaps they won't ever be able to escape Sony but they'll serve as a warning for others.
If the large corps keep on with this process it'll typically generate a new band of recording studios who don't and thus are seen as somewhat more friendly (though the cycle will probably still go on).
This is a band from the USA. Unless I'm mistaken, since the record company is usually the copyright holder of the recordings, this is actually a case of a band infringing the DMCA by telling people how to access their own music. Seems like a perfect example of how screwed up the DMCA is. I can only hope that they get sued for it, perhaps then people will realise the extent to which both copyright and the music industry is screwed up.
How long do you think it'll take for Sony to delete the post? My guess... they'll say "even if you bought the cd, simply trying to extract the songs onto your pc means you're going to send the songs to all your friends" and shut it down within a couple days. I don't understand this logic at all. Apparently (since the RIAA goes after p2p), they don't seem to care about the commercial pirating of music. I wonder what will happen when every music cd has copy protection on it, yet p2p and everything else (insert bittorrent jokes) thrive. The only thing this copy protection does is piss off people who legitimately bought the cd... it does absolutely NOTHING to stop piracy. sigh
Has always been that your fans pay with extra inconvenience and the pirates-that-be will get around it with ease.
Companies should learn that all it takes is one copy cracked for it to be out there.
But then I see the upcoming standard for Blu-ray, etcetera - and I suppose making the paying customers pay is the point. I mean, it's wonderful for the bottom line when you can sell the same person a movie on VHS, and then on region hobbled DVD, and then entice them with a HD version on Blu-ray. And the incentive is even greater for Joe Consumer once they can't back up their stuff or transfer it to other formats.
I'm glad for corporate thinking - because of this whereas I used to buy 25 CDs a year from mainstream RIAA companies, I buy 1-2 now. I don't download music but I simply don't care anymore. My money has moved onto other interests......
If they really cared, they wouldn't be signed to a shit-ass major label in the first place. They can't have their street cred indie underground image and swing for the major league cocksuckers at the same time.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
You overshot the artist's profit by about a buck.
I don't recall specific numbers, but the artist gets a number of points. Each point counts for something like sixteen cents. It usually ends up being around a dollar per album. And out of that, I believe they have to pay their agent, manager and often times pay for some or all expenses involved in videos and touring and maybe even production.
about this issue of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) a lot lately and coupled with Stallman's famous library/closed_information society essay.
Does anybody else forsee a time when everything "printed" will be on e-ink paper-thin paperless electronic displays that sense when you try to photocopy them (from the light?) and the only thing coming out of the Xerox machine will be static-filled pages?
It's funny cause the copy protection seems to only effect Windows. If you have Linux, Mac, or any other OS it won't hinder anything. Kind of shows how dumb the music industry is. I am sure it wouldn't be hard to find the service/dll causing the problem and remove it. Somebody should develop Copy Protection Definitions and a program to remove them automatically, kind of like virusscan.
Nite Rider
Not trying to Mac-bash, but having only about 3% of the consumer market share does have it's advantages.
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms. Why spend an equal amount of money for copy protection that's only going to affect 3% of your consumers vs 95%?
That said, the whole DMCA side of this is plain stupid. Microsoft designed Windows (this really *is* a feature
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
If only there was a way to register a reason why you're buying something when you buy it. Without that, you'd just be adding to the total number of sales, proving to Sony that consumers don't care about, or even like(!), this copy protection BS.
My advice? Don't buy the CD. Even if you're a fan, don't buy it. The artists get barely anything from CD sales. Go see them live, or buy their songs off of iTunes or MSN Music or similar (I have no idea if they're listed on any online music service). The very last thing you should do is buy the CD if you want to show support.
If sharing the music was such a big deal, why not just post everything as mp3s? Giving away publicly known information on bypassing copyright protection gives the band more publicity and probably won't increase the amount of avaliable media considering the rampant piracy already occuring.
/., there are hordes of people out there who do NOT know how to do this. Imagine for a moment that there is a subset of the human race that does visit the Switchfoot home page, but does not visit Slashdot...perhaps those very people are the ones the band was trying to inform.
Well, while telling users how to circumvent the protection may or may not be a grey area (see DMCA), giving away the MP3's on their site is very much black and white: they (likely) do NOT have the legal right to do this. Their contract with their record company (likely) explicitly forbids it. And they are not worried about their fans' ability to SHARE the music, they just want their fans to be able to LISTEN to their music, on whatever devices they might own. So this would be the best way to help their paying fans make use of the CD's they have purchased. Switchfoot was never trying to give the album away.
