Slashdot Mirror
Music Industry Backlash Against Sony Rootkit
Foobar of Borg writes "The Associated Press describes how backlash from Sony's Rootkit CDs is causing problems for the music industry. The problem is two-fold: (1) the inherent technological problem of trying to prevent anyone from copying anything and (2) letting lawyers make technical decisions when (from the article) 'Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra.'" More from the article: "'I think they've set back audio CD protection by years,' said Richard M. Smith, an Internet privacy and security consultant. 'Nobody will want to pull a Sony now.' Phil Leigh, analyst for Inside Digital Media, said the debacle shows just how reluctant the labels are to change their business model to reflect the distribution powers -- good and bad -- of the Internet. He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
So the Sony rootkit is BAD?! This needs more coverage.
Matthew Grint Midnight Artists
..would be to let people buy music online ... I know this is an amazing idea, but if they all got over their petty rivalries (company vs company and country vs country) and just sell the music, sell the DVDs .... then piracy would decrease at least amongst the 'unwilling' participants of the practice.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
"need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy".
:|
Like say, making shit music that no-one would want to pirate? Ugh, too late
'Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra.'
Is that right?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
No shit Sherlock.
Life is Reality
Now we just need to use this to draw attention to other things that "people don't understand, so why should they care?", like the broadcast flag, and other overly restrictive DRM technologies.
We'd be paying $1500.00 for a coast to coast airline ticket.
There'd be no interstate trucking industry. All freight would go by rail and canal.All television would be black and white. There'd be no VCR's (let alone PVR's!).
All radio would be AM.Telephones would all be dial. Long distance calls would be $2.50/minute.
We'd all still be using slide rules.There would be no foreign cars in the U.S.
There would be no sources of alternative energy (wiond, solar, etc.) whatsoever.And on and on. The RIAA wants to maintain the status quo at any cost. They have had ten years to adapt and have resisted at every turn. They all likely believe in Landrew (save us, save us, Landrew!).
They are pathetic....as the first and probably only rootkit wich has done something good.
Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but it is certainly clear that the current system is completely out of whack. Perhaps it will collapse now and America can start considering why this was supposed to be a good idea in the first place. It's way past time to whack Mickey Mouse.
On the other hand, perhaps it doesn't matter. If you believe that the free exchange of creative ideas is a thing that benefits society, and that this encourages growth and development of a healthy society, then you must conclude it confers competitive advantage. Therefore, the societies that do better at encouraging creativity will eventually overwhelm the others--and nothing the **AA can do will stop that inevitable transition.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It doesn't seem to stop every self proclaimed expert here from spouting off their particular pet theory that coiincidentally justifies their eMule use, nevertheless.
'...record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy.'
Which brings up the method, again, of how the 'Dead dealt with bootlegging, by inviting bootleggers to give it thier best shot - This meant more publicity for the band, which led to more sales.
The record companies just won't let go. They want the model that puts them in control. Pricing control where they get to say which track sells for what amount, giving them leverage over the artist - bundleing, where trash tracks have to be purchased, whether the consumer wants them or not - consumer habit tracking, where they get first dibs on mining all that data...it goes on and on. The record companies just need to die, it's that simple.
In Sony's case, I guess this one can be laid at the feet of the lawyers, but hey, they've got their own business model to protect, and we all know where that one leads.
Why not just let the artists be in control for a while. Let the $$$ grabbers sell peanuts and t-shirts while the consumer enjoys decent music for a change.
He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy.
Well of course they have to! What they're attempting now is more like trying to cure the symptom rather than curing the disease. And to use yet another metaphor, Sony really is trying to cure head-ache by chopping off the head.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Now I cannot trust Sony or EMI. This process will continue until I stop buying any industry products. I am more inclined to shore up my back catalogue than trust anything current on CD. Online mp3 retail can take care of the rest. Goodbye, music industry.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Mashboxx and the New Grokster 3G that will be launched later this year has the serious backing of Sony\BMG and the Sony Music CEO Andrew Lack was intrememtal putting the project together with the Mashboxx chairman Wayne Russo who was the former president of Grokster.
The whole Sony rootkit contreversey will seriously damage the reputation of this p2p service that already faces a uphill battle to convert the already sceptical filesharing community.
Many in the tech community have vowed to boycott Sony products and many just dont trust them anymore so Mashboxx will be put into the same boat.
A cow doing algebra
Dir sirs,
The suggested apparatus is a sentient, grass-eating organism ("Cow"), that has or will be taught complex mathematical operations ("Algebra"), with or without the aid of various computational devices.
I intend to patent this "invention" and then go on and "licence" it to all cattle grows in the planet, which will have to pay or face my formidable legal team. In fact, I have already hired an "Intellectual property" law firm, who has assured me that I am loosing $5.6B every day - literally being stolen out of my pocket, and the plates of my children, by greedy farmers who will not respect the foundations of our economy.
Moreover, said lawyers have promised me that the USPTO and the courts will share their (my) view that every cow grazing grass is in fact performing complex calculations, probably for some foreign power like Iraq, or worse, Europe.
All the best,
Edgar Bronfman.
"667 - Neighbour of the beast"
Sony's legal dept need their arses kicked.
Big Sony Corp Honcho: "We need DRM, we need it now!"
Sony Techie: "We've got shitty unlicensed DRM applications ready to roll. They fug up our customers' PCs and will totally trash business confidence in the run up to XMAS"
Sony Legalista: "Research proves that only pirates with piracy in mind ever access music CDs via their PC"
BSCH: "Make it so".
Man, and here I was following that link totally expecting a website about a cow doing algebra.
You heard it here first
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Translation: Sony BMG needs to research how to make their next crippling system-level crack more undetectable before they try this exact same crap again. They don't give a second thought b0rk1ng their customer's computers, but they absolutely hate getting caught.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I've been on a active boycott of record-companies since 1997. Two reasons. Sony closed a local CD-factory, claiming that 'piracy' was the reason. The production-equipment was shipped to Romania (or such) so I guess selling the CD's wasn't the problem, but they found a nice way to justify moving to a country with lower wages. (please keep in mind that most of you barely had the equipment to burn CD's or the bandwidth to exchange MP3's)
The other reason was that most companies abandoned recruiting local talent. All we get in our shops is American R&B, all we see on TV is American Gangsta Crap. There is a shitload of bands out their, but none of the big labels will see or hear them. Ilse de Lange might be the last you've heard from the Netherlands.
Haven't bought a single CD since, except directly from the hands of the musician.
He's just joking.
This will set the the cause of bovine freedom back several decades. I urge everyone to withold support of initiatives expanding the role of copyright in this manner.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
I'm surprised that we've not heard more from the artists themselves on this front. You'd think that those whose CDs were clandestinely infiltrated by this technology would have opinions. After all these people make thie money directly from the sales of those CD's too and you can pretty well bet that not a one of them was told about or consulted in advance of the decision to rootkit these cds.
I'm curious to know if on top of Sony's problems a rash of lawsuits will be filed by attorneys representing artists that either had their work defiled by the rootkits or those that want out of their contracts because Sony's miserable judgment will result in substantially reduced sales for any artist on a Sony label.
Anyone know about this or have an opinion?
Stitch
"There is no "I" in B-O-R-G"
There is no "I" in B-O-R-G.
Translation: cut prices, allow personal copying w/o restrictions.
