I hope everyone can bear with yet another Napster item, linked between 
Agora and Music conferences.  Napster and the more general issues of 
copyrights in the digital era, and the restructuring of the 
record industry, continue to fascinate me, and there's
no sign of the news slowing down.

143 responses total.

We'll start with an item from today's http://www.inside.com .
(I won't bother with the full URL, because by the time the story has moved
off the front page it will be a members-only article.  So read it today.)
 
Inside reports that the music industry has a new plan to stop people 
from ripping MP3 files from compact discs.  The plan is to muck with 
the disc's directory structure and to introduce deliberate errors into 
the data, so that the disc will be unplayable on CD-ROM drives.
The Inside article goes on at quite a bit more length with what 
details they have of the scheme.
 
Supposedly audio CD players are more determined to push on through 
errors and won't be affected.   However, if you planned to use your 
computer as a CD copying machine, you'll be out of luck.

If you plan to just listen to your legitimate CD on your computer, you'll
also be out of luck.  Inside also reports that a number of high-end and 
car stereo CD players use CD-ROM players, so the disc won't play 
for those consumers either.

This plan isn't vaporware: according to the article, the new CD by 
70's country star Charley Pride will use this scheme.

Linux/Unix already has a pretty "determined" audio CD reading program called
"cdparanoia"; it even tries to find its way around scratches and such.  But
the official software packages for Windows will probably choke on this sort
of format.

Anyway, it sounds like Commodore-64 era copy protection at its dumbest.

Hey, I should have read the article first, since they mention cdparanoia
having trouble reading one of these CDs.  Still, I'm semi-confident that the
problem is not insurmountable.

  It's amazing how oblivious the music industry seems to be to the crucial
  issue of user experience..  Intentionally releasing a defective product
  that violates long-established industry-wide encoding specifications
  as a response to (so far largely theoretical) revenue loss from piracy
  is the sort of idea which I have a really hard time imagining coming
  from any industry except the music and film oligopolies.

  In the very early days of the personal computer revolution, computer
  software companies tried very similar tricks to copy-protect their 
  products -- burning "bad sectors" into floppies, storing data in non-
  standard filesystems, etc..  The practice was a nightmare for legitimate
  customers, who often found that their "copy protected" disks were unusable
  if their floppy drives were even the least bit out of alignment (perhaps
  from being put through one too many gyrations by a poorly thought-out 
  anti-piracy scheme) but presented little real difficulty to those who
  truly wanted to copy the programs without paying -- as a twelve-year-old
  I had several specialized copying utilities and dozens of pirated copy-
  protected games for the Apple II and I didn't even *own* an Apple computer..
  There's a reason that copy protection died out in the personal computer
  software industry and there's a lesson there for the music companies,
  if only they'd pull their heads out of whatever cavity they're stuck in
  and have a look..

As somebody who uses the CD ROM drive as a CD player in my office and when
traveling, I would be seriously annoyed by CDs designed not to play in the
CD ROM drive.  I would probably buy fewer CDs as a result.

Besides irritating legitimate customers, this measure would fall way short
because a majority of the songs getting traded have been out on CD for quite
a while already.  It would be effective mainly with new music.  Eventually
it might be reasonably effective, but it would take a long time and I'm 
betting people will give up long before then.  
What about radio broadcasts?  There are several web radio stations--there
must be a way to record the sound onto your computer and then burn it to a
CD.  And presumably people will write better CD-reading software to deal
with the problem...yep, my prediction is that this idea is going to die a
pretty quick death.

Re #1: It'll also affect audio quality on regular CD players that aren't 
well adjusted or don't have good error correction algorithms, I suspect. 
 This varies widely.  My 1986 Sanyo CD player will muddle through 
scratches that cause my more recent Discman to give up entirely.  The 
audiophiles who don't already hate CDs will really hate this. ;>

I seriously doubt it'll take the people who write CD rippers more than a 
couple months to find a way around this, and meanwhile it'll 
inconvenience lots of people with poorly designed CD players.  Sounds 
like a really bad idea, to me.

