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EMI Considers Abandoning DRM on CDs
jOmill writes "EMI Netherlands has announced that it is considering no longer using DRM on CDs, because it isn't worth the cost.
According to Reuters the company is still reviewing the decision. From the article: 'Critics have argued that the system has not worked as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music to the popular iPod instead. A spokeswoman for EMI said it had not manufactured any new disks with DRM, which restricts consumers from making copies of songs and films they have purchased legally, for the last few months.'"
...because when any "DRM" is used on audio CDs, they're technically no longer even "audio CDs"...at least, they don't officially conform to the Red Book Audio specification, and can't even use the familiar "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo. While certainly they're intended to be purchased and used as audio CDs, and everyone would still refer to them as such, they're at most an "audio disc resembling a conventional audio CD," or "audio that is incidentally stored on CD media".
Intrinsic to a Red Book Audio CD is the ability to extract the audio in its pristine digital form. While content owners may not appreciate that in today's digital marketplace, that's what an audio CD is. If labels want to add DRM or anything else not in the Red Book Audio specification to these discs, they are obligated to make it clear that they're not really audio CDs, and indeed, consumers have found the belated warning that they "may not play in all CD players" only too true, resulting in practical decisions like this one from EMI Netherlands. This is what you get when you screw with established international standards.
Especially humorous is that, any amount of DRM aside, all of this music will always be widely available on file sharing networks, mostly as lossy MP3s. Who is affected most, then, by not being able to extract audio from discs within one's own physical possession, given that the music is invariably already available any number of file sharing networks many times over? The individual consumer who simply wants to enjoy his purchase on another device, such as a computer or portable music player. While DRM is intended to prevent or reduce casual copyright infringement, it never will stop content from being copied, and DRM on "audio CDs" is just one of those wrongheaded ideas, given that it toys with a standard that has already been established for two and a half decades.
Until someone figures out how to alter properties of nature in such a way that physical property of audio or video being able to be in an analog state via sound waves or the electromagnetic spectrum can be eliminated, there will always be mechanisms for those who wish to violate copyright to violate it. In the meantime, DRM will mostly affect and inconvenience legitimate, paying consumers of content.
The second-greatest day will be when they report that sales dropped off not the slightest bit b/c of this change DRM only annoys purchasers. Not "pirates"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Maybe the rest of the damn CD makers will follow suit, and I can go back to using my Sharpies to scribble on the front of my CDs!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
TFS says they are considering stopping, and then says they stopped months ago. Could we make up our minds please?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Critics have argued that the system has not worked as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music to the popular iPod instead
Who needs to illegally download? DRM'd "CDs" have a much more serious flaw, from EMI's perspective - They don't actually stop anyone from ripping them (and as a perk, they don't play in some audio CD players, particularly car CD players), meaning users need to rip and reburn them just to use as intended.
Good to see them giving up, though, regardless of the reason.
But did hell freeze over?
Finally, they're starting to get a clue. I do not advocate pirating music in any way. However, I think it's equally, if not more insidious, that commercial interests are making it very difficult for consumers to *want* to do the right thing. This is a step in the right direction. *AA....are you listening?
"EMI Netherlands has announced that it is considering no longer using DRM on CDs, because it isn't worth the cost.
We could have told you that, but since when did you guys ever listen to your customers?
From the article: 'Critics have argued that the system has not worked as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music to the popular iPod instead. A spokeswoman for EMI said it had not manufactured any new disks with DRM, which restricts consumers from making copies of songs and films they have purchased legally, for the last few months.'"
Did you ever think we, as consumers, when buying a CD, want to make backups, import the CD to our Ipod or other MP3 player?
It's amazing how management runs these companies. How can you deliver a product your customer wants when you don't even listen to what they WANT?
Are precedents global? I mean will one country follow suit solely because another has seen the light?
Welcome back to reality, where DRM is only an empty word.
DO you mean legally? then it would depend on treaties.
If they show that th cost of DRM is more then the cost of actual loss, then it could spread because of market forces.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do or do not. There is no 'consider.'
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
There is no try, only do.
DRM on cd's us futile anyhow.
Subscribe to emusic. Download plain old mp3s and do what you want with ' em.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
If you can violate laws of physics, you can make a whole lot more money than the entire MAFIAA combined.
Indeed!
Is any protection 'worth the cost'?
How about ditching all these lame attempts to stop 'casual copying' like CSS, DVD regions and macrovision, and then pass the savings on to the customer?
If not then don't be surprised when the customers casually downloads it from a torrent. With freedom from DRM shit, torrents would still be good value at twice the price.