Oh, and while bypassing this protection may be common knowledge on
Though of course I'm just guessing.
Something like 90% of my music listening is on my iPod: if I can't rip your music to my iPod in one easy step, I'm not going to buy your album. It's as simple as that.
I'm sure that is true for a large number of people these days, most of whom are 18-35 with a reasonable disposable income: ie. exactly the kind of people that buy large numbers of CDs. It's amazing how companies can be so incredibly short sighted.
As long as there is a market for selling copy protected CDs, companies will do that. If people are dumb enough to let companies impose all those restrictions on them and still buy the crap, complain to the idiots who do that. This is not much different to why you do not get a decent tasting apple in any supermarket: people will buy the nice looking, crappy tasting ones and that is why the do not sell anything else.
Doubt it - they might be able to pull that off legally, but it would hurt them politically. So in all likelyhood they'll just ignore the whole thing.
And to play those purchased songs on their ipods, they have to circumvent copyright protection, which is a crime. This has nothing to do with piracy or p2p.
Newsflash: directors of publically held companies are legally obliged to put profit before everything else.
The consequences of this fact and your above stated opinion are that the only faultless way of making money in a band is to self-publish
That conclusion is incorrect because it presumes that implementing obtrusive 'DRM' (and alienating your user base in the process) is a good way to maximise profit. What evidence is available, not the least of which is the dominance of the iTMS and the iPod and the relative obscurity of competing stores and DRM enabled media players, as well as the overwhelming balance of consumer feedback, would seem to suggest otherwise.
It is fair to say that Switchfoot bear responsibility if they knew Sony were engaging in this sort of behaviour before they signed (in that they 'did a deal with the devil' and can be expected to bear the consequences of their financial decisions).
Of course it's entirely possible Switchfoot signed with Sony years ago before this practice became practice became commonplace, but - and it's possible I may be misjudging them, but frankly I doubt it - I rather suspect they would have found the pull of fame and fortune hard to resist and that they would have signed with Sony even if they had been fully aware their music was going to be distributed in this fashion.
stupid idea anyway. The people buying the CDs are the people doing the RIGHT THING; I would say that only a small minority of those who buy/rip a CD will then bother to upload the songs to others via P2P. More importantly, these 'pirates' are going to get the songs off the CD somehow, regardless of copy protection: all copy protection is doing is putting a mild speed-bump in the way of small-time 'pirates' and pissing off the vast majority of people who are doing the right thing.
Good grief are people STILL allowing autorun on Windows boxes ? Have they learnt nothing from the last ten years ?
Every single time that anything is allowed to automatically run on Windows (opening email attachments, Word document macros) it's been a source of viruses and other crap. It's a fatally flawed idea.
So just turn the bloody thing off (Google to find how for your version of Windows) If the CD contains drivers, etc. etc. then the worst you'll have to do is open the disc in Explorer and double click on something yourself. No big deal.
Then again you could just hold down the shift key when you insert a CD.
Bah.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Isn't it at the brink of illegality to install a DRIVER on a consumer's computer which the consumer doesn't want there and that only has negative effects for him? If there is not at least a dialog that warns about what is about to happen, I think the makers of such "trojan cds" are in trouble...
Because nothing will show Sony the error of their DMCA/DRM ways like skyrocketing sales of their DRM CDs...
The artists are mere karma bitches, playing Sony for money and the general public for simpathy. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Do they have to give up all principles when they take payment from a record company? No. If doing something for the benefit of others (telling them how to get music onto their PC in this case) is being a "karma bitch" then you might as well make the same accusation of Ghandi and Mother Theresa (that bitch was only doing it so she could get into heaven).
If say Madonna (more realistically, her manager or whomever representing her) walks into a record-company and say she'd like to publish her new record with them, but one of the conditions is that it be released in standard CD-format, that the company would refuse to negotiate a contract.
If you're already a superstar at the contract negotiation phase, sure. If you're a new artist looking for exposure and you sign a four album deal and hit it huge after album #1, you're in trouble for three more.
And this one by Courtney Love (who'd have thunk it?) does even better: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/06/14 /love/index.xml
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
That's not a Mac-Bash at all. It's a succinct description of one reason why it's great to be a Mac owner.
When the Mac Market share hits, say 25%, I'll re-evaluate my platform choice.
I've actually seen a reverse trend over the last year or so, i.e. people specifically not buying Sony audio and video gear because they're afraid that it won't let them do certain things, or will require some "sony-only" media that costs more than the non-Sony items that everyone else uses.
It's gonna be such that you'll (unless you have bionic ears or some kind of hi-fi setup costing ten grand) not understand any difference from simply playing back the CD.
