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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 151 responses total. |
polygon
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response 75 of 151:
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Jul 30 13:49 UTC 2001 |
Re 74. It doesn't seem to me that this will prevent ripping for long.
Or would a program to screen out digital noise be illegal under the DMCA?
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orinoco
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response 76 of 151:
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Jul 30 14:50 UTC 2001 |
Programs already exist to remove the skips from a CD while ripping it. I
would not be surprised if CDParanoia, say, would also do a pretty good job
of overcoming the intentional noise on these disks.
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krj
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response 77 of 151:
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Jul 30 15:41 UTC 2001 |
My question about Mike's resp:74 :: if the Macrovision technology (a)
(a) has been used secretly on several releases, and (b) actually blocks
copying as a data file, then don't you think we would have heard reports
from people saying, "Hey, I can't rip this CD, what's up?"
Thanks for the pointer.
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krj
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response 78 of 151:
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Jul 31 22:12 UTC 2001 |
resp:51 and subsequently, on the sharp downturn in CD sales:
"As Audiences Discover Frugality, Pop Culture Starts Feeling A Chill"
Not actually about CD sales at all, but the article does discuss
the flattening or downturn in pop/rock concert ticket sales, along with
problems in Broadway, movies and book publishing. Free/inexpensive
entertainment such as TV is either measured, or anecdotally reported,
to be increasing its audience. The top tier of entertainment
still sells well -- Madonna's tour, the movie "Shrek," the musical
"The Producers," but below that level, business has fallen off
in all sectors.
Some pundits argue that prices are too high and people are watching
their wallets carefully as they worry about their jobs.
Others argue that a sort of cultural ennui has set in; people are
tired of megahyped blockbuster after megahyped blockbuster, in
all genres and styles.
Regarding concerts:
"In the first six months of this year, according to figures
published in the trade journal Pollstar, the top 50
concert tours took in 12.6% less money than last year's
top 50. The number of tickets sold was off by 15.5%...
"'A two-million-ticket drop is not insubstantial,' Pollstar's
editor Gary Bongiovanni said. 'The conventional wisdom is
that the entertainment business is recession-proof, and with
inexpensive forms of entertainment that's still true. But
since the last recession in 1991, the cost of our product has
more than doubled. What used to be an inconsiderable expense
is becoming a luxury item.'
"Music promoters in many parts of the country are seeing
considerable drops in business."
----------
The relevance to the Napster arguments: it does start to look like
file trading is irrelevant to the falloff in CD sales. Something
bigger is happening in the culture at large.
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krj
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response 79 of 151:
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Aug 1 04:29 UTC 2001 |
BMG is going to test a anti-ripping scheme from SunnComm. In the
initial test they will just process promotional CDs.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6719912.html
A Cnet columnist compares the file sharing systems still operating:
http://music.cnet.com/music/0-1652424-8-6699285-1.html?tag=sd
Legal fantasy? mp3newswire.net points to a findlaw.com essay
suggesting that the Supreme Court's ruling in Tasini v. NYTimes
creates a precedent which may save the original filesharing
Napster system...
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/tasini.html
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gull
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response 80 of 151:
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Aug 1 12:52 UTC 2001 |
The Register reports that a way has been found (already?) to bypass the
Macrovision SafeAudio technology:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20766.html
The article's a bit short on details.
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krj
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response 81 of 151:
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Aug 1 14:36 UTC 2001 |
Wired reports that Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chairman
of the Senate Commerce committee currently working on an Internet
privacy bill, is talking about using that bill to begin the
process of establishing a Federal security standard for entertainment
files. Once the standard is developed, all new "electronics
devices" would be required to conform to those standards and
reject unauthorized files (like your MP3 file collection, most
likely).
This is the holy grail for the copyright industry; Disney is
wildly in favor of it.
The good news is the example of the SDMI consortium, which is now
two years beyond its original deadline for a security standard for
music files and which doesn't seem to be making any headway.
There's no reason to believe a Federal process would be any more
successful in mediating the conflict between the copyright industry
and the electronics industry: the electronics companies believe
that what the copyright industry demands, consumers will not buy.
http://wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,45701,00.html
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krj
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response 82 of 151:
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Aug 3 00:08 UTC 2001 |
Another CD copy-prevention system, called Cactus. Sony is testing
it in Eastern Europe. They claim to be able to make copied CDs
generate square waves to damage electronics and speakers,
though the test CDs sold in Europe were not manufactured to do that.