Worst. DRM. Ever.
So someone put the fear of God into a company and now they're all running away going "NOT ME TOO! I'M NICE!" Well it's about fucking time.
Companies get away with murder, they tried to step on peoples feet again and they stepped on a very pissed off geeks feet and are now paying the price. If we had this uproar against all bullshit policies maybe the world would be a better place. But no, we're in a world of submissive consumers who won't say boo to a goose incase of a lawsuit.
I like muppets.
I want high quality, which the online music stores do not provide (128k WMA and AAC SUCK for a serious music fan with even marginaly good equipment)
I want the ability to easily copy the music! I should be able to rip it to MP3 ort ogg for listening on a HTPC or iPod, or Dell DJ or an mp3 cell phone...
Now as I shop for CDs I will always wonder in the back of my mind, "does t6his have spy/scumware? a virus? a rootkit? what does "enhanced" mean? would I be safer DLing a 320k MP3 from (insert P2P of choice here)?"
Actually, this Macrovision protection seems kinda pointless. Who's going to rip a disc 7 times? Like I said before: Rip it once and discard the original.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"... rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
I do find it rather ironic that I was, not five minutes ago, looking for an Oasis song (forgive me, its stuck in my head) on iTunes music store to purchase legally only to find out they are published by Sony-BMG who, in their infinite wisdom, have declined to be involved with the Australian iTunes music store.
Given their current predilication for sticking DRM crap on CDs and the fact I only want one or two specific tracks, no sale for you. Good going Sony. What's a possible customer meant to do if you insist on treating us like (potential) criminals?
Issues that remain:
Attacking customer computers seems to be the kind of thing that is part of the Sony corporate culture. There has been no apology, and Sony management makes statements giving the impression they will do it again if they think they can without bad publicity.
A music retail store spokesman said that Sony's attack became public just before Christmas. Customers can easily choose some other gift now that they are scared about computer attacks. Sony's attack has hurt the entire music industry, not just Sony. Also, the damage will continue after Christmas.
Few people are technically knowledgeable. The Sony CDs will be causing problems for many years, as they are traded or sold to thrift stores.
The number of computers already corrupted is probably far larger than the 500,000 quoted in articles about the Sony attack. That number is just the number of Domain Name Servers that show evidence that a computer has tried to contact the Sony phone home address. The average server would almost certainly service more than one corrupted computer.
One kind of attack has received attention. However, Sony apparently sells other CDs with other software that may also have negative consequences for Sony customers.
Following Microsoft's lead years ago, some businesses treat all their customers as crooks so that they can stop a few.
By forcing intrusive and dangerous DRM management, without fully consulting third party hardware and software vendors that the product is used on, Sony deserve everything thrown at them, especially from the fact that they have not only placed Microsoft in a difficult position, but also upset Philips by producing non-Red Book CDs.
Problem is will anybody want to fit a Bluray disc in their computer after this fiasco?
"The crew of the Enterprise land on a new planet. Their first reactions are of wariness. As Mr Spock says: 'Odd. The expression on that man's face. Mindlessness. Vacant contentment'. Everyone in the society is happy: they all smile, and their standard greeting is 'joy to you'. This disturbs the heroes: in a society where everyone is this happy, something must be wrong. They intervene.
"They discover that the planet is ruled by a supposedly benign deity named 'Landrew', whose representatives - the faceless, dark-robed 'lawmen' - ensure that everyone behaves happily, repeating such catchphrases as 'Happy communing'. 'Joy be with you, peace and contentment'. 'Peace and tranquility', 'Peace and harmony'. In the course of the story, McCoy is brainwashed. He begins to speak in the same terms: 'Happiness to all of us. Blessed be Landrew'. The society is peaceful, everyone is happy - or, at least, everyone thinks that they are happy. What is wrong with this?
"Firstly, according to the logic of the program, it is false consciousness. People only think that they are happy because they have been brainwashed by a computer which is running their society... Mr Spock reminds Captain Kirk: 'Captain - our prime directive is non-interference' The Captain responds - 'That refers to living, growing cultures. Do you think this one is?'.
"...as Mr Spock puts it: 'This is a soulless society. They have no spirit, no spark. All is indeed peace and tranquility - the tranquility of the machine'. As Kirk puts the argument to the computer who runs the system: 'The [society] is dying. You are destroying it. What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every individual in the body?
"...Return of the Archons ends with the crew back on board the Enterprise. Kirk asks the resident sociologist how things are going now they have destroyed the perfect society. The sociologist responds excitedly - 'Already today we've had three marital disputes and a stand up fight'. Kirk is delighted - the society is once again as it should be."
Stolen from here: http://www.staff.vu.edu.au/CSAA/newsletter01-1.ht
Better write up here: http://www.wizardrealm.com/Galadriel/landru.htm
"You can stop wearing those robes now.
And if I were you, I'd start looking
for another job."
-- [ Kirk to monk-robed figures after he blows
up Landru's computerized successor.]
Kirm was such a man's man.
He goes to alien planets,
sleeps with their women,
changes their society,
then makes smart-ass comments as he's leaving.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...in its proper place.
The people here being the artist and their ability to make use of the internet to introduce themselves and promote themselves via the internet. And to do so to the point of having enough opf a following to then approach the industry with bargaining power.... "I'm taking bids on who will giove me the best deal"...
Everybody benefits this way... as the music industry wouldn't then need the risky practice of subsidizing of newbies (often failures) with profits made from the established artaist that would really be better in the pockets of the established, where it belongs. Such subsidizing is somewhat anti-competitive for the artists.
On the public side, we get to better determine what is good and bad music. While having a wider rasnge of free music from samples and newbie trying to make an impression... Arrangements (music) and re-mixes can take a good song, shown to have public appeal and made better, then released for purchase... etc...
Where does this put the industry? Quite different than it is today, slimmed down and more efficient. And certainly not so damn greedy... cause greedy really wouldn't get the bids...
I've written some pages about Sony's XCP DRM system.
Summary about the DRM, what it does, and what its problems are: http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/info.html
You can also find my research and opinions about the issue linked from there. Please send mail if you have anything to add or any corrections to my content.
-- Matti Nikki
Only sad thing is, most any of us could have told them that this would be a fiasco, but before this happened there's no way any of us would have been believed or noticed. It took a disaster like this to wake everybody up. Lucky thing it wasn't nuclear bombs, huh?
But I'm happy, anyway. Slashdot has been fun to read this week; Sonygate brings the comedian out in the most taciturn geeks.
Actually the "Sony Rootkit" incident has increased the public awareness of computer security. How many non technically inclined people knew about "rootkit" prior to this?
To a certain extent, this incident has increased the public awareness of computer security, which is a good thing.
w00t
It has already started at work. As the resident geek in the department, I already have explained many times about the Sony DRM and the XCP rootkit. With Thanksgiving holidays coming up and get-togethers with the relatives, I figure I should just hand out a little pamphlet. I would like to be a fly on the wall inside the Sony corporate offices as they look for some mid-level managers to can over this. I would also like to read some of their heated and panicked internal correspondence as they try to do damage control. Someone is going to get torched publicly for this by Sony's legal team. I have looked to see if any class-action lawsuits have been filed, but I am now aware of any, yet.