I'd have serious problems if my cd players suddenly didn't play my music cds.
My computer is one of the main places I listen to music, and in fact the
ability to listen to music on one's computer was one of the early selling
points of the cd-rom device in the first place.  As lynne said, this will only
start having a major impact a ways down the road, when hundreds of loopholes
will already have been found.  Stupid.  

I've already got one CD that seems to be "defective" somehow.  The fancy
cd-rom burner won't play it, but the old cd-rom drive in the laptop
seems to play it just fine.  I found one cd ripper that could rip the
tracks, so I'm seriously considering ripping and copying the tracks just
so I can listen to it on the computer with the burner...

Suppose this kind of protection will work (i do not think so).
My hi-fi will read all these new protected cd right?
I can plug a cable from my stereo to my computer and do hard-disk
recording.
Then I could also "treat" the signal.
I do not think the quality of the recording will be much worse.
Computers are wonderful instruments for this kind of games.
About linux/unix paranoia i've got a scratched cd (REM's NAIHF) that
failed to do a good job with it.
There's a windows program (www.exactaudiocopy.de) that is IMHO better
(i succedeed).

"I can plug a cable" -- you just introduced two extra a<->d conversion
steps.  You'll lose on quality, gain noise, &etc.  How bad will depend
on what you do next and the quality of your equipment including cables.
The recording industry is hoping to discourage that "next" as much as
possible.  Whether you care is a mark of whether you're a true
audiophile of course.

Of course I introduce two a<->d and this is bad.
But suppose i've got a DAT.
I could digitally copy, and i could digitally extract raw data on pc.
Noise on my soundblaster is rather zero (my good shielded cable is less
than one meter).
Personally I was able to backup and restore many LP and cassettes on
cd.
Of course is not like having remastered cd.
But it's good until i've got enough money to rebuy this (original!)
stuff.

<notes that putting an "&" in front of "etc" is redundant>

  re #11:  I think that massive MP3 trading, with the format's lossy
  compression, has already proven that a huge consituency of listeners
  care less about sound quality than about convenience and price.

        Stores, retailers, and customers should demand that such CDs
come labeled as "may not play in all CD devices" in print as big as the
banner across the top.  If it does not fit the "CD standard" it is a 
fraud.

  I'd go a step farther and label them "Specifically designed *NOT* to play
  in many CD devices."  After all, that's the point, right?

News articles in many online sources report that the RIAA is going 
back to court to complain that Napster is not doing enough to block
RIAA-controlled songs from being swapped through Napster.
 
The RIAA is demanding that the preliminary injunction be modified in one
of two ways.   First, they want the Napster filters to become "opt-in"
rather than "opt-out;"  under this plan, Napster would block all song
files except those where the copyright owner had explicitly permitted 
Napster trading.   It's unclear to me if this would satisfy the concern
of the appeals court panel that the trading of files not owned by 
the plaintiffs not be unduly hampered.

Second, the RIAA wants Napster to adopt a scheme to filter files 
based on their checksum (based on the belief that most files traded 
come from a very small number of original rippings to MP3 format)
and their "musical fingerprint" using technology from someone like
Cantametrix, which I don't understand much at all.  

This demand seems to fall afoul of the Appeals Court's direction that
Napster was to filter out copyrighted songs to the extent that their
technology permitted them to do so.  Remember that Napster never sees
the actual song files; they only run a directory server, and the 
song file exchange takes place between the two users' computers.
This is why the filtering has focused on file names.
The plaintiffs argue that if necessary Napster should be forced to 
re-design the system.

My I-Am-Not-A-Lawyer take on it:  I think Napster is complying as 
best they can with the injunction as modifed under the Court of Appeals
direction.  The record industry is arguing that the loopholes enacted
under the Court of Appeals direction mean the injunction has very 
little effect, and they want to effectively go back to the trial court 
judge's original injunction, which was that Napster must halt the 
trading of their songs, regardless of the effects on non-infringing
users or on Napster Inc.    