...and the poor software pirates who are quickly being putting out of business. How are they going to put food on the table if they don't have anything to crack? Let's do the right thing and think of their needs, people!
When did people start equating rudimentary copy protection with Digital Rights Management?
The term has lost all meaning. People are throwing it around whenever they stumble upon any bug, missing feature, or technical limitation that causes them grief. "I can't use my iPod with multiple computers, I hate DRM." "Internet Explorer crashed, DRM strikes again." "This website requires registration, DRM is out of control."
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
...EMI has announced they are discontinuing the release of new albums on standard Audio CDs and will now be selling Audio HD-DVDs complete with fingerprint scanners and GPS transmitters and facial recognition software. Any AHD-DVD found to be played by a user other than it's owner (or within hearing range of a non-owner) will self-destruct, and any AHD-DVD found outside it's allocated region will explode.
In other, other news, numerous airlines worldwide have banned the usage of all media disks during flight.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
It's just that the data is on a second sesion instead of the first one. It took me 5 minutes to figure that out when inspecting the disk with isobuster.. copied the data, burned a real CD and it did play nice in my carstereo..
In the article, it says that the DRM'd CDs were sold primarily outside of the U.S.. I suspect this was because of the headaches and lawsuits they knew would likely plague them in the United States. But now with the globalization fueled by the internet, I can imagine that more and more U.S. consumers were importing these DRM'd CDs perhaps after discovering a foreign artist via their music downloaded from the internet. If that's even partially true, then it would be more proof in support of the notion that "sharing" music over the internet is actually growing the market. Making music easier to get legitimately will be a win for the music industry in the long run, if they can get over their CD and DRM fixations.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
CDs have a lot more going against them than just some silly DRM (that doesn't even work as intended, no less).
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
List by sub label. Taken from http://www.emirecords.co.uk/loader.html
::EMI:: ::Heavenly Records:: ::DFA Records:: ::Positiva:: ::Positiva:: ::Positiva:: ::Additive::
*NOTE: The site is flash so I can't copy and paste, these are hand copied, sorry for misspellings*
Auf Der Maur
Badly Drawn Boy
Beth Orton
Captain
Corinne Bailey Ray
David Gilmore
Faith Evans
Faultline
FischerSpooner
Hot Chip
Iron Maiden
John Cale
Kate Bush
Keren Ann
Kraftwerk
Pink Floyd
Radio 4
Robbie Williams
Saosin
Shawn Emanuel
Sigur Ros
Starsailor
Telepopmusik
The Aliens
The Concrete
Vincent Van and the Villans
Dove
Ed Hardcourt
The Little Ones
The Magic Numbers
The Vines
Black Dice
Delia Gonzalz & Gavin Russom
The Juan Maclean
Deep Dish
Ferry Corsten
Paul Van Dyk
Soul Avengerz
Soul Seekers
The Shapeshifters
Remy
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Intrinsic to a Red Book Audio CD is the ability to extract the audio in its pristine digital form.
5 &lastnode_id=918089 2 /
(Disclaimer: I am not an audio or CD technology expert. Take the following with a pinch of salt.)
My understanding is that audio CDs can't be copied exactly because the lowest-level information stored on the CD cannot be returned directly by existing recorders.
Bear in mind that the files which *can* be copied exactly to and from CD-ROMs sit on top of several layers of encoding. Even though you can make a copy which is identical at the filesystem level (which is all you care about in most cases), AFAIK the lowest-level bits (i.e. those actually stamped/burned onto the disc) may not be identical. Multiple layers of encoding and corrections mean that this isn't a problem.
IIRC audio CDs include fewer encoding levels, and whilst most players can read and extract the audio information from the raw bits, I believe that some corrections and "fixing" of damaged audio data (*) occur at a lower level than that of any data the CD-ROM is able to return. In other words, the "rawest" audio data you can get your hands on may already have been processed and "fixed" at a lower level.
(*) Not counting mathematical algorithms which exploit clever encoding techniques so that you can still retrieve the uncorrupted info if (e.g.) 3 or fewer out of 10 bits are damaged. (I just made that up, but you get the broad idea...) What I mean is actual unrepairable damage that the CD player interpolates before you ever get it.
See also:-
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=94461
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cdrom/cd-recordable/part
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
So they're making a definity imnprovement of the product availability to their customers, making a definite cost reduction, with only a theoretical risk of noticeably increased piracy? Yeah, that sounds logical here too, and I wonder what took them so long. Pirates aren't those crying out at DRM, they use BitTorrent or other P2P nets. That's the biggest design hole of DRM, IMHO. Maybe the point was to not have a single pirate be able to rip (one is enough) that protection or gain it from other sources where it's not protected (or before it is), but all I can say about that idea is "dream on".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Which will come first?