Have you Meta Moderated t
Right on! This is just another manifestation of the fact that CD's cost on average $17. I remember when CDs first came out, they cost about $15-17 and usually came in bulky cardboard packaging (ostensibly to discourage theft). Cassette tapes at the time ran $9-13. The dirty little secret in the industry was that CDs were much cheaper to manufacture than cassettes. So, why then was the consumer paying twice as much for CDs? You could say that if they sold them for the same price or lower than cassettes, that no one would buy cassettes because they are lower quality. Everyone would go out and buy a CD player. Well, now everyone in the world has a CD player and it's incredibly hard to even find releases on cassette anymore, yet the price of a CD has not gone down a single cent on average in the last 15 years. Mind you, the record companies are no longer paying to produce cassettes, no longer paying for producing those bulky packages that CDs used to come packaged in. If anything, CDs ought to be less expensive to produce. But... the industry is very powerful. The RIAA and its associate members are a cartel of sorts, like OPEC, and can set whatever prices they like and gouge the hell out of consumers. And they can get away with it because Congress not only allows them to, but they even protect them!
That seems to be how companies like Sony view them. Any rights customers may have are seen by SONY and their ilk (a cast too numerous to catalog) as detracting from their own. The only way SONY et al. can maximize rights (and, they hope, profit) is to minimize everyone else's, ultimately including the rights of other companies. Under that notion their rights are maximized when everyone else's rights = 0. That is a reasonable explanation of why they chose to crap on the rights of their paying customers. It's the same logic tyrannies have always used. Sic semper tyrannis
The the success of the GNU and other OSS liscence models suggest that SONY and their brothers in greed are wrong. Just my 2 cents.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
"Sony, in fact, tried discs that contained data near the perimeter of the CD instructing a computer's hard drive not to look for audio tracks."
Man, that's nothing... I remember when that Kid Rock CD instructed my hard drive to score some weed and a couple of hookers! Try explaining that to your wife!
Cars are complex, but McDonnalds doesnt put a tracking device in rthe ignition system while I am buying a bigmac.
They would have made sure that the weaknesses in the DVD encryption scheme wasn't in their scheme (which dvdjon cracked in October 1999, so the music industry would have been aware of the problems). And even if their scheme was broke, like the DVD scheme was, it would still be hard enough to copy a CD that most people wouldn't try.
By encouraging and perhaps subsidising (for the first couple of years) the placement of the encryption chip, by today, six years later, nearly every CD player would be encryption enabled and they could stop producing unencrypted CDs entirely. Through encryption, they could allow the music to be ripped to the harddrive, but it would only play on your computer. They could also allow you to produce a copy, but the copy would be uncopyable. And they could let you place the files on your DAP.
People would have the fair use rights they expect and criminal copying becomes nearly impossible.
I can hear thousands of average-joes returning their DRM'd cds now. Even if they don't know what it is, they'll probably be strongly opposed to changes in CDs now, which is good considering any change would be to benefit the RIAA. Many non-tech people will stop buying cds altogether because of the time they lost fixing their computer when they could have been producing something useful, maybe they'll start looking at iTunes or downloading music off Bitmunk or some similiar service, where they know no company will be sneaking trojan horses into their computers and do how they please. This is more than just a controversial event. This is the beginning of a revolution.
He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
Yes, as always, innovation (of products, price, distribution and markets) to match actual demands is almost certainly superior to oppression and enforcing old entrenched business models by law ... but why is noone listening? Do they all need to live through oppression on their own to get a clue?
I can't wait for the conspiracy paranoics to start putting up websites blaming Sony for everything from the Spanish flu to the Hindenburg disaster. Sony started the war in Iraq! Sony shot Reagan! And on and on... Maybe someone will just resurrect the "Bert is evil" website and put the CEO of Sony in there instead of Bert. You know it's coming, though...
However, when I asked if Van Zant would even consider moving to somebody other than Sony when the current contract ended, there was no comment. Meaning no, they won't. And here, people, is the proof. And the pudding. In a nice silver serving dish. Van Zant is making lots and lots of money from Sony - this is a good thing. I believe people should be allowed to try and make as much money as they can or want. But Van Zant is making money at the expense of their fans. If they respected their fans, they would make it clear and public that as soon as they can they would leave Sony. But they are being paid too much to do so. I would hope that the people who comprise the free market would vote with their feet, but we all know that isn't going to happen. Sony is going to continue to make billions of dollars selling CDs to people. Van Zant is going to continue to receive their millions from Sony. The world continues spinning.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I remember Switchfoot was so mortified that Sony broke their CD that they were actively helping fans to defeat the protection....long before it became a very public debacle.
I for one have only this to say:
...the debacle shows just how reluctant the labels are to change their business model to reflect the distribution powers -- good and bad -- of the Internet.
...They [the lables] insist on chasing this white whale...
Thank you Sony!
But enough sarcasm. That article had some good quotes in it:
This one should make good ammunitions for the Newsweeks cartoonist:
And my favorite:
Nobody will want to pull a 'Sony' now.
Having your business practices compared to one of Homer Simpsons most famous stunts most famous stunts has to burn the ego... badly.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Why should they care? Besides the obvious invasion of privacy issue and compromised security? People care when they have cookies that register more information than they should. You'd think they'd care if you installed a friggin' trojan horse, especially one that also cripples people using your product legally (i.e the 3 copy limit on CDs for people transferring songs from the CD to their iPods).
I still can't believe he was quoted saying that... the Head of Sony BMG's global digital business. It just shows how completely off these people when it comes to understanding piracy, and how to "fight" it...
I just what I felt was a fine job of this on the phone with one of my family members who was not pro P2P, but was upset about this Sony thing.
The whole situation is quite simple to explain really. It's merely a conflict over privacy.
The biggest privacy advocates in the world are corporate interests really and by extension their Republican or so-called neo liberal supporters which would include other political factions such as libertarians. This emphasis on the fundamental importance of privacy is clear in the fact that big business and its Republican advocates are hell bent on privatizing all sorts of things that have traditionally been public. Private is about as close as you can get to the opposite of public. It's like two sides of the same coin, or two edges to the sword if you like.
So, the private sector is totally dependent for its existence upon technologies that allow privacy. Who is the biggest user of virtual LAN technology? This is obviously an essential tool for modern corporations. SSL is another privacy protocol essential for e-commerce. If the public sector had no privacy it would cease to be the private sector, it would be the public sector. That's what the public sector is, those things which are not private.
Which brings us to the issue at hand. It's not that companies like Sony are saying that people shouldn't have privacy. That's totally in opposition to their very nature. Corporations can't exist without privacy and technologies that enforce and defend privacy. The problem is they are saying that their privacy is essential and the consumer's privacy is not.
That's quite a simple explanation of what's going on that anybody can understand. Good one to bring up this Thanksgiving while the family is all together.
"record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
I've been saying this for years.. There will always be someone who is gonna try to bypass the rules. But if they had music availible online at a reasonable price when the Napster issue first arose they probably would have nipped a lot of this in the bud.
I think the biggest backlash to come is versus the security companies.
Where the hell where they ?
I personnaly uninstalled Norton Security from my computer as it's now clear that they can not protect me from emerging threats.
The threats of today are not the threats of tomorrow and security firms have to adjust in consequences.
Threats of today : Companies hiding stuff in your computer and correlation between companies. Think Windows Vista.
