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RIAA Plans to Allow Portable MP3 Players
Bocephus writes "CNET news.com reports in this story that the RIAA, despite its Secure Digital Music Initiative project, will allow MP3 to continue to exist so that portables like the Rio or Nomad may play MP3s. However, MP3s ripped from new CDs will be unusable if downloaded from the Net. " Yeah, essentially the RIAA is saying that current players can still play ones, even the existing illegal ones, once specs from the recording industry has been made. I wonder how long it's going to take them to figure out that they lost.
This point has been made before, however not all musicians can tour and not all musicians can afford to put out a free album. Where does that leave them? How many musical projects can survive with no possiblility of making back money spent in the studio? I will tell you one thing.. studio time is not a couple of bucks an hour. Your idea is seriously flawed because it will create an endless loop:
I have this music...but I cant afford studio time unless I tour, if I tour I will most likly not make any money because my name isnt big because I cant afford studio time.
Too many people think that musicians should give away their services free after they have spent THOUSANDS or in my case 10s of thousands of dollars on education and equipment. I am lucky that I have the money to own my own studio. But I dont do music for a living any more because MOST PEOPLE THINK MUSIC IS NOT WORTH PAYING FOR. This is happening to just about every musician I know. And it has nothing to do with good musicianship or creativity...HELLO NIRVANA.
Its time for some of you to realize that musicians need money too, especially if you expect a good product. Thats exactly why the record industry took hold... to allow good acts with no money to be heard.
In turn, we can choose not to buy their CDs, because we are not happy with the licence -- and instead listen to those artists who realise they no longer need major record labels in order to reach an audience, but who publish straight to the net.
I'm looking forward to the day when alternative music radio DJs (i.e. the ones who aren't already part of the Sony/Warner/whatever hype machine) start discovering legal MP3s on the net, playing them on the radio, and paying the artists royalties.
--
With the system described in the article, the RIAA cannot directly defeat the MP3 market. If they were to change the nature of audio data on CDs, they'd break every single CD player on the market (god knows how many millions of CD players there are. I personally own about 10) They cannot force people to use a specific MP3 ripper/encoder/player, either. Or can they? Imagine this scenario: The RIAA develops a series of encoders/players that support their new "architecture." This includes storing a fingerprint on the CD itself. Their software does everything described in the article. Then, they convince Diamond, NEC, and all of the other portable player manufacturers to use _their_ format, as well as the existing MP3 format. Diamond, etc, would agree to this with no problems at all. It would end the dispute between the RIAA and the manufacturers, and the manufacturers would lose no business. Now, the kicker. FLOOD the market with this software. Right now, the MP3 market is relatively small.
The RIAA knows they can't convert existing MP3 users, so they have to go after the people who have no concept of online music. How do they flood the market? Store the player/encoder in a data track on every CD released. Think about it... they don't need a distribution model, because they already have one IN PLACE. So now, johnny and davie, who have never seen an MP3 player before, get a copy of this neat new whiz-bang thing with every CD they buy. All they have to do, is pop the CD in their computer and go. THIS is how the RIAA will put down the MP3 revolution. It's all marketing. Damn.
Copyright 1999 by Scott Crosby
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I can defeat digimark entirely withing photoshop using digimark.
The Tao Of Hacking Digimark
1. filter/noise/median until the watermark is defeated. Actually, anything will do. Sometimes I do an add noise as well. Basically just defeat the water mark at this stage.
2. Add a new watermark at the highest setting/lowest image quality
3 superimpose over the top of the original, adjusting the opacity until you get a near perfect picture with no watermark
simple really, with nealy indistinguishable results. picture looks great, no watermark, takes about 5 minutes, and a little bit of judgement.
I kind of got a kick out of buying Public Enemy's new release for 8 bucks in mp3 form off of www.atomicpop.com yesterday. They have a pretty smart approach- instead of purchasing it directly online you download an application where you put in credit card info and it unlocks the files. They didn't have an app for unix users though, so you have to have a mac or windows box at this point to purchase it.
As for the mp3 player and RIAA's position on it, I could really care less. That organisation has no interest in protecting artists rights, only label's royalties; labels are put in the position they are now in by trating their artists work like proprietary bigmacs- they don't care about music for arts sake, they care about cashflow. I can't recall hearing any artists complain about mp3 (enlighten if you know different) - in fact the music community seems pretty into it, so screw the RIAA.