Effective DRM
An end to Spam
or the release of Duke Nukem Forever?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I think the important part here is that you're getting the intended audio (i.e. the PCM data that was originally pressed at the factory from the master copy) rather than the potentially-scratched probably-incorrect-in-some-places PCM-like data from the disc.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
do please find sanity elsewhere as well, industry.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Has anybody actually bought a CD that they could not rip?
I've never seen one that I couldn't easily rip songs from....
I had a Foo Fighters CD that I got as a gift which was labeled as an "enhanced" CD. The first time I put it in my PC at home, I forgot to hold down the shift key, and I wasn't able to rip it on that computer (although the software on the CD wanted to "give" me a set of protected files for all of the songs, which I would only be able to listen to with their proprietary player). I ripped the CD under Linux on my laptop, then again on my work PC in Windows. Also with this CD, it was supposed to have some kind of bonus content that would connect to 'somebody' over the Internet to authenticate the CD in order to unlock the bonus content. That never worked on any PC I tried it on, the authentication always failed.
So there were two disappointments on that disc: 1) If you don't hold down the shift key, you won't be able to rip it (under Windows) and 2) the broken bonus content. I like the music on the CD, though... it's too bad that they have to muck it all up with DRM under the guise of extra features that don't work.
I posted about this earlier on http://www.groklaw.net/
;) )
i ll_be_protected/
Ithink that the last major UK EMI release with DRM was Coldplay's X&Y back in 2005, any other releases I noticed on EMI was on the budget/reissue EMI Gold label, which was usually sold at about £2.99 in the bargain bin's at Sainsburys (a posher version of Walmart for our American chums
Why they kept it on the cheap stuff and not the latest releases I don't know, I suspect they were trying to see how many returns as "faulty" they would get on the budget range, maybe it was too high a percentage and they decided the cost of the returns on a big selling CD was too high.
They used to have a pro-drm site at http://www.emimusic.info/uk/ printed on the DRM'd CD's but they seem to have pulled it.
Funny to see how cocky the record companies were back in 2002 compared to now - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/21/all_cds_w
Jonathan
After years of treating me like a whoring stealing bitch with the DRM restrictions, I lost interest in what they have to say anymore. They are not worthy of my business. It is like an abusing dad who beat his children after 10 years, asks them..."ohh please come back now, I will not beat you anymore!" Well I seen the world, and I am not interested in going back.
Im not your bitch anymore. You are not special, and I have no reason to give you any of my money. I havent bought a single new CD in the last 8 years from a store - but I did buy few used [DRM free] Jazz, Blues and few indie at the concerts.
Fuck you, if you think I will come back.
I always look for the little "CD" logo on plastic discs in stores, and if that logo isn't there, there's no way I will buy the disc.
EMI, in a recent press release, has declared that water is wet and the Earth is very likely in orbit around the sun.
"We're as surprised as anyone," said one EMI representative.
No. I understand what you meant, and that was the point I made regarding CD/DVD-ROM filesystems.
With audio CDs one can't guarantee an exact copy of the PCM audio because the lowest-level info we can extract may already have been *transparently interpolated* at a lower level.
I've ripped audio tracks via the two different DVD drives in my PC, and they came out very slightly differently. (Can't remember if the length was different, but the md5 sum definitely would have been). Clearly, one or both was not retrieving the exact information and interpolating.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Lets remember Tommi Kyyräs comments on playing cd's: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050922-5339 .html
Sorry, I should have made clear that this *implies* that we don't know if we're getting "perfect" PCM (i.e. the PCM which was originally encoded/written to the disc) or PCM with error interpolation.
I also don't know how much hidden information isn't ripped, nor if a "perfect" CD may return different PCM (other than that which was originally written) in any particular drive.
Even if it were theoretically possible to extract all the relevant, unmodified bits from the CD, another issue is that the pits/lands in audio CD-Rs burned at high speed may have poorly-defined edges (due to the speed the laser has to turn on/off), and thus some CD players may have more trouble reading them back, giving more errors, more interpolation and lower audio quality.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Maybe they realised it was a waste of time because it doesn't work.