I really can't understand why this audiophile crap has infected almost everyone. Just try it yourself people. Try it with *your* ears. I'm pretty sure you won't hear any difference.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
George Soros uses MJ? I know he's pro-reasonable-laws, but haven't heard yet that he's a consumer. -v, please?
Free as in mason.
** If these aretists - and others - were really so much interested in DRM-free music, why not make an appropriate deal with their label? Did these guys even try to tell their label that they wanted this CD without DRM?
It's my understanding that Switchfoot originally signed with a smaller label that was later bought by Sony. For a band to sign a contract specificaly stating they do't want DRM no matter who may eventually own their contract would be extremely forward thinking and suprising.
** Are the artists prepared to lose sales to piracy or will they demand that their label pays them as promised?
If the label has promised to pay them then there shouldn't be a demand to follow through, unless they can be declared in violation of their contract by their recent actions. Plus, even if they succomb to a little privacy it might mean they lose a few immediate sales but gain a wider audience, meaning possible larger crowds for concerts.
** Before a court, this entire piece is worthless. No judge will let some filesharing kiddies go free because the band itself endorsed DRM circumvention.
I can see that happening, but it could take a lot. Switchfoot is more of an employee of Sony, and it may be determined thay don't have any authority on how to handle their CDs, i.e. speaking on behalf of their employer. On paper, Sony would be ultimately responsible, but I could see a court understanding that direct instruction from the band gives the appearance of legality.
** All this sounds like a cheap marketing move: "Look at us, we are really cool, freedom-loving anti-DRM guys!"
If it is a marketing move I doubt it's cheap. Details are details but in the end Sony is no fan of p2p or copying in any form. It's tough to imagine they would go through the expense to copy protect discs and then have the bands leak info on how to get around it just to be "cool". It could be a ploy by the band I guess, but they've just opened the door to getting around not only their own album, but evey other Sony album protected in the same way, and Sony can't be happy about that.
And for the record, though I do appreciate Switchfoot's recent actions, I'm no fan of their music.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
"Everyone" hates DRM and it's currently trivial to circumvent so the only reason I can think of to continue pushing it is to condition the public into accepting DRM's inevitability.
The problem though isn't with the production side of things, it's with the distribution and promotion side. As long as radio stations (clear channel and MTV) only play major label artists if you want to be able to make a living as a musician you have to sign up with a label.
Everybody else will just download it, business as usual.
"SONY - Hurting our legitimate customers...". What's wrong with this business model?
No sig today...
"If they were genuine about being pro-fan, there is a hell of a lot that they could do about the situation."
They're also pro-feeding and clothing themselves. There's not a "hell of a lot" that they can do in the notoriously fickle recording industry.
Finding that little CD logo is becoming (actually, has become) nearly impossible to do anymore.
And if shiny round pieces of plastic that didn't have the logo didn't sell, DRM on fake CD's would be already dead. Sadly there is enough demand for DRM CD's to keep making them.
nothing released in the last year has had it.
I've noticed. My purchases have reflected this. My last few CD's were purchased from Goodwill.
I Rip, Mix, and Burn my CD's. I also honor the DMCA. I don't buy DRM CD's.
I spend my entertainment dollars elswhere.
The truth shall set you free!
It's time that bands did something about it, or be branded money-grabbing hypocrits. The power to bring down the system is in their hands. Currently the majority just have no interest in using that power and getting rid of the old machine.
That's all well and good. Would you risk your livelihood to stand up for a cause against a company to which you will almost certainly lose?
Most people can't afford to put their lives on hold and lose years' worth (if not more) of income to take a moral stand.
That might be sad, that might be selling out, but that's life. Most people can't afford to fight a crusade, and no sane person wants to be a martyr for a cause he probably can't win.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
From what I recall of the format, though, at least with these, it's a strange sort of "affirmative DRM", in that the CD portion of the disc isn't corrupt, but you "have to" (if you don't know how to turn off Autorun) load the player/driver, which includes a wedge program that scrambles reads from the CD-ROM if the disc is marked. If I'm not mistaken, it's plain CDDA if you never load the "driver". So, if the security software says "no", then the installer won't run, and you'll just have a plain ol' Multi-mode format CD in the drive.
It's really a shame, though, that CDDA doesn't support multichannel audio out of the box. That means there's a real competitive advantage for a next-gen audio format, which will undoubtedly end up having integrated DRM ability. Until then, there are predominant existing media (with consumer-ubiquitous players) to openly encode most current DRMed content, which means that DRM can't completely take over with the current 2-channel audio format.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.