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Diamond will provide anti-piracy software for Rio
Anonymous Coward writes "Diamond is responding to the RIAA threat to their MP3 player by offering anti-piracy software that would 'lock-up' the recording after listening to one or two tracks. You can get the full scoop here. "
(Melbert, posting this as AC from work, without his password handy)
The important thing about MP3 is not wether people can duplicate with impunity anything that they want. The Music "Industry" can "protect" the canned product that they own all they like. The real revolution of MP3 will be when a whole lot of musicians (the people who actually own musical instruments and/or use the microphone jack on their recording equipment) are empowered to distribute their music THEMSELVES without all the suits acting as middlemen.
One point that just isn't covered well in the mainstream press is wether the schemes being devised to "protect the Musicians" from the dastardly MP3 will be closed, proprietary formats that individual musicians can't acquire and use to publish their music themselves.
If MP3 really takes off, it will be when any musician can put up a site to distribute his/her tunes, and kick the Record Companies out of their lives. The technology is here now for that. A major change in the channels of distribution is what has the Music Industry quaking in their boots, not the ability of people to distribute rip off copies of their Pink Floyd CDs.
The issue has to shift from people "pirating" stuff that's already "owned" by the Music industry. If the industry people keep the focus on "piracy" and manage to force proprietary standards where they continue to control the means of distribution, they have won.
As earlier posters have observed, this will be about as "successful" as DIVX.
What I find annoying is that Diamond is caving on this issue. Diamond has plenty of legal precedents on which to stand (the Sony Betamax case being but one), so I can't understand why they don't just tell the RIAA what they can do with themselves.
Personally, I'd like to get a dozen or so friends, make some trips down to southern California, visit some Hollywood restaurants posing as record company executives, and start "jamming" them.
Jamming is trick whereby you go to a well-known hangout where you are sure to be overheard, and start talking about untrue things for the purposes of spreading rumors and FUD. Skillfully executed, I imagine the Secure Digital Music Initiative will completely crumble if they can be made to believe their solidarity doesn't really exist.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The record, movie, and software industries are screaming like banshees about the incredible "economic loss" represented by piracy (a term used more for its emotional overtones than its accuracy). But the fact of the matter is that piracy is really no problem at all.
Example: Name one software company that has gone out of business due to illicit copying of its software. You can't, because no such case exists. Micros~1, who is arguably the largest "victim" of piracy, consistently turns in quarter after quarter of record profits. So it's abundantly clear that illicit copying has negligible affect on the software industry's bottom line.
Same deal with the music industry. They're charging $18.00 for a product that costs less than $1.00 to stamp out. There's no way you're going to convince me they are somehow failing to make money with such usurious margins. The movie industry is a shade different, since the capital costs are so much higher, but then so are the storage requirements. Until a gigabyte of storage drops below $5.00 or so, no one's going to burn hard disk space on a movie they can pick up legitimately for $25.00.
And as for all the statistics detailing those multi-billion dollar losses to piracy? Complete and utter fabrications. They are making the highly flawed assumption that every illicit copy represents what would have been a sale, so they just add them all up. Even the most casual observer will realize that such an assumption is disingenuous at best. There is no way to predict what a person would have done had free copying been impossible (most likely they wouldn't have bothered, or moved on to truly free software).
China is presented as an example of what can happen if piracy is allowed to run rampant. "Informed" sources claim that up to 95% of the software running in China is from illicit copies. China's cultural heritage (which spans some five thousand years, so don't expect it to change any time soon) sees such copying as perfectly acceptable. However, they're also discovering that, when Micros~1 Word/Excel/Windoze craps out, they have no one to turn to. So they are learning that there is an economic cost to freely copying software. While this could lead to more legitimate sales to obtain support, it could also paradoxically lead to a mushrooming of the installed base of Free Software, where copying is encouraged, and support is just one NNTP connection away.
So, no, I don't see "piracy" as any significant problem. The statistics they hand us are heavily cooked, and the extreme case of China can't be sustained over the long term (unless the whole country goes Open Source).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If I buy an MP3 player, it's for one thing only: listining to MP3's which I've ripped from my own home collection to a more convenient format. I can fit 10-12 of my albums at 192kb/s on a single CD-R, saving me having to carry a massive CD wallet to/from work and making my shuffle lists longer.
;)
I don't see any reason why I would buy encrypted music. Not only is it totally proprietary, but I no longer "own" it, like I do a CD. It's now almost like a "licensed copy" of the data. I don't pirate music, but I don't think I should be hampered by anti-piracy technology.
What if I want to play my encrypted music on something else, like X11Amp or another MP3-playing device that doesn't support the secure format? I guess I'm SOL there. Well, looks like this is another technology we're going to have to boycott. Anti-piracy technology has *never* worked for an industry and I don't think it will. All it does is piss people like me off.
Oh well.
BTW, hopefully Creative Lab's player won't support trash like this.
æeee!
From the article...
Arnold Brown, president and CEO of San
Francisco-based Audio Explosion, noted that
DVDs, available in six regions, include
technology that prevents consumers from playing
back a disc from one region to another. The
technology is "intended to prevent cross-border
piracy and price dumping," he commented.
The DVD player software I've worked with (under Win 95) implements this "protection" by letting you pick the region when you install the software. You can change this within the software once or twice, and you can format the HDD to change it again. Pretty lame protection, if you ask me, and it seems indicative of the whole entertainment industry's IQ.
Lemley pointed to the recent launch of DIVX, a technologically protected version of the digital versatile disc, or DVD. "If I bought a movie on DIVX it would expire after a specified time," much like the self-destructing tapes in Mission: Impossible, Lemley explained.
It seems counterintuitive to me that one would want to compare a product to DIVX as a model for success. Given that the market has essentially spurned DIVX, and that the enthusiast community has rejected it even more violently, I would strongly advise any vendor from drawing this kind of parallel, as Professor Lemley. Either he is taking a dig at Intertrust's system, which I doubt, or he is especially clueless.
To say, "See! This product is just like DIVX!" seems to be a recipe for disaster.
"Technology makes enforcement essentially costless," says Mark Lemley, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, who adds that tech fixes offer IP holders more control over their products than they would otherwise get.
Here Lemley seems to suggest that the cost of developing a secure distribution system, as well as maintaining it, is very low.
Tell that to cable TV operators, who have seen analog descramblers proliferate to the point that they are moving consumers in a forced march towards "digital cable," which provides them only some semblance of control over distribution.
Tell that to the DSS folks, who suck in the (admittedly fairly low) cost of distributing fresh keycards every few months, and who must maintain and operate their monitoring systems to authenticate users and manage channel distribution.
Tell it to Microsoft, the company that has arguably experienced the biggest brunt of software piracy, despite any number of (fairly half-hearted) attempts to curb piracy in order to drive profit upward.
Technology isn't cost-free, especially not secure digital distribution technology.
All this without factoring in the biggest problem that content distributors face in the current age: end-user acceptance. The RIAA, for example, is so late to the party that it's almost inconceivable that they can have any impact on the market's direction, and certainly not by pushing "secure" technologies that have a higher hassle factor and little benefit over existing free and open distribution.
I don't exactly condone piracy -- I'd be out of a job if honest people didn't pay for software -- but I don't believe that introducing additional hassles and restrictions into end-users' lives is the right direction to go.
Maybe if the RIAA, SPA ("Don't Copy That Floppy!"), and other organizations of their ilk used education instead of FUD, they would see more positive results? Believing in the essential badness of human nature does not endear one to the marketplace.