Threats of tomorrow : Don't ask security firms
Linux/Mac is not an alternative to this shit if you like to play the latest games.
And let's not leave out the anti-virus companies!
:) . (ABC - that's the secret ones nobody knows about)
... You know it can be copied so don't blame anyone but yourself for distributing your media this way. If you don't like it you are free to create something of your own. Stop whining. If because I leave a $100 dollar bill on the street and someone picks is up should I be allowed to inspect the wallets of every person in my country to try and find it? Go away!
How could an operating system even allow this or not be able to detect it. If my virgin hard disk is given to Microsoft to install its operating system then NOTHING should be able to supersede it. If it does, then I see it as a fault of Microsoft to protect me and execute a fundamental task of an operating system. If they happened to share their "key" (i.e. methods, backdoors, etc) to my hard disk or operating system then its even a bigger matter. If I were responsible for any government IT decisions I would immediately begin the process of expunging Microsoft products from all areas under my responsibility. Remember this was a foreign corporation that obtained access.
The US government may not be in a rush to replace MS but what about the Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, India?
If MS allowed Sony to get in, would they allow the NSA, CIA, ABC, DEFG?
Microsoft if this was an unwilling aid to Sony tell us that this is fixed and nobody else can do it! If it was willing tell us you will STOP NOW!
It has already been shown the Anti-virus companies were in collusion here siding AGAINST their customers! See here
And to you SONY
Quite possibly the 2nd worst idea Sony has ever had
f
(right behind their rootkit fiasco) Is their returns process.
http://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/
They let you fill in whatever nonsense you want & then provide you with a mailing label good for up to 1 lb. of mail at their expense.
I for one plan to send them, on behalf of The President of The United States, 1 Lb. of my finest junkmail. Its UPS, which means you have to drop it off at a UPS store. All that really means is I'll only send them a package every few days.
Feel free to print out the label from here:
http://www.upsrow.com/label/113249543300867500.gi
In case that link dissappeares, I ULed it to xs.to
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"They want the model that puts them in control."
That's exactly it right there. Business is risk-averse. Any risks taken must have known, quantifiable limits and statsitcally likely profits to justify them. There is no gambling in successful businesses. The only risks are making less money than projected, and even that is unacceptable.
But that's the way it has to be. Anything else would be unforgivable. Any company that throws money around without knowing exactly how much ROI they're going to get is playing fast-and-loose with investment capital, and MUST fail eventually. Witness the dot-com bust.
The answer to this problem is not legislation or education of the business people. The answer is for the people who care about the problem to take steps to obsolete that system. If you're an artist, refuse to sign with companies with which you disagree. If you are a consumer, don't buy from companies with which you disagree. Support the independant artists. If you are a voter, vote against anything which interferes with the ability of the artists and consumers to make those choices.
The freedom to not participate in a relationship you find offensive is very important, and we must continue to exercise it lest it atrophy.
If you're looking for a specific way to support independant artists, I recommend listening to kexp.org. They are listener-sponsered radio and they know who their masters are: the listeners and artists who support them.
No sweat off of Sony's back. I'm betting that the full cost of this initiative is coming out of the artists' royalty cheques.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Here is your way in to spy on America! And a security hole you might want to plug.
Copy protection is mathematically impossible. That limitation is not one of technology, which would be overcome by a suitable invention -- it is a limitation of the way the universe works. {Blame the appropriate God if you're so inclined}.
I can't provide a formal proof, unfortunately. But let's just say that there's no way for the dumb, read-only CD even to be certain of, much less do anything about, what lies downstream of the laser head, and that's where the problem begins and ends: the act of reading the CD for the legitimate purpose of listening to it is, on some level, utterly indistinguible from the act of reading the CD for nefarious purposes such as copying it. Of course, you might well have a right to copy it anyway: think Fair Use / Fair Dealing. If you've a cassette player, but no CD player, in your car, then you are allowed to make a copy of the CD onto a cassette as a necessary step in listening to the music on the CD -- your common law property right by virtue of ownership of the CD -- in your car. It only infringes copyright if you part with the CD and retain the cassette for longer than is reasonable for you to get around to recording something else over it, or if someone steals the cassette -- and they are the infringing party. You were merely aiding and abetting copyright infringement, but ignorance of the fact is a defence. These rights aren't set in stone anywhere, because exactly what constitutes Fair Dealing is determined by the courts; but face it, no court in the land is ever going to send you down for taping albums -- hell, even the judge probably has a few in his car.
If you boot up a Linux LiveCD on a computer which has already been infected with the Sony rootkit, you can still rip it with cdparanoia. That proves the protection is ineffective. And while it isn't obvious to everyone how to do it yet, it's a foregone conclusion that someone somewhere will make a Linux distro just for ripping CDs.
Why don't the record companies learn from the printing industry? Many newsagents have a photocopier sitting right next to the magazines and newspapers. Does anybody ever illegally photocopy the Times, the Penguin Shaggers' Gazette, the Woman's Monthly, or the latest Harry Potter novel? No, of course not.
The fact is that CDs are overpriced, and downloading offers an economically viable alternative to purchase. Downloading isn't free: it takes up time, bandwidth and drive space that all have some value to the downloader. If the intention is to burn the tracks to an actual CD, then this requires additional resources: a jewel case and about 1.05 blank CDs {remember the hit rate is not 100%}. Recreating the CD packaging -- even crudely -- will require further resources in the shape of paper, ink and time.
So my challenge to the music industry is to set a new price point for CDs that compares favourably with this figure. Make it cheaper to buy the physical CD than to download the tracks. And people will buy CDs in preference to downloading.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Seems this rootkit has opensource code. I am sure many of you will recognize this blog. http://nanocrew.net/2005/11/16/sony-drm-rootkit-sa ga/
This really gets me excited for the possibility of malware using exploits to take advantage of Vista's Trusted Computing (TM) framework. Won't that be spiffy if somehow, once it gets into your system, a piece of malware can suddenly decide that your monitor, ethernet/modem, and sound card aren't Trusted (TM)?
Oh frapjuous day.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
When palladium/vista/'trusted computing' comes out, most of this capability is going to be built into the OS. Sony will be able to install this garbage and we won't have much say in it because 'trusted' computing is meant to be trusted by companies like Sony, not people like us.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I think you're confusing sarcasm and satire. Satire is often a reductio ad absurdum argument, showing the silliness of a particular hidebound point of view. Sarcasm is just being snarky.
Illegitimi non carborundum
I didn't follow all the whole event, but how antivirus companies reacted to this? Was there one that prevented infection? I guess the rest should find some excuses for betraying their customers?
I read this elsewhere, hence, it's not my original thought: why were the antivirus, etc. manufactures so silent?
If they ignore such an egregious attack on the majority of systems in use, why should they expect credence with their PR campaign about the next dire threats facing computing?
because one has to know logarithms to use the thing.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I think what Sony actually did wrong here was go to the lowest bidder to write them this. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
It is really quite an irritation, Sony aren't the only firm doing this, and this isn't the first time Sonys been caught (any readers here own a Viao, hæ hæ hæ), but now everyone and their dog is looking for these things.
Some people write really good quality viruses and their collective reputation is being besmirched by these cowboys. Something ought to be done about it, questions ought to be asked in Parliament!
