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Sony's latest attempt to 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
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In seeming proof that the high-tech solutions aren't always the best, newsgroups have been buzzing with the way of defeating the copyright tyrants. Developed by Sony, the current way it works is by adding a track that contains bogus data onto the CD as the first track; and because computers are programmed to read data files first, the computer will continuously try to play the bogus track; causing it to lock, and in doing so, it never gets to play the music tracks located elsewhere on the compact disc. So while your standard CD player will play it, CD-ROM drives will not. In fact its so deadly to Mac's that it will cause the computer to lock up irretrievably - meaning you can't even eject the bloody CD and have to return it to the shop...
With the most high profile releases to date being middle of the road established artists such as Celine Dion or Roger Waters, it might not have had a great impact yet on DiS readers; though Sony have shipped 11 million of the copy-protected CD's to date. However, as the technology is there, it'll surely be introduced to more and more artists such as Eminem, a man so concerned with his intellectual property rights he said about bootleggers .. "I want to meet that motherf***er and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going ‘I got Eminem's new CD! I got Eminem's new CD!", threatening physical violence against anyone who pirates his new album. I don't know how that defense will stand up in court, but he better head down to New York City then, because pirate copies of the new CD, not out for a month, can be found on street corners for $5. But i digress, anyway...
Anyway, hackers have discovered that the easiest way of defeating this new copy-protection technology is with... a visit of your local stationers and picking up a Black marker pen. Apparently scribbling around the rim of a disc with a felt-tip marker will defeat this copy-protection: by making the bogus data track unreadable, the CD-ROM drive will simply skip to the next track - the music. And hey presto, millions of dollars of investment by Sony's copyright department is defeated.
I dunno about you, but surely one way of getting more CD's sold is simply to reduce the current exorbitant price of them, investing millions in reducing exorbitant and extravagant overheads rather than investing millions in this new 'chocolate fireguard'-like technology...
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Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
I'm not very technologically minded, so I might be getting this all wrong, but anyway...
... I got the impression that the Cure's recent 'Greatest Hits' album had been subject to an anti-copying device, because I leant it to a friend to copy and they found that it didn't work. However, I copied the songs onto my computer as MP3s using MusicMatch and it worked fine. Is it possible that this is another way of defeating the anti-copying attempts, or am I being ridiculously naive? -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
you can tag the cd in the `p` and `q` bits of data that makes it impossible to copy... not sure how effective it is.
even if it is all you have to do is run it back into itself using a little bit hardware trickery and recording on to a wave editor (like wavelab or cool edit pro) and slice and dice the required tracks out of that as wav files then you can do as you will. -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
music match takes the sound and compiles that into MP3s, alot of other programs take the actual data and make that into MP3s -
Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
Does seem pretty odd doing all these things when you can quite easily just record them analogly with those red and white cable things that most music playing devices seem to have on them.
And must every article say the ridiculoulsy simplistic solution of "make the CDs cheaper thicko". Thats not going to solve the problem either (will undoubtedly help a little). Unless albums are the price of singles its just not going to take away the incentive to download the music for free. I download about an album of music a day and generally feel pretty guilty about it (particularly when they are all of wee indie labels) but maybe i've just got weak moral fibre or something.
anyway if i had broadband which we all probably will in five years time why would anyone pay for them? bearing in mind i don't give a shit about packaging and stuff for the majority of bands -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
but in 5-8 years time we are not gonna be listening to cd`s it will be dvd`s with surround sound.
now they are harder to download due to the sheer size -
Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
1. The release date of Eminem's new album was June 3rd and is now next Monday, May 27th. ("pirate copies of the new CD, not out for a month...")
2. "Exorbitant price" of CDs?! How do you figure that out? £1/track is amazing value considering that you can listen to it millions of times (should you wish). And that's without any thought for the hundreds of people involved in marketing, distribution and retail, the costs of recording the thing, the cost of manufacturing it, the royalties paid to the artist, the record label's fair share (they lent large amounts of money to the artist to get them off the ground - they deserve a dividend), and many other factors.
3. "millions of dollars of Investment by Sony's copyright department is defeated" - no. It just doesn't take millions of dollars to add an extra track to a CD.
4. I think a lot of people are mis-understanding the idea of these measures. You will never, ever, ever be able to stop it completely. The idea is to just make it a bit harder, to put people off - a deterrent. If people have to take to their CDs with a marker pen and risk screwing them up completely that may put quite a lot of them off. -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
I)When I wrote it, the release was still scheduled as June; next month. The release has bene moved forward since then to this month. (slight exaggeration then)
II)£1 per track? compared to the fact that on average Us cd's prices are between 33% and 50% cheaper than UK prices (ie the average new release in the US costs appproximately £8-£10), why are they so much more than that in the UK?The fact of the matter is that CD's were itnroduced at a higher price than vinyl in 1985, and when the public proved willing to pay that price, why would he companies willingly reduce it? By this definition, take than on average that a song lasts say 5 minutes, abnd if you pay £1 per 5 mins of CD, if you went to see a movie at the cost of say £5.50 (averga eUK cinema price),It'll last just over 25 minutes. How about that for value for money?