Problem is, you can't put a different watermark on every CD you produce. Since all CDs are perfect copy, they would all carry the same watermark. So what this watermark would be good for ? To know that a MP3 files has been ripped from a CD ? You already know that. Even if the watermark is different for every CD, there will be no link between the watermark and the CD buyer, so you can't use it to prevent piracy.
To me watermarking is only good when selling music online, because you can put the name of the buyer in the watermark. But for CD it is really useless.
"However, MP3s ripped from new CDs will be unusable if downloaded from the Net." I'm not sure how that's supposed to work. Can't I just buy a new cd, rip it, upload it, and anybody in the world will be able to download it and play it in winamp or their Rio? Clarification? Ian.
>RIAA will somehow manage to add a tariff on HDs,
>tapes, floppy disks, RW CDs and MO media, etc.
>for copyright infringement "reimbursement", or
>increase the ones they have in place already.
And this will just make pirating worse. After all, who will agree to pay for a CD if they already "paid for it" when they bought their magnetic media?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Now, there are ways for the RIAA to add watermarking to a CD signal where you're not going to hear it - I'm sure some people will complain, but superimposing a sine wave into the digital signal at a super-high-frequency that most people can't hear is trivial to do.
What happens is when you run a compression algo on the music, this sine wave (or whatever) will show up when the signal is transformed into the frequency domain (using a fourier transform, for example). This can then be looked for by the portable players, and if the music doesn't have it, they won't play the song. This is similar to what is done in a JPEG - you can hide craploads of information in lossy compression; In fact, there are programs that do this (quite well!).
Unfortunately for the RIAA facists, this information needs to be the same. Comparing two different CD's and running their FFT's should make their little watermark stick out like the red armband that it is. You then apply something along the lines of stickItToTheMan[RIAAFreq] = 0; to the signal and away it goes. Enjoy. :)
None of this changes the fact any EE can make a mp3 player with a DSP chip. There's many kits and plans now.
The RIAA makes me sick. I will lose all respect for any hardware manufacturer that knuckes under, GO DIAMOND!. Steve smanley@nyx.net
The only ace I can see up the RIAA's sleeve is Sony. They seem to be the only member who has the know-how to make anything decent. But who would buy something that doesn't work with existing MP3s? Especially knowing the type of people who use MP3 -- Slashdot types and other college students with fat pipes (Ethernet, of course, not crack pipes...) -- who seem to hate the RIAA and what it stands for. Even the casual MP3 listener will be infuriated when, after spending $150 on that new Sony MP3 player, he finds all his MP3s are useless because of the RIAA.
The RIAA seems to thrive on making enemies. Personally, I don't think I'm ever going to give up CDs in favor of MP3s. I can still hear differences between the original CD and the MP3, even encoded at 192, sometimes even higher. I've downloaded plenty of songs, and the ones that I like I eventually buy. The ones I don't like get trashed, and the "ehh" ones linger around my HD for a while before eventually being tossed. I think MP3 is the ultimate try-before-you-buy for music.
If the RIAA was REALLY worried about MP3, why don't they just lower the prices of CDs? If they cut the average price of a CD from $18 (or whatever fscking ridiculous price it is nowadays) to something like $8, there would be a huge buying spike. If they'd stop being so greedy they might be able to save themselves. But, of course, there's little chance of that happening in an organization comprised of such behemoths as Sony and Columbia (same company?) and the other record companies.
And it'll be their downfall, I tell you.
-----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
Evan
rooooar
When you hear about "watermarking", bear in mind: like the tamper-proof smart card, it doesn't work. See Petitcolas, Anderson, Kuhn, "Attacks on Copyright Marking Systems":s /
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/papers/ih98-attack
--
Xenu loves you!
I don't believe most people are anywhere near as stupid as you believe. People tend to get whipped up into a frenzy as soon as they believe their privacy or pocketbooks are on the line, and I can't imagine they'll take kindly to RIAA's Orwellian ideals.