I blame the industry, any fool can now get a certificate in point and click (level 2), install visual basic, and call themselves a programmer.
threadeds blog
I personally will never buy any technology that incorporates Digital Rights reMoval of any type. It is much better to obtain a pirated version of something than a crippled version. The music industry wouldn't have problems with piracy if it content was good enough to merit buying and was sold at a reasonable price. Clearly this is a problem that the music industry has some difficulty understanding - probably due to sheer greed. The present actions of the music industry are the last desparate acts of companies that have an obsolete business model. They are no longer necessary, as technology makes the distribution mechanism available to everyone. However the record industry tries to buy some time before its ultimate demise, it will only generate generate even more hatred from its customers.
And -- as most smart people -- they tend to know their limitations, and are not afraid of hiring expert advice...
And, after all, lawyers are just a tool...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"It's an arms race that the content owner can never win," said Yankee Group analyst Michael Goodman. "In order to make it usable, you also have to make it beatable. If you really truly want to lock it down, it is possible to lock it down. But it is so onerous on the user that they'd never want to use it in the first place."
This is exactly the problem with the record industry today. They think their shit smells sooooo good that people will put up with ANYTHING to get at it.
What they don't know is that once they finally reach that holy grail where content is locked down, non-portable, non-shareable, only listenable on approved and certified devices, and only copiable when you put a microphone in front of a speaker... NOBODY will want to bother with it.
Normal people don't want to spend time learning the difference between "Plays for Sure - Download" and "Plays for Sure - Subscription". Normal people don't want to figure out how many computers they can own before their music collection becomes unplayable. Normal people just want to listen to their music on the home stereo, in the car, on the computer, on the ipod... and not have to jump through hoops when they paid hard-earned cash for the privilege.
Both DVD-A and SACD have to high of power consumption for portable use. As such no consumer was willing to go back to the days of before the casset deck when music could be listened in the home only. DVD-A is avaible in a few of the more expensive cars, but that is it for portability. Also both formats were 2x the price of a CD offering, which nobody was willing to support. DVD-A also did not allow for digital ouput from the player, which had the beutiful effect of destroying any added resolution, by sending it through cheap cables. SACD's fair just as poorly, but with a propitry Digital Bitstream, incompatable with normal amps, so once again, D-A-D-A chain of audio in most HT amps. Which is great for audio quality....
:The long music content of CD-MP3 players :Inexpensive burning to format :Ability to be copied to portable players :Acceptable portable battery life (MP3+CD players get 50+ hours from 2 AAs) :No increase in cost, or perhaps a reduction :Compatable with current HT amps, which isnt really possible, since its got to be un-encripted to work which they dont want :And a noticible sound improvement (which probably is not realizable without a 100+ headphone, or 800+ set of speakers
To make a new "CD-style" format that i would invest in the system must offer:
All of these except the increased resolution are availbe in CDs, so unless they have em all, its just going to be a downgrade, which i know i am not paying for.
Yeah - it's a bunch of ones and zeros
And yeah, it's 16 bit audio... whoopdedo.
If you listen to CDs you obviously don't appreciate music, I only listen to live music where the bit rate is so much higher. And I need something tangible.
/sarcasm
When bandwidth gets there we'll be downloading far higher quality tracks than you can get on your glorious CDs. Then people like you will claim that CDs are only for philistines who don't truly appreciate music.
"What ? You mean too far." Youa re surely saying. No. I mean too quick, too fast. If they had continued to erode fair use by slowly using more strigent DRM, with each step a small one, Maybe in 5-10 years or so they would have been able to install rootkit. After all if the evolution is slow enough joe sixpack will not see anything happenning or may not protest too much. But a brutal step in "DRM"-ing in one throw is too much for anybody to swallow. This is one of those rare occasion where I am happy firms take a shortsighted view on the future and want to reap immediatly benefit. They would be far more evil if they had long term plans.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."
Time to repeat my subject:
Somebody actually gets it? HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!?!
I have a new business model for a new recording studio concept but I don't have the capital to pull it off.
Here are the main points:
* Artists would retain all rights to their own music. Copyrights would be in the names of the artists and bands, not the studio.
* All contracts with the studio are open ended, they never expire, and allow the artists and/or bands to back out of them at any time. The artists and bands ARE NOT employees of the studio, the studio is strictly a service to them to get their music published and on the radio.
* The studio would only retain publishing rights, not ownership. The studio's publishing rights ends when the contracts end.
* Music would be published on CD and via a paid P2P service similar to iTunes or Napster. Downloaded music could be used on MP3 players (including the iPod) and burned to CD an unlimited number of times.
* Music CDs published by the studio would contain CD Extra content such as interviews with the artists and bands, music videos, printable lyrics sheets for all the music on the CD, and news about the artists or bands updated via RSS Feed daily.
* A PR Department of the studio would help with merchandising the artist or band. The artist and/or band retains the copyrights and trademarks of all merchandise. The studio receives a percentage of sales as a fee.
* The studio would pioneer the Open Media License, or OML. The OML like the GPL, but for music, video and literature, would apply to media that is offered free of copyrights and trademarks and can be downloaded, used, and even altered without restriction depending on the OML License that is used.
Basically, the artists and bands have full control over everything, and the studio becomes their client offering CD publishing services, P2P music sales and distribution, marketing and advertising, and the artists and bands retain all the copyrights and trademarks. A studio like this I think would set the whole recording industry on its head.
Any comments? If you know a VC who can help me please let me know.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Wal-Mart music. $.88/track. With a price point like that I see no point for piracy. 100% of my "digital music" is ripped from CD's I legally own, or purchased from Wal-Mart. I'm actually so lazy, I've been known to buy a track for .88 rather than find the CD which I already own and rip it.....
What has never made any sense to me is that all it takes is one person to rip the song to MP3 and the genie is out of the bottle. Everyone can then get it off of P2P. Since one person will always get around the protection somehow everyone else must suffer the lack of ability of portability, backing up, etc... so instead they just get it online anyway. I mean what do they expect? I would buy it once to listen to in a CD player, another purchase to listen to on each computer, another purchase for my iPod, etc.... I'm sure that's their wet dream but no one is going to accept that. The people who would have gotten it illegally still will and everyone else will be frustrated and give up and probably buy something less frustrating. I think it would be safe to say that copy protection has stopped very little casual copying and done nothing to the mass duplication. Their real losses I'm sure are at the factories in China pumping out copies off of a production line. Why are they attacking us?
Even more so if I can hear it I can record it, if I can see it I can tape it. How do they plan to stop that? It will always find a way into unencrypted form. Regardless of implications the only two ways I could see copy protection work is to require all users to run programs that examines signatures of files looking for copyrighted works or require that all music players only will play encrypted music. Beyond that it is all doomed to failure. The only answer, since those options would likely horrendously fail market acceptance, is to make online purchases easy and cheap. Yeah it sucks for them that they don't have a strangle hold on us and artists anymore, but it also sucked for horse carriage makers when automobiles came around, it sucked for train companies when trucks and highways came around, and it sucked for large passenger boat manufacturers when airplanes came around, but I doubt many would argue we aren't better off now than before. As with these examples they must adapt or die.
And as for that declining CD sales number due to P2P they love to throw around, in the same time frame a lot of other things have come up that steal discretionary money that in the past would have been available for music. Video games, DVDs, mobile phones, are a few I can think of off the top of my head. That's on top of abysmal new releases, backlash at the tactics of the RIAA, and maybe to some extent yeah P2P.