3.Addign an extra track to the Cd doesnt cost millions. But setting up a specilaist anti-copying department, designing anti-copying software code , investing in wages and so forth, all adds up to lots of money. Especially when the attempts at file-sharing prevention are taken into account.
4>of course you'll never be able to stop it completey. You can always plug in an external audio-only CD player into the PC and copy it that way. No amount of technology will ever stop that for happening ever.
Remember the futility of 'Home taping is Killing Music'? this is the same, only even more pigheaded from the record comapnies. and even more futile. -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
maybe a better way of Sony saving money would be to stop throwing barrowloads of money at mediocre bands... a marketing principle much practised on other products, such as family hatchbacks or washing powders... all pretty similar products, and none of them are REALLY going to set the world on fire, so an inordinate amount of money needs to be spent trying to differentiate one mediocre product (in this case, record) from another.
I worked on part of Michael Jackson's album launch, and was aghast at the incredible amount of money being pissed away on things like having a playback at the incredibly expensive Ubon restaurant. The album flopped and Sony were left with a bill for millions of wasted dollars. I think if they were really interested in saving money, then it would be a good idea for this big flabby corporation to rid themselves of the management, starting from the top down, who landed them in that hole and employ some sharper cookies... -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
1. Still doesn't really excuse mistaking 30 days for 12, but whatever.
2. Have you ever been to the US? All prices are lower. DVDs, jeans, food, home electronics, cars, alcohol, petrol... The UK is simply an expensive country compared to others, basically because the exchange rates just don't fit in with life at a common level. Go to America, for instance, and things are priced as if dollars and pounds are equal. The price of CDs here and over there are the same, relative to other products. Remember, this is rip-off Britain, not just rip-off HMV.
Why should the record companies reduce the price of CDs? It's a better quality than vinyl. And do you remember the price of CDs when they first went mainstream? Yes, just about the same as they are now - despite inflation managing to almost double the price of a lot of other things over the same period.
I don't understand your comparason of buying a CD to going to the cinema. When you buy a CD you get to keep it. When you go to the cinema you just get one showing. If you want to compare, do it to a DVD.
3. I am pretty sure that all the major labels aren't coming up with the anti-piracy protection themselves. They'll just be buying the methods from specialists. But anyhow, considering their turnover, one or two million dollars isn't really that big a deal to them.
4. "No amount of technology will ever stop that for happening ever". Glad we're agreed on that, but why then write an article with a headline that says "'copy-proof' CD's"?! My point was they were never going to be 100% copy-proof, so Sony's attempts have not been "thwarted".
No, I don't remember 'Home taping is killing music', but this is quite different because they've actually taken action instead of just words, and they have every right to do so. Their music, their product, their choice. If you don't like it, don't buy it (and if you're a regular file-sharer then you probably don't buy 'it' very much anyway). In this country at least, you don't actually have the right to make personal copies of the music you buy - just exemption from being sued for doing so. As for the futility of their actions, they are only responding to millions of people engaged in massed Internet piracy (a.k.a. file-sharing). Napster and co. started the fight, not the labels. -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
In 5-8 years time most people ought to have broadband, and it quite possible to downgrade DVD audio to MP3 etc.
Don't forget that DVD, like CD, doesn't use compression. You can quite easily shrink a film from 4 GB to 500 MB, just like audio CDs are actually 500 MB but end up as 50 or so in MP3. On standard broadband you can basically download video (and audio) (or potentially super-quality audio) fast enough to watch (or listen to) it live. -
Re: Sony's latest attempt 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
Actually it does both. Does it digitally (directly) if it can (and therefore can do so faster than standard playing speed - basically as fast as your CD-ROM will go), or it just reverts to analogue recording (in real time) if necessary. -
Sony's latest attempt to 'copy-proof' CD's thwarted by Household objects....
I've never had a problem with copy protection, my mac and itunes has always bypassed it. And even if it did lock up the computer causing it to crash, all one would have to do is restart it, and eject the cd while its restarting. Easy as piss.
I also heard because of this copy proctetion, they aren't really CDs so shouldnt be marketed as such. Also heard they shortened the life of some older CD players by as much as one to two years..
sorry if anyones said what i've said already, at the moment am far too tired to read through what everyones said.
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