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krj
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The Fifth Napster Item
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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.
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| 143 responses total. |
krj
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response 1 of 143:
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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.
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scott
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response 2 of 143:
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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.
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scott
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response 3 of 143:
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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.
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mcnally
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response 4 of 143:
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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..
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scg
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response 5 of 143:
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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.
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lynne
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response 6 of 143:
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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.
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gull
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response 7 of 143:
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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.
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