Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?

Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.

Comments

If it doesn't play at all its's pointless

[edwardpickman]

The trend is to cripple them so videos can't play on computers. I've found Disney started doing this with DVDs and most Blu-Ray disks don't seem to play on computer drives. I live in my home office and the room is full of hardware but I don't have a DVD player in the room so I normally play them in one of my computers, the Mac mostly because it's wide screen and often available. If I can't play videos on my machines I won't buy or rent them period. I had planned to buy a stack of Blu-Ray disks but since it's a crap shoot if they'll play on my drive I'm not buying any. Bricking the disks so they can't be played is costing them sales. It definitely cost them a bundle with me because I've been wanting to get into a HiDef format and I have a brand new Blu-Ray drive and a nice big 24" screen that can play at 1080P res but the catch-22 is the disks won't play. I used to be a fanatic over Laser disk and I still prefer them to DVDs so I was hoping Blu-Ray or HD would be the next format to dive into. I currently have no plans to buy a dedicated player for either format so they definitely shot themselves in the foot with one customer. I don't care if they block copying but to block playing entirely is insane.

Re:Punishing your PAYING customers

[internewt]

It probably would have played in a normal CD player. The way this copy protection works, I think, is the WMAs are on a second session, with the music in the disks first session. I think they then purposefully corrupt the info on the CD about the session layout.... in a normal CD player the error correction corrects the session info, and finds the music. But a computer CDROM sees only the second session, so the user can only find the data: horrible low quality DRM'd WMAs.

I think the way around it is with software that can find that first session. Exact Audio Copy under windows has an feature to do this: action menu, detect TOC manually. Then you can rip the audio to WAV files or MP3s and ignore the data session at the end of the disk.