Whatever, I don't buy much music anymore anyway. Rambling rant complete.
Three cheers for SONY actions on this issue - for waking up the sleeping giant - consumers. Consumers seemed to have been lulled to sleep - and tricked into "being cool" versus "being smart"? The spin machines from the status quo media - owned by the ruling classes everywhere- as well as corporate CEO mobsters and their puppets are on a hustle right now since SONY exposed how the corporate thugs love to screw consumers.
Imagine screwing up computers of millions of consumers and not having to do jail time! Any time some teenager "steals" songs or hacks something somewhere and is SLAPPed by corporate thugs - the media falls all over itself to report the "news" on the front pages - but as soon as corporate thugs get caught with their hands in the til - it's buried on page 22 between the A&P adds - if reported at all
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out
That is actually "support" software which most spyware cataloguing sites list as harmless.
Some sites claim that there is a modified spyware version out there too - but not the Vaio version.
The site you have linked to looks like the least professional site of the bunch. Maybe you are right, but it is not so definite from the evidence I've seen.
If the music and movie industries had their way, their product would be kept locked away inside a vault buried under a mountain surrounded by armed guards, a moat, landmines, pits of diesel ready to burn, and lots and lots of razor wire.
NOBODY is gonna steal even a look at the box, and even if they did, it's sitting on a self-destruct device that would scare Indiana Jones(TM).
Thanks for making sure a) nobody can touch your content, and B) if they do, they and the content get nuked.
It's like that car alarm from one the James Bond movies featuring the innocent "protected by an anti-theft device" sticker. The goon laughs and tries to smash the windshield with a pipe. The car explodes.
Extreme, yeah, but he didn't steal it, did he? Nope! The content is protected!
Sig for hire.
I remember back in the early to mid 80's, as a H.S. student, and making copies of software like the original Wizardry for my Apple II+ and the like. I had friends from two different areas that were a group of hackers, and I was the conduit between the 2 groups, meaning my fater had to purchase boxes of 100 5 1/4 diskettes every month or so.
The difference was, back then (and even now, to a large extent), there was an entry level knowledge often needed to do this kind of thing. You couldn't just make a copy, because of the variable disk speeds often written into the games, etc. You had to know how to use certain programs to make it work, and access to folks that had copies of the original wasn't always easy.
10 years ago, as well as today, for music especially, there isn't a great deal of knowledge you need to do it. Windows will rip a CD for you, in fact. You don't need anything more than what your core OS gives you.
It is similar, in a fashion, to how Sony and Verant handled some cheating in EverQuest. There was an application often run on a Linux box called ShowEQ. It would give you relevant data about where mobs were, how much xp they would grant you (approx) and their levels, etc. For the longest time, there was an entry level knowledge required to use it, so Sony didn't go out of it's way to protect it that much. Then folks started selling machines with a pre-built ShowEQ kit on it that automatically updated itself, and too many folks were using it. Sony had to fight back, and did, with much harder encryption as well as other things to make it harder to work. Could it still be done? Yes, but it made it that much harder. The entry level went up.
Basically, that is what these music companies need to do. Make the cost of entry to rip a CD illegally higher than most folks can handle. The problem they have is that they haven't been able to come up with a way to do that. Until they do, they won't fix anything. And with the internet being what it is, as soon as someone figures an easier way to get around what the music companies have done, they will distribute it easily. Today's ease of naer global communication makes the job well nigh impossible.
Conclusion: The music companies can't win this fight. They never could.
I wrote something just a few days ago about how the music industry should not only concentrate on fighting piracy, but also give something back to their loyal customers. It seems that just like lawyers know nothing about technology (or cows know little about algebra), music companies know very little about using the power of the internet for good causes. Maybe now they'll learn.
"I think they've set back audio CD protection by years."
Ahhhhhhh... that made my day. I could read that over and over.
I agree with the above entirely. What is interesting is that with the old analog LP, no matter what you might say about it's sound quality (vastly better than CD or crackly, noisy annoyance), you actually get a copy of the sound waves as captured in the studio/stage as they happened. Pretty amazing if you ask me. Not to mention the larger canvas for artwork and often some quite creative packaging concepts. Unfortunately you don't get DRM protection, which I know we'll all miss. (Note for the Anonymous Coward above: This is also sarcasm. Just in case you were wondering.) Cheers
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Yes that's true, and it's an anomaly that should be taken advantage of to promote free software and user control.
Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.
What? I think you understand the issue less than your non technical friends.
The only difference between Sony's DRM and any other is that the popular press noticed and reported it. You seem to understand this, but not the implications and you underestimate your friends.
People really are angry for the right reasons. No one asks for DRM and no one selling computers or software ever tells them about it. What's sold are partial advantages of digital media. Less honest vendors promise all the advantages of digital media but actually deliver almost none of them other than portability. Cases like this show the real problem of all DRM: when you can't read and write files on your system but someone else can, that someone else owns your computer. They understand that WM / the new Napster, Ipod and others do the same kinds of things with more or less honesty about it.
Now's the time to pop in a copy of Mepis or some other good distro. The longer you wait, the more entangled in DRM trash your friends become and the more they have to lose. The demonstration is even more appropriate if your friend's computers are all crapped up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
under the current system when something falls out of copyright (yes it happens every day, even to Elvis!) it enters the public domain and if free for all. Because DRM systems are attempting to be 'impossible' to crack there's a good change that when DRMed music falls out of copyright it will not enter the public domain. So using DRM is basically like saying bye bye to existing copyright laws.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Eben Moglen.
Does anyone know if this rootkit stuff is preinstalled on VAIO computers? I'd like to know before I buy one.
Precisely.
A question I'd love to ask the record industry (slashdot interview, anyone? :-) )
would be:
"Would you rather sell X million CDs per year with a 0% piracy rate,
or 2X million with a 30% piracy rate?"
(They still wouldn't "get it", of course, but it'd be fun to ask.)
This is also a bit off-topic, but the view of the oil-connected, "born-again christian" businessmen who run Washington is that the world is coming to an end soon anyways with the second coming of you-know-who. If you remember, James Watt, under the Reagan adiministration, made that very remark regarding the selling off of park lands to the big mining and oil conglomerates.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Instead of trying to give less freedom for your paying customers compared to the pirated work, give more freedom? Online encoding services work great for allofmp3.com -- you tell them which song(s) you want, then if you want it as mp3, ogg, FLAC, or something else, and in which bitrate. Nothing is of course DRM'ed. Granted, allofmp3.com may not be entirely "clean" legally, but it's time the sites who are start doing the same.
Give the customers something P2P software rarely can; there's a lot to offer still, compared to eMule or Pirate Bay's unorganized torrents where you don't know how good job the ripper did, and where you only get the raw music, and nothing more.
I think they need to *compete* against piracy, as it'll always stay, and competing isn't done best by basically pissing on your paying customers with DRM protections.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Someone in some boardroom somewhere must have defined/designed this feature set.
This was a deliberate action not made by some lackies.
Expect the alternatives to be variations on a theme as they try to find out what is and what is not acceptable.
Let me spell it out again!
Nothing you attempt to install on my computers is acceptable even if you hide the action behind a EULA.
