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.'"

Comments

Good...

[daveschroeder]

...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.

Re:Good...

[Mateo_LeFou]

"DRM is intended to prevent or reduce casual copyright infringement"

I'd like to point out -- though most people here probably know -- that casual copyright infringement very likely improves the bottom line of the music publisher. E.g. my friend casually gives me a mix CD of tunes he thinks I'd like, I'm X% more likely to buy one of those artists' discs later. That X% increase has a monetary value in the aggregate. I'd love a link to a scientific study of that value.

Re:Good...

[Monkelectric]

Preventing casual infringement also depends on your definition of infringement. I bought the new David Gray CD. It wouldnt play in my computer for some reason, so I bought another copy. Then I found out it was copy protected. I don't *OWN* a cd player and I couldn't rip it.

I have two copies of the album and to this day I have only heard it via an mp3 downloaded illegally. In this case they just prevented me from legal fair use and its the last sony album I'll every buy.

Re:Good...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

While DRM is intended to prevent or reduce casual copyright infringement...

I disagree with this. In my opinion DRM is intended to prevent lawful use of copyrighted material and motivate people to buy multiple copies of the same work by intentionally breaking interoperability with other devices. That is to say, content producers would like their customers to buy one copy for their home CD player another copy for the tape player in the car and another copy for their portable player. The industry is used to income from people periodically re-buying their favorite media in the new format or to replace the copy they have broken. They are terrified of the idea that a person could buy one copy and use it forever, handing it down to their children.

Media companies claim that they are trying to stop illegal copyright infringement, but they also claim accidentally posting a song on a file sharing network costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and if not for file sharing networks 90% of the gross national income would be spent on music. Why anyone would believe such obvious liars is beyond my understanding.

Great Day

[Mateo_LeFou]

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"

Re:Great Day

[arivanov]

Yes I did. 5 months ago. 3 CDs from Virgin records via Amazon.

The wife wanted to listed to them on the MP3 player in her car and her Mac at work. None could play them. Even the "proper" Sony CD player had problems with 2 out of 3.

I ended up researching the matter and buying a DVD rewriter model with a known firmware bug (or feature depends how you look at it) which can rip through most current DRM with flying colours. So the "could not rip" lasted for 3 days in total. After that it was ripped and encoded in the suitable formats for usage on the devices used for listening in the house.

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. What really pissed me off was the fact that I have purchased it legally, 2 out of 3 had a "CD digital audio" on them and they were unuseable on all devices in the house.

From the point of view of the average consumer this is perceived as "shitty and unuseable product" so I am not surprised EMI is considering abandoning the practice. It is costing them lost sales and handling returns from pissed of customers who after that go to "illegal" networks or AllOfMP3.

Re:Great Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed I have purchased a CD that I could not rip. In fact, it was an EMI published CD, and the last CD I ever purchased.

Everyone here knows the cat and mouse game that has existed between consumers who want to exercise their fair use rights, and publishers who want to prevent "casual copying." For years, none of this affected me. I purchased CDs on occasion, a couple a year usually. I've even purchased a few "copy protected" CDs with the bullshit data track. These methods were laughable. Despite this "copy protection" I bought these CDs, brought them home, trivially ripped them to MP3s, and loaded them onto my MP3 player.

Then two years ago I purchased Massive Attack's "Danny the Dog" soundtrack which I believe was published by EMI. It used a different method of copy protection than the bullshit data track that was common at the time. Instead, it contained a corrupted C2-error stream, a violation of the redbook audio standard.

The purpose of the error stream is to provide the CD player with a means of detecting when it has read erroneous data from the main audio track and allow the CD player to interpolate samples instead of producing an audible skip. The intent of the error stream was to improve the robustness of CD players even when there minor disc damage was present. Great idea, right?

Well, some folks noticed that CD-ROM drives, by large, acknowledge the C2-error stream as they should. However, most cheaper CD players made in the past few years ignore the error stream entirely, since it's not necessary for playback (although it may improve the playback quality in less than ideal environments) and costs more to support. These folks figured that, if you write an intentionally corrupted C2-error stream, then the CD can't be ripped properly in a CD-ROM drive (it makes clicking noises a few times a second), but would work fine in "most" CD players.

I wasn't aware of this copy protection until after I bought the disk and tried (unsuccessfully) to rip it. At the time, I thought "that's odd." But, then I tried it in other CD players around the house and discovered it wouldn't work in any CD player I owned. It didn't work in my computer, in my car, in my mid-80s Sony model, anything. Eventually I did find a cheap boombox that it did work in, but what good was that to me?

I was furious. I already knew copy protection was bullshit, but I didn't care because the techniques practiced at the time were laughable at best. However, to intentionally cripple a product, violating the very standard that it was supposed to adhere to, was a slap in the face to both me as a consumer and as an engineer. I couldn't really have known that it was crippled either, sure it didn't have the Compact Disc logo on the case, but many cases no longer featured the logo on the outside. Furthermore, it didn't say anything on the outside about how "this was a copyprotected disc and may not play right in all CD players" or something to that effect.

Realizing that I would never again be able to purchase a CD with confidence that it would be useful to me in my terms (allow me to rip it), or even play it, I vowed that day to cease any support of the recording industry. I managed through patience and luck to return the CD to Best Buy (another story in itself), and have not purchased a single CD (or any other form of music) since. EMI's copyprotection backfired on me, all it did was breed resentment, and cost them lost future sales. I doubt my experience was isolated, and I hope that anyone else who was inconvenienced, or rather cheated, to the same degree that I was also decided to stand up to them.

The irony of this whole story is that I originally downloaded the "Danny the Dog" soundtrack months before it was released. I never saw the movie, which I believe came out a few months after the soundtrack. Instead, my first exposure to the soundtrack was from the pirate scene. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to support the artist and the label by purchasing it upon releas

I know it has been cold outside recently...

[symbolic]

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?

Re:I know it has been cold outside recently...

[LWATCDR]

Well they got a clue but not the one your thinking of.
1. DRM costs money.
2. Current DRM didn't stop the music from showing up on file shareing networks.
3. Current DRM is a waste of money.
4. Stop paying for DRM that doesn't work.
5. More Profit.

Now if they ever get effective DRM it will be back.

EMI Artist list

[jimstapleton]

List by sub label. Taken from http://www.emirecords.co.uk/loader.html

*NOTE: The site is flash so I can't copy and paste, these are hand copied, sorry for misspellings* ::EMI::
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 ::Heavenly Records::
Dove
Ed Hardcourt
The Little Ones
The Magic Numbers
The Vines ::DFA Records::
Black Dice
Delia Gonzalz & Gavin Russom
The Juan Maclean ::Positiva:: ::Positiva::
Deep Dish
Ferry Corsten
Paul Van Dyk
Soul Avengerz
Soul Seekers
The Shapeshifters ::Positiva:: ::Additive::
Remy

Logical

[Jugalator]

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".

Foo Fighters: One by One

[norminator]

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 think they pretty much given up a few years ago

[TAZ6416]

I posted about this earlier on http://www.groklaw.net/

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_wi ll_be_protected/

Jonathan

because modern CD players are DATA players

[apodyopsis]

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.