(Sounds like a declaration of war to me.) Haven't had time to
read this closely yet:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991105
Aren't all of these schemes defeated by a pass through the analog
domain?
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orinoco
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response 83 of 151:
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Aug 3 06:00 UTC 2001 |
(In Douglas Hofsteader's book _Goedel, Escher, Bach,_ he comes up with an
analogy for proof by counterexample using record players. The Tortoise keeps
buying new record players. The Crab can always come up with a record that
will blow the latest player to bits. In that sense, he's got
the advantage.
Sometimes, the Crab thinks he's noticed a pattern in the Tortoise's
players. He takes advantage of that pattern to make a record that will
destroy -- he hopes -- any player at all. But the Tortoise can always
gain the upper hand by making a new player that doesn't follow the old
pattern. In that sense, the Tortoise has the advantage.
Douglas Hofsteader is a strange, strange man.)
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danr
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response 84 of 151:
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Aug 3 15:52 UTC 2001 |
re #82:
When I try to pull up that article, I get:
Sorry, This article is unavailable at the current time - every effort
is being made to get it back up and running as quickly as possible.
It's a conspiracy! Seriously, though, off the top of my head, I don't
see how they could put anything on a CD that would damage speakers.
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gull
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response 85 of 151:
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Aug 3 18:32 UTC 2001 |
Speakers don't tolerate square waves at high volumes well. Back before CD
players were savvy enough to refuse to play data CDs, it was pretty well
known that the digital 'hash' generated by trying to play one could blow
speakers.
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krj
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response 86 of 151:
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Aug 3 20:53 UTC 2001 |
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-mp02.html
Northwestern University fires a secretary for having 2000 MP3
files on her computer. She wasn't running Napster; the University
long ago blocked it.
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krj
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response 87 of 151:
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Aug 3 21:32 UTC 2001 |
Another review of Jessica Litman's discouraging book "Digital Copyright:"
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/books/reviews/20010720_hodes.html
The reviewer writes that Litman's optimistic conclusion that the DMCA
would end up being ignored has been overturned by the destruction of
Napster, which had not yet happened when the book was written.
Other than that, the reviewer agress with Litman: copyright law no
longer represents the will of the people expressed through their
legislators, but instead it is dictated by the large corporations and
becomes a club to beat the public with.
-----
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010802/re/music_internet_dc_1.html
A Reuters story on proposed legislation being developed in the US House
by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) and Rep. Christopher Cannon (R-Utah).
They propose to loosen copyright laws to help online music businesses
get up and running without being destroyed by lawsuits.
The key seems to be a plan to extend radio-style compulsory mechanical
licensing to online music services. "This would mean there would be
one royalty pool, elminating the need for a Web-based service to
negotiate with individual artists, labels, music publishers and
songwriters." ((I *told* y'all this was coming.))
-----
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20010727/tc/net_music_faces_patent_squeeze_
1.html
(careful with the wrapped URL)
The Intouch Group has been given a patent which they claim covers most
or all downloaded music. Lawsuits are flying. The courts have not
yet had the sense to laugh this patent out of existence.
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danr
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response 88 of 151:
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Aug 4 02:19 UTC 2001 |
re #85: That may be true, but I'd guess that while square waves may
have been written to the CD, by the time the signal actually got to the
speaker, they'd be fairly well rounded off, especially in low-end
equipment.
Let's get one of these CDs, hook the audio output to a dummy load, and
scope it out.
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scott
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response 89 of 151:
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Aug 4 02:57 UTC 2001 |
A square wave is easily maintained through even a cheap receiver and amp.
It's the speakers which have trouble moving instantaneously from + to -.
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krj
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response 90 of 151:
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Aug 4 03:37 UTC 2001 |
There have been "conventional" recordings which were infamous for
containing square waves and having equipment-damaging potential.
Usually these would be recordings of the 1812 Overture with the
cannons driven into clipping in the recording.
However, the trick in the Cactus system is the claim that the
CD data is manipulated so that the original disc plays musically
and safely, while a copy produces noise, and could be manipulated
to produce a square wave.
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mdw
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response 91 of 151:
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Aug 4 05:43 UTC 2001 |
That really doesn't make sense - it's all digital stuff - just 576 byte
blocks of data -- either you copy it, or you don't -- a CD-R is going to
see just the same bits on the disk that a CD player will, baring weird
chemistry or physics trying to play "tricks" with different kinds of
lasers.