So let me put that a bit clearer, I do not give you or anyone else permission to install anything on my computers other than functionality that I specifically require.
That means if anything is installed under a cloak of legalise or technical measures I have pre-stated that it is not acceptable.
best rgds
People that have broadband and are inclined to listen to music on computer and music player are going to be very reluctunt to buy CDs. Last CD that I bought was probably a year ago. It will be very hard to convince me to buy another CD.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Great! Then you would be interested in buying my own version of Beethoven's Ninth, sung by myself in the shower? If, as you say, any "el cheapo" earphones are okay, then maybe an "el cheapo" artist as myself would also do? What really matters is music itself, not the quality of the recording, right?
Well of course their response is "It's our music! FUK OFF" and if you don't like it don't buy it. It's not a mandate you buy it. Which of course leads to the only way these idiots will take notice. Don't buy their crap, don't even steal it or notice it. Only then they may realize their mistake. Nah! It would likely be "Damn pirates stole our material so much nobody buys it anymore". Hmrph!
You wanted to know why sales have been down? THIS is why!!! Well, that and the bubble gum pop crap you are pushing out lately and calling music.
If somebody *expects* me to steal, when I did not merit that expectancy in the first place, then yes, you might say, they criminalize me. And that just p*sses me off.
I don't go and shout "you are a murderer" to Sony's boss, just because he might get a gun someday and actually shoot somebody.
These are Star Trek references...
Sorry, I already don't shoplift. ^_^
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I don't get it.
All this talk of boycotting Sony is well and good -- I've already had geek friends comment that Sony is now off their shortlist for HDTV's, games, etc. -- but unless this behavior spreads beyond the typical /. crowd, I don't think it's gonna make a speck of difference.
So, let me make a modest proposal: all you geeks in the USA who are about to visit friends and family for Thanksgiving, TELL THEM THIS STORY.
"Sony has been making music CDs that have a computer virus on them. The idea is that if you play the CD in your computer, the computer gets modified to prevent you from making illegal copies of the CD. The problem is that not only is this illegal to do, it makes it easy for more viruses to get on your system. Even the Department of Homeland Security has condemned Sony for this, but they have yet to apologize. So I'm going to avoid buying any Sony product -- music, movies, games, electronics, computers, etc. -- until they do. I wasn't planning on stealing their CD, and I don't appreciate them treating me with the presumption that I was going to."
(I realize that calling it a "virus" isn't technically accurate, but I'm assuming that's much more likely to be a meaningful term to grandma than trying to explain what a "rootkit" is...)
- Windows users all over the place have turned off autoplay on their machines, so they won't get infected again
- Nerds everywhere will be posting ways to defeat whatever shows up in the future
- The whole industry (and Sony in particular, thank God) is trembling about taking the risk of the ire of the computer industry if they screw these things up again
- The fact that it took 6 months or more to discover this rootkit is a GOOD thing, as the damage done is now more noteworthy and it has caused more damage than if it was discovered quickly
- There's been a ton of bad press, meaning the awareness of 'fake' CDs that are really copy-protected disks has been raised, even in the minds of many non-technical people
How much money would it have cost to arrange for this ourselves? Way to go Sony! Your long-standing behavior toward proprietary and lock-in types of behavior (Betamax, Minidisc, Memory Stick, and now rootkits) has *really* hosed you up good this time!
Us Slashdotters owe Sony a debt of gratitude.
Try sitting in a dark room with your eyes closed and put on some of your favourite music - either in headphones or a good quality stereo. I tend to lie in bed with good headphones
Now REALLY listen to the music. Focus on the different layers. Listen to the textures of the instruments. Focus on the form of the composition.
Pretty soon you'll be hearing all sorts of little details and layers that the musician has put in there that you never noticed before, and with any luck you'll get a shiver running down your spine occasionally. I'm speaking literally here - listening to music this way can actually get shivers running down your spine, the way you can be moved when you loose yourself at a great concert.
Your milage may vary.... and it might not work like this with all styles of music :D
DVD-Audio didn't sell.
You can buy DVD-Audio discs, and most DVD video players will play them. You get more channels and more dynamic range. Finally, 24-bit audio. But no digital outputs from the player, a tough copy protection system, and watermarking in the audio.
Nobody buys this stuff. Total worldwide sales of DVD-Audio disks are around 400,000 units. That number has been flat for years. There's some high-end audiophile interest, but it's a niche product.
So that was the industry's try #1 at moving customers from copyable CDs. It was an abject failure. Try #2 was hokey copy protection schemes for audio CDs. That backfired. Stay tuned for the next great idea from the music industry.
Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra
It's not the lawyers at fault here, it's the courts. Judges (and moreso juries) are people too. Even if this case went before a judge, there is a lot of technicality that would probably need to be very much reworded in order for him/her to understand. One of the problems with law is that one not only need to understand law (a difficult task in itself), but how it applies to the case at hand. In technology we've been getting by using laws pieced together from non-technical applications - sometimes coming out OK but often ending in disaster.
Even if the lawyers understand tech (Lessig, for example), you still need a judge and/or jury that understands it... and possibly more importantly laws that actual deal with tech rather than vaguely related scenarios/applications that have been applied to tech.
> tired-of-this-story dept.
Well, I'm certainly not tired of it.
This is perhaps the greatest, most significant development in the history of anti-RIAA activism.
For years, the RIAA has told us that P2P is a dangerous vector for viruses and spyware.
But now, we find that RIAA-blessed CDs also install this most vile type of crapware, too.
One of the RIAA's biggest anti-P2P arguments has been destroyed permanently.
Which is safer? (1) buying a legitimate CD and inserting it in my computer, or (2) downloading the same music in MP3 format from e-mule, knowing that each file has 50 different sources with the same SHA-1 signature?
The answer to that question has been irrefutably decided this month, and that's a truly historic development.
Once again, you don't have to buy CD's. I want to emphasize that one more time: you don't HAVE to buy CD's.
I'm not suggesting you steal the music. I'm suggesting that you boycott music in general. Go without playing a CD for a week or 2 and see what its like. I don't use CD's at all. I listen to the radio on my way to work and don't have time to sit and listen to music at home.
I think the music industry would fall of their horse if people just recognized that purchasing CD's doesn't make you cool, it doesn't improve your love life, and it doesn't make you a rock star. I love music as much or more so than the next guy, but the crap that is being produced these days is worthless. Sony has paid music stations into making stars out of mediocre bands, and they've been fined for it- but unfortunately the fine is like a slap on the wrist for them given the benefits they reaped out of pushing this crap on us.
Regardless, my point is that if all these people whining about copy protection and the cost of CD's and the RIAA just quit buying CD's, the problem would go away. Unfortunately, we've create an industry where the RIAA believes that their members are entitled to their earnings. They don't understand that their revenue is driven by our actions. And equally unfortunate, we've forgotten that we are the consumers and we control the dollar. We as consumers hold the power to stab the dragon in the heart. We could shut them down if we so choose. But they are counting on people to have no self control or self discipline and buy every piece of crap that is shoved down their throats because its cool to listen to the latest music- no matter how bad it stinks.
So one more time- you don't have to buy CDs. Make it cool to NOT buy CDs. Make it cool to download your music from free bands on the internet. Don't get attached to any single band though, because they'll soon be signed by a major record label. But there are enough bands out there for free that you'll have plenty of original sounding music that you never need to pay for the likes of Metallica or 50-cent again and the RIAA and its members will change their ways and stop penalizing their customers with attempts at copy protection or disappear into oblivion.
