|
|
| Author |
Message |
krj
|
|
The Fifth Napster Item
| 
Mar 27 23:46 UTC 2001 |
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. |
krj
|
|
response 1 of 143:
|
Mar 27 23:54 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
scott
|
|
response 2 of 143:
|
Mar 28 00:00 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
scott
|
|
response 3 of 143:
|
Mar 28 00:03 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
mcnally
|
|
response 4 of 143:
|
Mar 28 00:42 UTC 2001 |
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..
|
scg
|
|
response 5 of 143:
|
Mar 28 01:04 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
lynne
|
|
response 6 of 143:
|
Mar 28 02:40 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
gull
|
|
response 7 of 143:
|
Mar 28 02:45 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
senna
|
|
response 8 of 143:
|
Mar 28 05:45 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
mdw
|
|
response 9 of 143:
|
Mar 28 06:33 UTC 2001 |
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...
|
sironi
|
|
response 10 of 143:
|
Mar 28 09:12 UTC 2001 |
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).
|
mdw
|
|
response 11 of 143:
|
Mar 28 10:39 UTC 2001 |
"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.
|
sironi
|
|
response 12 of 143:
|
Mar 28 13:00 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
lynne
|
|
response 13 of 143:
|
Mar 28 15:51 UTC 2001 |
<notes that putting an "&" in front of "etc" is redundant>
|
mcnally
|
|
response 14 of 143:
|
Mar 28 22:11 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
tpryan
|
|
response 15 of 143:
|
Mar 28 22:18 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
mcnally
|
|
response 16 of 143:
|
Mar 28 22:22 UTC 2001 |
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?
|
krj
|
|
response 17 of 143:
|
Mar 28 23:10 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
russ
|
|
response 18 of 143:
|
Mar 29 01:00 UTC 2001 |
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.
|
mdw
|
|
response 19 of 143:
|
Mar 29 03:53 UTC 2001 |
[ English is redundant. ]
|
lynne
|
|
response 20 of 143:
|
Mar 29 15:41 UTC 2001 |
<yes, but you're using French *and* English to say the same thing> :)
|
mdw
|
|
response 21 of 143:
|
Mar 29 19:41 UTC 2001 |
[ Sure it ain't latin? ]
|
mcnally
|
|
response 22 of 143:
|
Mar 29 22:31 UTC 2001 |
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..
|
lynne
|
|
response 23 of 143:
|
Mar 29 23:07 UTC 2001 |
ah, my mistake. however, if you ignore the cetera part, "et" means "and"
in French as well as Latin. .
|
gelinas
|
|
response 24 of 143:
|
Mar 30 03:46 UTC 2001 |
Well, yeah; French ain't nuttin' but gutter Latin.
;)
|