Furthemore, this whole hare-brained scheme relies on lockstep acceptance on the part of the entire industry. I don't know about you, but the music I listen to isn't really pop-culture, big-business fare. Perhaps Columbia and Epic will buy in, and I really couldn't care less, they pretty much suck imo, but indies like Touch & Go, Dischord, AmRep, Quarterstick, Kill Rock Stars, Trance Syndicate, etc., will not touch this garbage with a ten-foot pole. I'm sure of it. It is just not part of their mindset. I think of what one of the major indie guys, say Ian MacKaye (Fugazi frontman, owner of Dischord), would do when presented with this, and I just laaaaaaugh. It seems to me that, by and large, the level of disenchantment by recording artists with their labels is at fever pitch of late. If the labels keep through their weight around, they'll soon have no one left to dictate to, as there ARE other options for musicians today.
Perhaps the RIAA initiative will have some measure of success, perhaps not. In the end, though, this farce will be unceremoniously cast onto the ash heap of history like so much other garbage, and that's what really matters.
Adeiu.
Hmm... I'm not totally sure that the RIAA has lost in this case. Watermarking CD's is a VERY effective way to superimpose information on top of a song without it being audible, and without compromising the information if the song is encoded into an MP3 or whatever.
I tried playing around with various methods to defeat JPEG watermarking, but even stuff like embossing a picture doesn't get rid of it. The only way to beat it would be to go back to the FFT of the image and attempt to restore it.
The audio watermarking is similar to this and won't be easy to defeat. Someone will have to write a program to actually go and remove the FFT components that they've stored the information in.
If you have a chance, use Corel Photopaint to load a JPG and use the watermarking feature and take a look at the FFT of the image before and after. You can see the spectral components of the information fairly easily.
æeee!
The RIAA wants to target the 15-30 year olds. They are the most active buyers, and they are the ones who illegally obtain music. This digital security crap is not needed for the mainstream public. It's needed for punks like me who don't feel bad about ripping off a huge company that robs artists blind.
The RIAA has stolen more from musicians than all the MP3philes ever will.
Consider the script kiddie phenomenon. If there is one person who can figure out how to bypass the copy protection, It is already done for everyone. You no longer have to be a "techie" to do things that were traditionally techie territory in the past. The "technical battle" will be over before its started.
I'm guessing "Remove RIAA Watermark" will probably be a button in your favorite mp3 player.
I believe that the main thing we have to consider here is that the MP3 format has awoken a new market -- the market of "geeky" computer users. People who are using a flavor of unix are used to getting many utilities and software for free -- where the stuff the use everyday is produced by a group of people writing software for the better-ment of the entire society of computer users. By tapping into this market, they've effectively unleashed the "GNU" spirit. In the world that we live in today, there are companies that write write software for profit, and in the same way, everyone in the music industry would love to make more money on their goods.
The music industry is in a way like Microsoft -- they've been doing something all along to make money, and it's always worked for them. Then, with the increasing popularity of the internet, they are facing competition with all these new faces of technology. Both the music industry and companies like Microsoft are having their goods pirated. Also, they both are facing the challenge of competing with free music: The music industry has to compete with new smaller music groups whom the music industry's publishers had not even considered publishing. Microsoft must contend with the free software available, such as Linux.
It seems as if the internet is filled with people with a view of "the greater good" in mind. Almost like Marxist philosophies, these people believe in the equality of all people, and idealize everything.
The music industry also fails to see the advantages of the MP3 format -- if I hear a song I like, I go and buy the CD, because it is true that an author should recieve whatever credit or royalties they want for a product. The biggest problem for the music industry with the MP3 format is that fact that soon bands and music groups will be able to circumvent the music recording industry and be able to sell directly to consumers, avoiding the middle men. The direction of the capitalist market today seems to be moving away from a "middle man" type price barrier -- I believe that it is only a matter of time before the recording industry dissapears into oblivion, being only a necessity of the past. After all, direct consumer sales is the product of the internet, is it not? Just look how well amazon.com is doing...
So let me see if I have this straight...
Sometime in the future, the RIAA is going to force labels to actually change the way that CDDA is written to a CD. Somehow they are going to tag the CDs that you buy at the corner store as "secure" CDs. This will have to be done so that the new CDs will play on old CD-players. Perhaps an extra track at the very end of the CD with a small amount of data on it (hell, if they are going to do that, then I would also like to see them include the track and CD info, ala CDDB, right on the CD!)
The new ripper software will detect this tag on the new CDs, and will only allow the audio to be ripped to a 'secure' format. More than likely, this secure format will be tagged such that it only plays on a single device, so you would need to re-rip the audio if you have multiple devices.