>>There would be no foreign cars in the U.S.
As if thats a bad thing?!?!?
Oh, I see, you're one of those losers that thinks "it must be good, its not from here" and you probably spend a great deal of time saying how we're all stupid here to make up for your low self esteem and failures in life.
American cars and engineering are excellent.
"record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy" like lowering the ridiculous price tag! but I guess the rootkit is more lucrative than lowering prices in regard to consumer interest.
OK. Here's a test. Talk about source code to a lawyer. I sold a tech business. I NEVER got the lawyers (ours and theirs) to understand what source code was. I CONSTANTLY had to edit the agreements to change "source codes" to "source code". I think they file it in their brains under "secret nuclear launch codes type things; dangerous; can cause company to explode; must be kept top secret, dual keys, vetted staff, keep out cameras".
Morons. Trouble comes when a company needs to use tech, but is run by lawyers. Bah.
K.
Oh the irony. Perhaps the lawyers are also not aware that every time I've tried to play a copy-protected cd in linux, the only way I've been able to do it is to rip it with cdparanoia
An individual singer/songwriter usually does not have the business skills, capital, resources, networking contacts etc to promote their own material. They are the creative element of the mix. Most of the time they need a business element in order to market, exploit, and further the artistic element.
Since most singer/songwriters do not know much about business, or they are not able to conduct the business themselves, they have to partner with someone who does. This partnership results in the limited transfer of the right to copy and exploit the person's creative works.
Think of it this way - how many inventors would want to actually manage their own companies? Most would not. Most would want someone else to handle the business, the accounting, the marketing, the selling, the taxes, etc so that the inventor themself could focus on the actual productivity and creative side of things: the inventing itself.
That analogy is very similar to the typical situation a singer/songwriter is faced with. Focus on the art, let someone else sell it.
Libertas in infinitum
I think you are confused on a couple of things and the Industry is slightly more complicated than you probably think.
First off, most studios are just that; studios. They only do the recording, mixing, editing, mastering etc and usually have no affiliation with the record labels. The record labels are the people who are memebrs of the RIAA and front all of the money, market the recordings etc.
Also publishers hold the copyrights to the lyrics and composition while the record labels usually hold the phonorecord copyright. Pubs and labels are definately two different entities. A pub's job is to exploit songs and get them in the hands of the labels to record the songs. And the labels job is to exploit masters.
Hope this makes sense. If you have more questions about the industry feel free to ask. I have a degree in it and live/work in Nashville.
Libertas in infinitum
Im pretty sure that someone would have figured out a workaround or fix for that root kit. Music companies and the entertaiment industry are a bunch or greddy aholes. Its none of their business what ppl share among themselves, as long as they are not selling it. Sony needs to look in its own backyard for piracy. Asia is a hot bed of piracy.
Has anyone explored the topic of how this debacle might be used to explain what is being attempted by the media companies with their advocacy of Trusted Computing? It is another effort to hijack a computer from its owner. In fact it seems to me that this episode is a clumsy attempt to retrofit Trusted Computing onto existing non-compliant machines.
I suppose it might be too confusing to try to bring up something that does not exist yet but you don't want to face a situation where it has been become a fait accompli for all new computers. There are enough ways for a computer to fail to work without adding people trying to inhibit it for their own agenda.
Linux and/or Mac is an alternative though if you use consoles for gaming!
There aren't that many games that are really even PC only anymore, Half-Life 2 was just released for XBox. Is it really worth having the computer you use for so many things be so subject to malware and personal corporate espionage? Are a few first release games really worth that?
At the very least use a linux/Mac system as a primary box and keep a PC just for gaming. It'll save yourself a lot of bother.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The boycott need not be restricted to CDs. If they want to screw us over, I'm not sure I want a PS3.
I don't like Microsoft much either, so perhaps I'll try a Revolution
"Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra" ...
It's not the lawyers at fault here, it's the courts.
That doesn't make any sense in this situation. Sony decided at some point to include this rootkit on CD's they sold. Almost certainly, someone in Sony's legal department looked over the plan and said OK. No courts were involved at any point.
THAT lawyer (really team of lawyers) obviously did not know technology well or he/she would have realized what a grave risk Sony was taking. Software that modifies the deepest innards of every computer that it touches? I'm sorry but you couldn't pay me enough to write that software as I know the kind of liability such an effort puts you under. Yet this group of Sony lawyers gave the OK for Sony to embed this in millions of CD's.
Lawyers are, by training, the most risk adverse people on the face of the planet. They are not stupid but they are compelled to avoid risk by years of said legal training. The lawyers job is primarily to go around saying "well you could do that but here are the reasons why you will go to jail if you do". That they did not succeed in convincing Sony execs not to go forward with the mad rootkit plan can only mean they did not understand the risks enough, as an informed lawer would have been able to make a strong case for probable legal damage WHEN the rootkit was discovered that would have dissuaded any Sony executive from undertaking it.
I have a lot of close friends whoe are lawyers - just ask any lawyer what lawschool really is and they will agree it's basically re-molding how your brain works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not only would radio be AM only, it would be talk radio, with no "bumpers".
Mandela
Gandhi
most of the founding fathers
plenty of the french revolutionaries
Lord Denning
Warren (for Brown v Board of Education)
Despite all your objections (which are correct), the railroads in the US ship 2/3rds of the ton-miles in the US. Trucks are only used where on-time is important. One wonders how much long distant shipping would be left if the railroads figured out how to stick to a schedule when customers want.
To compete with the railroads, semis need to get better than 20 mpg (they get about 7). That isn't counting cost of the drivers - 1 train engineer can replace about 25 truck drivers.
Barge traffic is more efficient, but limited to where there are rivers.
""Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" the head of Sony BMG's global digital business, Thomas Hesse, told National Public Radio."
Question: Does Thomas Hesse know what a rootkit is?
The curious thing is that Sony stock went up about 10% since the rootkit was discovered.
We need a catchy name for software that thinks it knows what's best for the user. Sony's software thinks I don't need to see files beginning with $$, my HP all-in-one driver thinks I want to devote 16 MB of RAM to it all the time when I only use it once a month. My ipod thinks I don't ever want to delete any files immediately after hearing them and just knows I want to use iTunes to organize ALL my music. My Brother laser printer thinks I want to see its "multiple page" window all the time. It goes on and on.
I have no idea how these things are done, but why not find the secret IP addresses that First4Internet, XCP, and others phone home to, and create a denial of service attack ? Maybe a Black hat cracker who feels the need to use his zombie droves to perform a public service ? Sony, etc, can't change the phone home addresses, so this might work.
A cluster of cows doing algebra
fantastic! now we can all remember when something daft is done, we can all say how it was to 'pull a Sony'.
U238 might (or might not) result in a significant chemical toxicity problem, but no worries about nuclear explosions http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/ fission.html
... I get your point!
Plutonium, on the other hand
Bear in mind that the rootkit code appears to be of dubious quality. I have pointed out before that running multiple kernel patches is very risky. I doubt you would have the problem of several rootkits hogging too much CPU, because your system would fail to boot much before CPU hogging would become an issue.
I did and I do ;-)
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?