The solution to deliberately buggered CD's is to buy them and then
return them as defective.  Exchange, and then return the exchanged
one as defective.  Do this enough and stores will stop carrying
buggered CD's, and the record labels will stop producing them.

That'll be the end of the problem until some other format comes along
that's got an apartheid policy built into the hardware.  If players
and computers are built differently at a fundamental level so that the
computer can't read the audio (except, maybe, to pass it on to a
speaker in an encrypted form) then you'll be back to being unable to
rip your music.  Even if you *can* play the music through your speakers,
you'll be unable to re-balance the tone, add reverb, or otherwise play
with the material YOU paid for... except as THEY allow you to.

I think this situation sucks.  Sometime in the future I intend to
transfer my entire CD collection to HD storage and put the originals
into safekeeping somewhere.  I may compress to MP3 for the car or
a portable player.  That's my right under fair use, and any company
that tries to deny me my fair-use rights deserves a kick in the balls.

[ English is redundant. ]

<yes, but you're using French *and* English to say the same thing> :)

[ Sure it ain't latin? ]

  Yes, it's Latin, and once you've identified it as Latin you ought to
  realize that either the "&" or the "et" is redundant..  Sometimes you'll
  see "&c", but that's not particularly common..

ah, my mistake.  however, if you ignore the cetera part, "et" means "and"
in French as well as Latin.  .

Well, yeah; French ain't nuttin' but gutter Latin.

        ;)

(*ahem*)
 
resp:0 ::  More information comes from a story in today's USA Today.
Apparently the copy-protected Charley Pride disc isn't supposed 
to fail completely in a CD-ROM drive:
 
          "The disc will direct PC user to the Web site of ((the 
     copy-protection firm))...  There users will be offered free
     downloadable Windows Media versions of Prides's songs, which
     can also be copied to portable players that support the 
     music industry's copy protection standards."

So that's what they plan to offer anyone who wants to listen to 
their Charlie Pride CD on their computer.

So we might drift into a discussion of Microsoft's plans to make the 
PC a copy-proof device.  There's something called the Secure Audio
Path coming in one of the upcoming versions of Windows, and apparently
Windows Media is locked down, at least in the digital domain.

Remember that, as the court rulings have fallen so far,  you do not
have a legal right to watch DVDs on a Linux computer.

(does anyone actually listen to Charlie Pride?)

Used to.  And would again, did I buy music with any regularity.

Thanks for mentioning the report in #25 --- I heard a snippet of that on NPR
this morning, and meant to research this a little more online. I don't
understand how this can be effective. What about all the users of these
so-called CD_ROM devices, what will they see to explain why they can't play
what should be a standard audio CD? There are many other unknowns in this
roadblock the industry is considering.

As an aside, does anyone know if the component audio recorders use CD-ROM
technology, and will thus be affected by this attempt at copy-protection?

That still screws people like me over who don't have the bandwidth to download
songs regularly.  I don't even have an MP3 player on this computer.

I read a few days ago that some of the big boys are planning to start some
kind of subscription-download service of their own.  Anyone know anything
about that?  

There's a raft of articles and I'm not coming up with a good synthesis.
Some time back the Universal and Sony labels announced that they would
offer a subscription plan called Duet, and this week it was announced
that Yahoo will become a part of this project.  Details are scanty,
and the articles I've seen indicated that the files will come with 
"digital rights management" encumbrances to inhibit trading and 
loading in portable MP3 players.  
 
Monday's announcement was that BMG, EMI and AOL-Time-Warner are going 
to do a partnership with Real Networks to form a subscription service
called MusicNet.   The article in NewMediaMusic.com said that 
MusicNet would be offering Mp3 downloads, but I'm not sure that's 
a reliable report.  MusicNet had the air of having been thrown together
in a big hurry so that, in last Tuesday's congressional hearings, 
the industry could claim to be moving forward in offering music
on the Internet. 

