Anti-copying CDs up the copyright ante

Here's my gripe with it. I don't listen to most American pop music for obvious reasons. I do however listen to Latin, Brasilian and general Spanish music which is both innovative and excellent. Most of these CD's are excruciatingly difficult to get a hold of, special orders, mostly, or obtained while overseas. They are precious to me. So in interest of preserving my investments, I archive, archive and archive. Try finding all three versions of Lenny Andrade's "Onda" some time. Once you find it it's worth the price of gold.

When I convert my music for archives, I use the MP3 format. These I can upload to a portable player that I hook into my car's cassette player via the same thing they use for portable CD players. I get digitable quality music with less than a $100.00 investment. I change the tracks every week for my variety. The rest of the time I listen to AM talk radio.

If they manufacture a CD that doesn't conform to my pattern of usage, it does me no good. Also forget about investing $20 in a CD that my kid might decide to eat or use for skeet shooting next week. I won't do it.

The clicks and pops are already taken care of in audio CD players. They are designed to silence or fill in unrecoverable errors. At worst you take the output of an audio player and plug it into your sound card. Or get CD ripping software that does the same thing as the audio player.

Heck, the soundtrack for Episode II is already out there and the CD isn't going to be in stores for a month! How can you copy protect a product that isn't even being sold?

DVDs and Super Audio CDs are protected by encryption, a legitimate technique. But they can't prevent you from making lesser quality copies. This is where the industry needs to go -- protecting the latest and best products while not preventing home use copying.

It's all a zero sum game in the end, to take it from a new angle. There is only a limited amount of dollars, a limited amount of disposable income if you will, that can flow into this industry from the consumers pockets. And if the above novel theory is true to any degree, a successful copy protection scheme, if such a thing is possible, cannot significantly increase the record companies' intake. The market in every popular music category out there is oversaturated, with new acts coming online weekly. Who can ever absorb it? Thirty years ago a record store the size of my living room could contain everything in every category, plus a smacking of 8 track tapes (mmmmmmmmmmm... 8 track!) Today, the record stores I visit are bigger than even Julia Roberts' living room.

Forty years ago there was only a handful of marginal "artists" who the record companies deemed worthy of overpromoting (Frankie and Annette anyone?) Most such questionable talents were not promoted too hard and would fade out after a 45 RM single or two (mmmmmmmmmmmm... singles!) Today, dozens of one hit wonders receive the royal treatment and are pushed on our ears and eyes by all means possible. It's just too much!

LOTUS 123 tried something similar. They eventually realized that the copy protection...

Microsoft once had a telecommunications program called Access (this was before the MS Access database).

Access had a bizarre habit of kicking into copy-protection mode at odd times, like when you were installing a completely legitimate copy. Just before the copy-protection rebooted your machine, it would display a message saying "What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. Copy-protection violation. Erasing drive C."

Access was soon pulled from the market, never to be seen again, and eventually replaced by a database of the same name (which reminded me of some Stalinist bureaucrat airbrushing out the image of a liquidated politician).

Singles. What a novel idea. I have several CDs full of one hit wonders. Some great songs by people who couldn't do a complete album to save their lives.

I wonder if any FReepers would approve of internet distribution of singles if it involved a legally protected copy protection scheme.

The marketing geniuses have just turned a paying customer into one who has no choice but to download pirated versions of the music from the internet.

I don't know how many people are into video games around here, but back in the days of the Sony Playstation there was a copy protection scheme used in Japan that made its way into Europe and onto at least one disc in the US. It detected the presence of a "modchip", a device used for bypassing the system copy and country-code protection.

Unfortunately there is a legitimate use for modchips: playing imports. Also, the "protection" could be defeated through a crack applied to a CD image. As a result the only people adversely affected were people who had modified systems for legitimate purposes while the pirates could play on unfettered.

I predict a similar, but much more widespread, side-effect here.

I agree with you that our pop culture is a cesspool -- there is little new pop music on the radio that I can even relate to, and I'm more eclectic than anyone else I know.

Even my 13-year old daughter recognizes that Brittney Spears will be long forgottten 30 years from now, yet The Stones music from the 60's/70's still plays daily on the radio. She loves all the bands I loved as a teen: Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, all of them. I was astonished when she made this observation; even our kids "get it."