This may just be my experience, but I haven't come across a single CD (including some which are explicitly marked as having some sort of "Copy Protection" on them) which didn't rip first time in my PC. There's nothing special about my drive (I've used an old Matsushita DVD drive and a Plextor DVD Re-writer). Maybe it's because I am running Linux, but as far as I can tell, CD-Ex on Windows would work equally well as anything I am using under Linux.
as pointed out before the Red Book specification describes audio CD's.
but data DVD has sectors and format information in the data on top of the red book specification.
and the Orange Book specification give details of multisession formats.
most of the "copy protection" systems used worked by wrapping the session information to impossible combinations that were impossible to read. or degrading the galois based CRC information that was used to recover bad data. neither of these methods were fatal to a Red Book player that only played audio disks as it ignored all other formats happily.
but these days most CD players can play MP3's also, and hence are data players not audio players - this means they are exactly the systems that the copy protection was designed to disrupt.
so the CD manufacturers found themselves in a situation where the new hifi's being built were being disrupted by they copy protection and hence unable to play any of the CDs. its a question of the physiscal data path built into the decoder IC on most MP3/Audio CD players.
in short, I'm not suprised they stopped including it - I'm just suprised they waited so long.
Frankly, Virgin and Macromedia can take their DRM and shovel it where sun does not shine and rotate it at 48x CD speed until they the torque pushes their heads out of their arse.
That is a memorable quote! Thank you!
consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music
My favourite band are signed to EMI, and their last album was DRM-infested. I emailed them to tell them that, although I had bought all their previous albums, I'd be downloading their new one illegally because it works better. They intentionally crippled their own product to the point where unpaid pirates actually delivered a better service than the multi-billion pound international corporation.
You're not supposed to like that sort of music (probably made by dirty hippies and/or subversives). You're supposed to only like the kind of nice music that the Big Companies deem suitable by broadcasting on mass-market public radio (for which they are paid royalties for the privilege of the free advertising?!?!?)
If people like you stopped doing what you're not supposed to, you'd make life easier and more profitable for those who are in a position to benefit by rights, and there'd be no need for pesky low-profit artists, who are by definition therefore dirty hippies and probably foreign and communist.
Some record companies claimed that allowing radio stations to play records would damage their profits.
As it turned out they were talking rubbish.
...at least in some of the newsreports I saw, in which they stated that "it was not feasible to use a DRM system as the system was hacked every time", rather than (the truth) "the consumer and CD license holders (!) have fully rejected the protection systems we have devised, because they hamper fair use - especially in the area of simply playing out the CD (not even copying it) on normal consumer-grade playback systems and even outright violate consumer rights (sony rootkit)".
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
The CEO of EMI Netherlands has been found dead in an Amsterdam ally with two ricin pellets in his leg and a quantity of Polonium-210 in his body.
Police say they have been asked by the city authorities not to investigate, since this may be in breach of the American DMCA (Secret Overseas Pre-emptive Section)
"When did people start equating rudimentary copy protection with Digital Rights Management?
The term has lost all meaning."
DRM is not Copy Protection. It is Copy Prevention under defined circumstances (most of them)*. Copy Protection is Copy Prevention under all circumstances. Rudimentary Copy Protection is -- my guess -- Copy Protection that doesn't work.
Anyway, that all means that "Copy Protection == DRM for original media".
* DRM defines a series of "rights" you have to the content. Each application of a "digital right" begins with the allowing of a copy, or degraded copy. Or not allowing the copy (no access). So, the "rights" part of DRM can by replaced by "copy". Which is fundamentally what DRM controls -- Copyright. Further, "Copy Protection" (prevention) controls the same right. Except that instead of using fancy crypto, it is supposed to verify the original media only. Same job. The reason that "DRM" is separated from "Copy Protection" is that "Copy Protection" as defined here cannot be applied unless original media is available. Consider application to downloaded content.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The primary reason that people stop buying new CDs is because there are no good CDs being produced. I'd have lots of trouble naming 1 great CD that came out in the last 6 months (even though I've bought a couple).
If you think there's a lack of good music being produced, you're simply wrong. There's tons of it. You might have to do some searching, but no matter what your taste you will eventually be satisfied.
This "no good music these days" attitude is just the usual unnecessary and unwarranted elitist front worn by people from every period.
The payload (PCM data) is wrapped around several error checking structures defined in the Red Book. They are intended to recreate bits that are potentially lost due to damage with a similar technique to, say, a Hamming coding.
This error checking and correction is the first level of defense against problems with the media, and is by design, intended to recreate a bit-by-bit true PCM audio stream.
Interpolation of the actual PCM data happens after this ECC layer. That is, if so many bits are flipped in a sector that the correction yeilds a payload different from what it originally was THEN (and only then) should it interpolate with what came prior and will come later.
If you rip the tracks in two different drives and get different files, then one (both?) the drives aren't doing it correctly. There may be differences in audio extraction based on delay from the track marker or normalization or simply bypassing the ECC layer and stripping its wrapper instead of using it to verify bits read.
