Sony Adds New Copyright Method to CDs in 2003 630
Natoi writes "Sony is leaving Mac and **nix users out in the cold with their new copyright method called Label Gate CD copyright system. You'd have to be running Windows and use a Sony developed proprietary software to listen to CD's published by Sony starting next year." This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?
Read the article before posting (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, you might see your questions answered.
It plays in Cars and CD Players, too! (Score:5, Informative)
SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay.
Read the story! (Score:0, Informative)
Hi Fi Players are not affected by this (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, since some car CD players work on the same principle as PC CD players, they would be unusable.
I normally play my CDs in the car. I have more or less stopped buying CDs altogether. Go Figure.
Campaign for Digital Rights (Score:5, Informative)
This is an active campaign to try to stop this kind of evil action by corporations who insist they are the injured party when charging ripoff pricing for their goods and using graft to stop anything at all ever falling out of copyright and into the public domain where all works finally belong.
Take a look at their site at least, consider joining the mailing list.
Re:It plays in Cars and CD Players, too! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Read the story! (Score:5, Informative)
Incomprehensible (Score:5, Informative)
1. This is not a copyright system, it's a copy protection system.
2. It doesn't prevent people from playing CD's in analog players altogether. The music available in two forms on the CD, one inteneded for traditional CD players in a copy protected format, and one for PC's, also copy protected.
3. This only applies to 12 cm CD singles produced in Japan.
RTFA -- not all Sony CDs (Score:2, Informative)
RTFA. "All 12-centimeter CD singles by Japanese artists rolling out from SME's group record companies are expected to be Label Gate CDs from Jan. 22." NOT All Sony CDs, just some Japanese ones.
Cowboy Neal: "What about car stereos and high- fidelity CD players?"
RTFA: "SME's new Label Gate CD consists of two kinds of music data -- one is data for audio devices to replay and the other is encoded compressed data for PCs to replay."
Maybe the audio data won't play on car and hifi CD players, but if not it's not by design.
Re:whatever. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sony and trademarks/branding (Score:4, Informative)
Started? That's the heart of the plan:
Copy protection on CDs isn't about stopping file sharing, its about creating new per-play revenue streams WHILE ALSO preserving obscenely high hard-media profits.
I.V.
Re:It plays in Cars and CD Players, too! (Score:1, Informative)
In fact, I once wrote an angry letter to them and they were kind enough to send me an untampered CD. Also they told me they were going to work on Linux support.
This is somewhat of a pointless article. (Score:2, Informative)
The ability to circumvent this "new" form of copy protection is already present in most PCs. A typical CD-ROM has a four-wire analog audio connector in the back next to the IDE cable. Connect that up to the Audio In port on a soundcard. Instead of ripping tracks via CDDA, you can rip tracks by hitting the often-ignored Play button on the front of your CD-ROM and running something simple like sndrec32 in Windows to record the results
Thats how we used to do it back in ye olden days before direct CDDA ripping was popular.
Cheers,
Re:Incomprehensible (Score:5, Informative)
And a few other points no one seems to be making (probably because they don't RTFA):
4) If there truly are two copies of the data, redbook and protected, not shared data, then the capacity will effectively be cut in half, meaning this approach could never be applied across the board to Sony's whole catalog since the average album is too long to fit twice on the same CD. Which raises two interesting questions - is the data duplicated or shared? And is the protected data uncompressed, or are you getting a lossy version?
5) You only get one free key to listen to your music. Subsequent keys must be purchased. So if your hard drive fails, or you wipe your drive and forget to backup your keys, you get to buy your music all over again. Not to mention that if you want to listen to your new "CD" in your home office and your computer at work, you will have to pay for two keys.
6) The copy protection system requires an Internet connection, making it even more burdensome than it already is
7) You have to use Sony's proprietary player, like it or not.
All around it sounds like a a great system that is exactly what consumers are asking for. Way to go Sony!