DVDs and Super Audio CDs are protected by encryption,

Actually, CSS, the 'encryption' used on DVD's etc. is not much about preventing copying. It is mostly to prevent an electronics company from making a DVD player (or player software for a PC) unless they fork over money to those who created the DVD standard to get the decryption key. It's true if you just copy the files to a hard drive it won't work, but if you burn a copy with a DVD writer it works without having to do any special trics, because you are copying the CSS as well.

DeCSS was created because nobody was producing DVD player software for Linux, so they took matters into their own hands and found the key so they could play DVD's on their Linux system.

Good point. I defy anyone to name an act or band that has popped up in the last 5 years that will be remembered after 2005.

The recording industry has returned to the pre-Beatles 1960s when they manufactured pop stars based upon looks and sellability (is that a word?). They find a pretty boy or girl who can dance, have some hack write music for the pretty boy or girl (it helps if it sounds EXACTLY like the music all the other pretty boys and girls are lip-syncing to), find a distributor, hype it to the ceiling and BINGO--another pop phenomenon.

I didn't know that. That would explain why DeCSS is in so much trouble, because they are doing the one forbidden thing.

So are DVD manufatturers taking the cheap road ot copy protection -- making pre-recorded DVDs longer than the available recordable DVDs?

No, most DVD's have far less on them than they have room for. DVD writers and blanks are still too expensive and too few to have any real impact on the bottom line. They are mostly concentrating on ways of messing with 'region free' DVD players, and DVD players that allow macrovision to be disabled. Region codes are supposed to stop someone in europe (or japan or whatever) frp, watching a DVD made in the USA (so they might get to see the DVD before the move comes out in the theatersEurope), the latter is supposed to stop you from dubbing a dvd to a VHS tape.

Wait until you see what the Hollywood content providers have in store for High-Def video copy protection. Currently, Hi-Def signals only exist for Over-the-Air (OTA) transmission of TV signals but will soon exist for DVD-Video as well. Currently, the digital signal is decoded in a box outside the display and de-crypted and then sent via analog signal to the display monitor. This allows for the taping of TV shows in Hi-Def if you have a D-VHS. The proposed copy protection scheme will have the signal (either OTA or DVD-Video) remain in digital format all the way to the display. The display, equipped with a DVI input and HDCP decrypting software, would then de-crypt it to allow it to be shown. However, what this will not allow is to make a tape of a TV show for your own use (just like all VCR's or Tivo systems now). Currently, every high definition monitor sold in the past, and with the exception of one (a JVC model I think) being sold today will no longer be able to show a hi-def signal. Think that will tick off the 5 million or so owners of Hi-Def displays? How about not even being able to record a TV show in hi-def for watching sometime later? This is going to be a mess.

You mean, like the $99 price tag will prevent anyone from aquiring a foreign player? and a PAL converter?

Actually, you can get a Sampo 631CF in the USA right now, flash the bios to remove region coding and macrovision, and then play any PAL or NTSC DVD on any PAL or NTSC TV set.

If you want to remove the CF card reader and hook up a hard drive in it's place, you can do that too.

This is going to be a mess.

I can think of no moral reason for companies not to attempt copy protection. I can think of lots of marketing reasons.

Short lived protection schemes provide a motivation for content providers to upgrade their quality standards, leaving legal copying always at a lower level of quality. Right now, CDs, DSS and digital cable are that lower level.

I agree about the moral issue as private property rights are the building blocks of a civilized society.

About Cable, DSS, etc., the current situation is that all OTA broadcasting is to be digital and hi-def by 2006, therefore, copy protection is being forced as an issue. All these "delivery systems" will have to be able to implement the chosen scheme while satisfying the customers. The point is that the customers will be up in arms if they can't copy, under existing 'fair use' provisions, the content that they have purchased. My bet is that this stuff eventually ends up in court and the content providers lose the "no copying at all" battle to fair use.

I haven't thought this through, but if the law is going to mandate a copy protection scheme, wouldn't it be simple for every digital device to embed its own serial number as a watermark. Fair use would not be inhibited, since all copies would remain in the owner's custody. But wild copies with the same watermark would be traceable.

I don't know, it seems like it would work. One thing though is that the law (really the FCC) is only mandating that all broadcasts be in a digital format. It says nothing about copy protection. Since there aren't really different grades and qualities of "digital", the content providers are concerned about having perfect copies available for distribution. Understandable. However, their consumers will demand fair use.

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