But I do think that their investors should know they're spending millions trying to prevent something that might conceivably be driving profits *up.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Well talk is cheap - speaking as someone who stopped my 3 CDs a month habit when CD copy protection became widespread, It's going to take more than "considering" to get me near their coasters again. To be honest, the idea of giving money to them at all doesn't sit well with me with the way record companies have behaved over the last few year - it just feels more like paying a ransom to suited mobsters than buying music. Ah well, there's no good way to pay the artists and not the record companies I suppose, so I'll continue to enjoy music through royalties-based channels and magnatunes.
Non-Dutch music shoppers still up a creek!
(or, alternatively...)
Continues to fund RIAA lawsuits!
I've ripped audio tracks via the two different DVD drives in my PC, and they came out very slightly differently.
The CDParanoia FAQ explains this.
Basically, you cannot seek accurately on an audio CD - you can ask to seek to a specific frame and the player will land you somewhere in that frame, but not necessarily at the beginning. So 2 rips of the same track may be absolutely identical except for the fact that one starts a few samples earlier than the other. To compare them you would have to align the tracks against each other and trim them to the same length.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Google if you need instructions, but I really recommend disabling autorun on your computer. It's quite the security risk. You can always run whatever programs are on the disk manually, if you actually intended to do that, anyhow.
Is anyone buying that stoneage tech anymore? That you've heard of?
I bought a classic music set (2 sets, 6 cds per set, best classics vol 1 and 2, spectacular) and when my 6 cd changer part of the music set that dates 1991 have (understandably) broken down from continuous playing and changing, i was able to rip them to mp3s without any problems, and with quality. now i connected a stereo line out cable to the music set's amp, and it is playing via winamp perfectly.
this is the way to make a happy customer.
Read radical news here
Ah. That explains how I was able to get two copies of the same song into iTunes and have one be two seconds shorter than the other.
I was doing messy transfers: rip DRM'd iTS song to CD-R, then import to another copy of iTunes. Because I had forgotten some of the first imported copy's metadata, I included the same ex-DRM'd song on a second CD-R and then imported it (again) from the second CD-R. Results: two almost identical songs, one lasting 4:00, one lasting 3:58.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Most other businesses, large and small, realize the essential fickleness of the customer. That means that any barriers you place in his way will result in his finding another way. Now, that doesn't matter when the customer has no other way to get what he wants: that's how it was in the music industry for a long time. All that changed with Napster and the succession of sharing protocols and applications that have come along since. Yes, they tried (are still trying) to use the courts to suppress that "other way", but haven't met with any real success.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
CD producers have, to a large degree, abandoned the use of the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" ("Red Book") logos after about 2002. Interhack did fairly extensive testing of various CD copy protection systems a while back and found that, among other things, many of the newer copy-protected discs did not carry any of the logos that go along with the Phillips specifications, but instead carry an "Enhanced CD" logo that is licensed not by the producers of playback devices, but by none other than RIAA, the producers of the content.
It's a subtle but very important shift in the business of creating logos that consumers use to determine what it is that they're buying. Where the logo used to be something that would ensure high compatibility among playback devices, the logo can mean whatever the producers want it to mean -- and maximum playback device compatibility takes a back seat to enforcement of certain restrictions.
We made quite a few other discoveries of interest as well, including the error rates introduced by unplayable frames on discs as part of some copy protection schemes by comparison to what happens when a disc is scratched with a metal key. Our testing has been a bit different from that done by others in that we used some special hardware to look at things like the use of wonky pit/land geometry that is "beyond-spec" and how that affects playback in various devices like audio CD players vs CD-ROM readers.
Not only did I avoid buying copy protected CDs, but I also wrote to EMI in Germany giving them a list of the CDs I hadn't bought because of the copy protection. (I haven't received a reply yet.)
I also told them that there was an upcoming boxed set I was interested in buying, and that if they put copy protection on it I wouldn't buy it, so it was up to them.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
In Australia at least, records on the Virgin label are manufactured and distributed by EMI, so they include "copy protection" as well.
Virgin Records artist list.
The biggest names there include Ben Harper, Enigma, Gorillaz, Iggy Pop, Korn, Lenny Kravitz, Massive Attack, Meat Loaf, N.E.R.D., Placebo, Richard Ashcroft, and Robbie Williams.
Strangely however, some of the Australian bands on EMI don't use DRM on their CDs.
Ah, that rings a bell... oddly, I used cdparanoia to rip, and it must have been its FAQ I read it in. Had totally forgotten it though; like I said, I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
but the already produced discs are still selling