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mcnally
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response 92 of 151:
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Aug 4 13:03 UTC 2001 |
Marcus raises the obvious objection. Either there's something more
to this scheme than explained in the press reports or Cactus is some
kind of pseudo-technological scam intended to soak panic-stricken
recording execs..
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scott
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response 93 of 151:
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Aug 4 13:11 UTC 2001 |
The theory is that an audio CD player will realize that the data makes no
sense, and fix the obvious errors. Normally such errors would be the result
of corrupted data; ie a scratch or other physical damage. A CD data read
would read the data as-is, then lay it down on a new CD as good data. But
yeah, why wouldn't the audio read of the copy fix the same problem? Maybe
there's a checksum involved which aids the fixing of the bad data on the
original?
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mdw
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response 94 of 151:
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Aug 5 01:35 UTC 2001 |
Yes, but whatever's happening is *probably* something that CD-RW
software can do just as well. I'm not sure there's any checksum (or
that there isn't)--I do know though that when used to store data
(CD-Rom) only 512 bytes of data are stored in the 576 bytes -- the
remaining 64 bytes of data are used to store (I think) ECC data to
repair any minor read errors -- this isn't done for audio because a
1-bit error in audio data is typically not audible. That suggests to me
that there isn't any checksum on the audio data.
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gull
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response 95 of 151:
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Aug 6 14:35 UTC 2001 |
It probably has something to do with the underlying subcode tracks on the CD
that audio players use but CD-ROM drives can't copy, but that's just a
guess. I remember that this was why Playstation CDs couldn't be copied and
the copies run in an unmodified Playstation -- the boot code for the
Playstation was hidden in those subcodes. Supposedly you can fit about 2
megabytes in there, spread across the entire disc.
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krj
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response 96 of 151:
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Aug 6 19:28 UTC 2001 |
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6788999.html
"Department of Justice to probe online music ventures"
Quotes:
> The Justice Department opened an antitrust
> investigation of the online
> music business, focusing on two new joint ventures
> backed by five major record
> labels, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
...
> The government is also expected to examine the
> major record companies' use of copyright
> rules and licensing practices to control online
> distribution of their music, according to these
> people, the report said.
...
> According to the report, a lawyer familiar with
> the Justice Department investigation said that it
> isn't unusual for joint ventures among competitors
> to attract antitrust scrutiny and that many
> such ventures have been permitted to continue operating.
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mdw
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response 97 of 151:
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Aug 7 07:02 UTC 2001 |
At least some CD-RW players are (as best I can tell) capable of copying
all the subcode data as well. Any CD-RW player has to be capable of
copying the P and Q subcodes - I believe it's integral to how it knows
the difference between data & audio, and other important stuff. Some
common tricks used for copyprotection include a bad table of contents
block (apparently audio players don't need to use it...?), and
scattering bad sectors or data on the disk. The bad sectors can cause
data under-runs if you're copying from CD to CD, but I don't see how
those can break things if you use the HD as a buffer. I don't entirely
understand how a bad table of contents can break things, but that's the
claim. It sounds to me like something that could at least in theory be
programmed around, if you were "clever".
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krj
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response 98 of 151:
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Aug 9 16:24 UTC 2001 |
Today's web news stories:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6820135.html
"Napster blasts court's technical meddling"
Napster complains that the court-appointed technical master, who was
supposed to settle technical issues of fact, has been given unprecedented
and unjustifiable authority to run the engineering side of the Napster
company.
-----
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6817555.html
The record companies ask the judge to skip the Napster trial and deliver
a summary judgement against Napster.
-----
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6816989.html
Napster's new CEO outlines the hypothetical Napster subscription arrangement.
((Your weblog writer thinks that this has become completely irrelevant.
Napster Inc. has two possible outcomes: either it will be vaporized by the
court judgement, or else it will die from lack of users.))
-----
http://musicdish.com/mag/?id=4333
"Putting the Pieces Together: An End To End Solution for Protecting Music"
A music business fantasy about how our ability to copy CDs and music
files will be restricted, and how we'll all put up with it just fine.
Notice the handwaving where the writer assumes that no one will want to
put up with second-generation music files which have been passed through
the analog domain to strip out all copy restrictions...
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scott
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response 99 of 151:
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Aug 9 17:50 UTC 2001 |
The MusicDish article is amusing. Serious math/logic errors in the first
paragraph. I really doubt that 30 million people are getting their music via
online sharing, especially not for one specific album.
|