The devices which incorprate this SDMI technology would be able to play MP3s, as well as this new format, which the RIAA is calling MP3, but really isn't (unless I am mistaken, there is no provision for encyption or locking in the MP3 spec...)
So this requires that the CD makers, the CD-ripper makers, and the MP3-player makers all sign up for this plan.
Perhaps if you use an all-in-one solution that comes with your portable MP3 player, this would be feasible. But if you continue to use any of the freely available CD-rippers/MP3 encoder solutions that are around today, this just can't work.
Anyone else have an idea as to how they plan to make this work?
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
It may take 5-10 years, but storage capacity keeps growing. When you have multi-terabyte hard drives and portables with gigabytes of RAM compressing audio won't be an issue. The 44/16 660 MB CD is unlikely to change unless humans suddenly evolve better hearing. The 96/24 format on DVD is wasted on most people. Right now putting 600+ MB of wav file on your hard drive for every hour of music is unthinkable. Once you spend $300-400 on the new 1TB drive are you really going to worry that it only holds 1700+ hours of uncompressed, unencoded wav files? Are you going to mp3 them so that you can fit 17,000 hours on that drive?
What's this "allow" stuff, as in, "We will allow MP3s to exist?"
Does the RIAA have governmental powers? Can they actually compel anyone to do anything? No, I didn't think so.
This is the whole part of the thing I don't understand. RIAA is not an arm of any government, so there is no reason why a hardware manufacturer can't tell them to fsck off.
Not only is what RIAA wants technically impossible, but it's also contrary to the spirit and intent of digital media, which was designed into it from day one: Costless, limitless, perfect copies. This is the reality of digital media, and no amount of whining is going to change that.
As for "lost revenue," if the profit margins on your wares are 1800% (one thousand eight hundred percent), and you're still losing money, then I think you're more likely to find your real problems staring back at you in the mirror, rather than on the Internet.
Call to Hardware Vendors
The RIAA is not a governmental agency. They do not have the power to draft and enact policy. As such, they are relying on your cooperation to further their ends. If their goals don't match yours, ignore them.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
the way i understand the liscense of MPEG, they must treat all users of the liscense fairly. the owners of the MPEG codecs can charge reasonable amounts of money of the users of the codec, but they can't flat-out deny usage, or anything like that.
/. won't accept his password
according to that, doesn't this mean that the RIAA essentially has no power over mp3 player makers? they shouldn't be able to threaten them with anything, since the MPEG liscense itself says that they can't deny usage to anyone.
you could maybe argue the same thing about the "country codes" that DVD player makers are forced to implement. But sense the DVD hardware may not itself be included as part of MPEG-2 that may not apply. But i'm sure that simply creating a portable mp3 player is something that the RIAA has no right to even comment on.
and does it seem to anyone else that "secure digital music initiative" has the same kinda feel to it as "information purification directives"..?
-mcc
who is worried that
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
First off, I'm most thrilled that the RIAA will "allow" MP3's to continue to exist. Gee, thanks.
Can anyone think of a copy-protection scheme, software, hardware, data, or music that can't/hasn't been broken? Floppies can be bootstrapped, serial number formulas can be broken, hardware chips (ala PSX) can be tossed in, executables can be hex edited... I honestly can't think of one.
"incentivize"? What the hell kind of word is that?
[flipping through the dictionary]
I don't see it...
NitpickMode = 0;
Hmm - it seemed that the article hinted that in some manner new CD's would be encoded in such a fashion that even after ripping, a decoder (presumably a new one, properly programmed - hold on to all your old MP3 enc/dec code, everyone!) would be able to figure out this, and display a warning message. I don't quite know how this could possibly work given the constraints of the format (mainly the fact that it is lossy in various ways imperceptible to the human ear - perhaps this will be the key to the whole sceme, though).
With the new SDMI format, it would be easy to do, since the format would allow for it. Either/or, I don't put it past the RIAA to get something to work, esp. when the head of the SDMI is largely responsible for MPEG.
But I have faith that a way around all the schemes will be created - these kinds of locks are always broken - this "new" one will be no different.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
> For instance, the Playstation crack: You need to install a new chip into the Playstation, about as complicated as you can get. How many people actually do that?
Actually, you can now get a device that plugs into the back of the unit - no soldering required. My brother ordered one a few days ago and we'll see how it works.