But I think the major labels have decided that they need to have something
which looks sort of like Napster in place when Napster-as-we-know-it 
comes to an end this summer.  Users with some technical sophistication
will probably continue on with underground Napster clones or Gnutella,
but millions of Napster users aren't too sophisticated and the record
companies need to have something to offer them by, say, July.

So, all five of the majors have signed up for one service or another; 
the indies are so far out in the cold, and also left out in the cold are 
today's music retailers, who are starting to scream very loudly.
Also apparently out in the cold are the holders of the music publishing
copyrights; the blurb in Inside.com says the proposed subscription 
services are not dealing with the concerns of those copyright holders.
Unfortunately inside.com isn't offering much content for free any more,
so I haven't been able to read the details.

There was another story in today's news: MTV has concluded a deal to 
sell song and album downloads -- priced individually, rather than in 
a subscription service as described above -- from all five labels.
This is the first time anyone has been able to offer "one-stop shopping,"
and of course the indies are left out again.

Things are moving very fast, and my picture of what's happening is murky.

I, for one, would strongly support a "pay-for-download" of high-quality
digital recordings of *single songs*, were the price within reason.  

  They're not exactly Napster stories, but Salon has recently had a couple
  of interesting stories about the payola-like business of radio promotion
  and about "indie" promoters' near-stranglehold on American FM playlists.

  http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/03/14/payola/index.html
  http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2001/04/03/payola2/index.html

Greg in resp:32 ::  but in what format would you pay for these songs?
You're not buying a song, at the most basic level; you're buying a 
computer file.

The Cnet story on the MusicNet service to be formed by AOL, BMG, EMI and
Real says that the files they sell will come encumbered by digital 
rights management stuff.  This is in contrast to the NewMediaMusic
story I quoted earlier, but I think it more accurately reflects the 
thinking of the major record companies.  So far the "digital rights 
management" copy prevention systems have been generally 
rejected by consumers.

A good question.  I think I'd probably want an uncompressed version, so's I
could convert it to whatever format was convenient for me, but I'd probably
be willing to pay for good quality mp3's at a lower price.  

  Unfortunately the record companies have consistently and repeatedly
  demonstrated that they waren't willing to sell what you say you're
  willing to buy..

More bunches of articles and I am short of time.  There's a Reuters
story today which I have from:
  http://www.latimes.com/wires/20010411/tCB00a2780.html

Napster had a compliance hearing in front of trial judge Marilyn
Patel yesterday and she was not pleased.   "(Napster) was warned by
a U.S. judge on Tuesday that it could face closure if it doesn't speed up
its efforts (to block copyrighted songs).  ... Patel said it was 'disgraceful'
that copyrighted material remained on Napster's system."

I don't fully grasp this, since the current situation was dictated by 
the appeals court panel when they told Patel how to revise her injunction.
So I don't see how Patel can throw out the directions of the appeals court 
just because they don't work effectively, when the appeals court for 
reasons of its own overruled Patel's original effective injunction to 
close Napster.

In the same article, Napster claims to be close to reaching licensing 
deals with the five majors.  Napster says that once the licensing deals 
are reached, the majors will drop their suits; well, fine, but there are 
still a large number of independent labels whose claims to infringement
damages are as good as the major labels' claims; what's going to keep those
claims from pouring out of the woodwork if Napster settles with the five
majors?

The other articles are more think pieces, less urgent news so I will 
try to make time for them later this week.  (I'm on vacation and we have 
Leslie's recital and a family visit.)

(Much bigger stories on this at www.inside.com and www.wired.com.
The Patel quote above is incomplete; she did acknowledge the controlling 
authority of the appeals court ruling, though she thinks they should 
reconsider because the injunction crafted under their guidance is 
ineffective.)

It's odd how little the professional audio press is paying attention to this.
,

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss