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EMI Considers Abandoning DRM on CDs

Posted by Zonk on from the wisdom-comes-with-experience dept.

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.'"

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. because modern CD players are DATA players by apodyopsis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.