What part of this statement makes sense? Why do journalists write statements like this. It's stupid. If something is here to stay, that suggests longevity. The phrase "for the moment" suggests the opposite. This reporter has very eloquently said jack-dookey. One often finds this in reporting. eg. "All hackers are dangerous, though a minority of them are not." Reporters actually say things like this.
Personally I think all reporters should be shot, while some, like our own Mr. Katz, should be spared.
--
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)
A few thoughts on RIAA's inititiative.
This is actually their smartest move yet, when you think about it for a minute.
They are going to allow us to play MP3's on the machine. And they are going to push it really hard to manufacturers of recording equipment--the big ones, like Panasonic, Sony(who have proprietary tech, but might abandon it) and Phillips. And believe me, the RIAA has some pull with these guys. So all the big consumer electronics guys will release these devices.
And we will buy them, because they don't threaten our beloved MP3 collections.
More importantly, the general public will probably end up buying the RIAA approved devices in far greater quantities than old stuff like the RIO, etc, because the big boys (Sony, etc)have marketing budgets several orders of magnitude beyond. Their manufacturing and design abilities are also much better (admit it, the Rio is an ugly, badly built piece of crap compared to a Sony minidisc player), so the RIAA devices will be spiffier and work better too, meaning even those of us who generally hate all things RIAA will probably buy the Sharp or Sony model.
So, now they have all the market share, and everything is groovy for MP3 lovers too.
But my bet is that the new SDMI spec will end up sounding a hell of a lot better than MP3.
Which basically sucks, if you want my opinion, or if you don't just siddown and play a tune ripped at 128b versus the same song off a CD for yourself, back to back.
My guess is that the SDMI spec will be close to CD or ATRAC-6 MD quality. So people will play free MP3s, but buy SDMI versions of songs they really like.
There is really no reason for the watermarked CD option RIAA is pushing, except that somebody would probably figure out a way to open up the SDMI algorithm and rip their own without watermarked CDs.
I don't even think this is such a bad scenario overall. (except that like most of you I would like to see the music industry crushed beneath the heel of the music-buying public. I just don't think that will happen.)
\
Stage 1
Your hardware player plays all MP3s, RIAA continues preparations of stage 2.
Stage 2
Most new CD releases are watermarked. SDMI-format starts becoming widely available. If you want to play SDMI format you must upgrade the PC software that communicates with your player. Upgraded software accepts SDMI but rejects watermarked MP3s with the exception of files you ripped for personal use on your player only.
This "solution" concentrates on the PC software which downloads files to the player. This means that they will try to keep the communication format proprietary and won't be very cooperative with anyone who wants to write download software for a different OS.
But, of course, the communication formats for the common players will eventually be reverse-engineered and download software which ignores fingerprints will be available for all important OSs at a mirror near you.
I must say that I am surprized but this proposal is actually quite reasonable and everyone gets what they want: The RIAA lawyers get their fig leaves and give the go ahead for SDMI, making online distribution an option for the mainstream. The hardware manufacturers don't need to add complex algorithms and make their devices more expensive because it's done on the host. We get something which is easy to reverse-engineer and override because it's in software on the host rather than inside a tamper-resistant chip.
Now if only more commenters actually had read and bothered to understand the article before posting dumb comments...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It seems they are slowly (quickly?) retreating from each position they take. They say something, the techs or Net at large says "no way", they retreat a bit. Repeat.
:)
It's actually kind of funny to watch. I'm just worried that they will succeed, not with the tech, I don't think the market will let them, but with legislation. The RIAA has already gotten laws passed that are favorable to them for streaming media (by favorable I mean limiting distribution thus controlling their oligopoly) By making certains type of MP3 "paraphenalia" (sp) illegal or even certain uses of it, they might retain control.
Personally I am against ANY and ALL limits on my ability to copy and use digital data that I own, probably why I hang out here.
LONG LIVE DIVX!!!
+&x
I have no contacts inside RIAA or member companies, but this sounds an awful lot like the following happened:
1. They saw their golden empires are being challenged by MP3, so they knee-jerked and took a hardline stand against it, including the failed legal efforts to block MP3 players. The people who made those decisions had no clue about the technology involved, so they naively thought they could stop it.
2. Some of the more technical people at these companies informed the decision makers of the realities of the situation, i.e. MP3 is here to stay, and RIAA has already lost, so to save face and avoid an even bigger debacle, they decided to "allow" MP3's to co-exist with their standard.
BTW, I think this was NEVER about stopping bootleg copies, and was entirely concerned with outside, independent artists who were satisfying the listener's demand for new music and keeping the customers from spending money on new CD's. I know that since I started downloading files from mp3.com, my CD purchases have flatlined. I listen to music all day while I work, and it's about half CD's I bought months (or longer) ago, and half MP3 files.
Any software copyright protection can be broken. Yet most people don't pirate software and software companies aren't broke.
99.99999% of people who listen to music have cd players and radios, and don't have portable MP3s
and don't listen exclusively to MP3s.
The market the RIAA is addressing is the mainstream digital music market. Your MOM.
Your MOM won't use MP3Spy to find illegal warez sites and download music.
Your MOM will be marketed to by record companies, and will recognize name brand secure music download sites and primarily go there to purchase music.
You know, patents don't mean shit, and anyone can export contraband software. So why isn't *EVERYONE* and I mean *EVERYONE* using encryption everywhere?
Because most users don't waste time trying to find and setup illegal or contraband stuff. Most people don't steal cable tv either, even though anyone can buy a box to do it.
Put two and two together and figure it out.
(incidently, for the same reason, it is not "inevitable" that Linux dominate and win the Desktop from Microsoft. )
I don't believe that one second. Redbook CDs still have to follow the same format or old players won't play them, and that format has no copy protection.
Booby trapping encoders and decoders is a joke, because its not like they can make existing MP3 encoders and decoders "go away" if the new ones won't do what people want them do to. Sure they can watermark (at the cost of sound quality), but what are they going to do, burn the CD with my name in the watermark AFTER I purchase it?
The RIAAs only hope is that they develop a copy protection scheme for the SDMI format that is 10 x smarter than anything that has been done before, and that people actually let themselves be fucked over by the new format.
Did I say I doubt it?
I wonder would this happen: music industry become an industry like academics, that sharing knowledge and idea (here the music) freely with recognition of the author (the musician).
So, the new industry have recording companies, whose role is just like the academic journals in academics, publish music for musicians. Of course, there're cost for music lovers to search for the good music, and so the recording labels basically provide some information on the music. If you love certain kind of music, like R&B, maybe you would like to subscribe to a R&B labels by small annual fees, and you get the music downloaded. You can distribute it freely as long as you're not making money on it.
I guess, this would kill most of the current industry and force them to do very specialised kind of music for small number of audience.
Similar to academics, many musicians won't be happy with this new industry... shouldn't we subsidised musicians like we subsidised universities to promote creativities?
A sig is redundant.
"riaa will allow mp3s to exist"...
When are they going to get it? This is exactly the type of mentality that will ensure they loose.
As long as physical media exists, we will be there making mp3s. They cant force another format on us. Itd be one thing if we didnt know how to make the mp3s ourselves. Who do they think made all the mp3s that are already out there? We did.
You can shove that liquid audio right up yer @#$)@#($
Throw MS into the mix who has used MAC addresses in their tracking methods, and introduce them both to the RIAA.
The only trouble is how do you force all the free/shareware/GPL existing encoders to do this? YOu can't. Therefore they'd likely have to add something proprietary which would make it non-mp3
--- http://foo.ca
In the Playstation case, the difficulty is to crack a system. The difficulty that the RIAA faces here is that once a song is cracked, that song can be distributed endlessly, through already established channels. Moreover, there is a huge established demand for this. I really don't see how they can prevent the MP3 community from making illegal copies of music using already capable hardware. Since you can't mandate the replacement of the millions of CD players out there, what can you do?
Finally, it is virtually certain that cracking these things will be a matter of running something through some program written by a cracker after ripping it with one of the millions of CD readers that can currently rip CDs.
The cat is out of the bag, and they could only have what they want if they can go back in time and modify all the hardware. It's too late to implement a new hardware standard (years too late), and all software can be cracked, probably relatively easily. In fact, I bet there would a race of sorts amoung the ripper-programmers to see who could be the first to get the crack in.
I had to vent a little there, sorry. The point being that these 'solutions' are not being technically driven, and they are trying to fix something that, from the broad perspective, only they think is broken. But it is everyone else who they have to change to scratch their itch. The mindset seems to parallel with the people who want to censor the Internet.