Hoontech Digital/XG, ca. EUR 60 (Score:4, Informative)
And, oh yes, the Linux drivers (ymf744 IIRC, or ALSA) ignore the SMCS bit. I can copy from MD or CD to PC and vice versa as much as I want. Under Windows, the Toslink (optical) stuff seems to be disabled as soon as you playback stuff.
I bought this card precisely for this reason. I don't want no stupid bit telling me I cannot copy my own live recordings (from my own music I myself, and the rest of our big band, make). Seriously.
And this is the music industry's brain on drugs (Score:5, Informative)
Here's yet another example. (I submitted this various forms to the /. editor gods 3 times in the last two days, but they don't seem to think it worthy of your attention) :
According to this article [electricnews.net] , Universal Vivendi will be making 43,000 tracks available for sale, at $0.99/track, on 28 different web sites (that will get commissions for the sales). In what can best be described as a monumental example of still not getting it, UMG will be selling the tracks in the proprietary DRM hobbled Liquid Audio format [lycos.com] . A quote in the article from a UMG unit president demonstrates that years of listening to the kind of stuff big labels sell does indeed damage the hearing (and possibly the corporate brain) when he said (please try not to laugh too hard, folks) "We have listened to the public, and we are offering the music that people want at a reasonable price that fairly compensates the artists, songwriters and [other] individuals who make their living in the music industry". Apparently UMG thinks that a restricted format is what the public wants. As to "fairly compensating artists (and) songwriters", I have yet to hear any UMG artists announce that their contracts have been ripped up. Just to double check that last point, I looked outside - there is still only one moon in the sky.
Finally, for the 3 of you that don't also peruse the Register, here's an interesting item that the music industry should pay attention to: File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers [theregister.co.uk]
It seems that the harder the music industry tries to resist, the more likely it is that they're writing their own epitaphs.
Sony email addresses (Score:1, Informative)
feedback@sonyclassical.com;
SonyWonder@sonymus
thestore@sonymusic.com;
smsp@sonymusic.c
sonymusiconline@sonymusic.com feedback@columbiarecords.com
Epic_Records@sonymu
LegacyOnline@sonymusic.com
Re:It plays in Cars and CD Players, too! (Score:5, Informative)
SCMS is the Serial Copy Management System. There's more info [minidisc.org] on it from minidisc.org. There's a more technical description [epanorama.net] of the whole S/PDIF protocol at epanorama.net.
Elektor Electronics is an electronics hobbyist magazine from the UK which featured an SCMS remover in their July/August 1998 issue. There's a page (not affiliated with Elektor) with some more information [sketchy.net]. That page includes links to on-line ordering of the kit, a parts list for the kit, and some notes to help you if you're trying to build it.
The Elektor kit got things started, but was produced before CPLDs were accessable to the general electronics hobbyist. I agree with warmcat that it wouldn't take much work to implement an SCMS remover in some CPLD, although I haven't yet come across published plans for one.
I am also unsure if soundcards with S/PDIF inputs honour the copybit or not. However, a cheapo AudioPCI can easily have an S/PDIF input added on [www.uta.fi], which won't care about the copybit. This is the way I'm going since I already had an AudioPCI lying around.
Of course, you don't need to build anything. You can get an SCMS copybit remover [minidisc.org] brand new from Behringer [behringer.com].
(btw - warmcat, dude, you rock!)
EMI just did the same with the new Robbie Williams (Score:4, Informative)
First let me state I bought it for the girlfriend :)
Anyway, like the acticle description of Sony's technique, the CD plays in a normal CD player, or a DVD player, however when put into a PC it autoruns and starts a little, quite good looking player, and plays the CD using this player.
Now if I use Media Player, or Real to play the CD, it still works, but if I try to rip the CD, each track errors about 5 seconds in.
By the looks of things, the CD based player software has digital versions of the songs embedded in it. According to the player the tracks are encoded at 47kps.
It's clearly labelled as "Copy Controlled" on the front and back of the CD. It is not described anywhere on the media as a "CD", nor does the Phillip's logo appear. Minimum listed specs are Windows 95, Pentium II, 4Mb RAM. But as you can still play it using your normal computer, I guess those specs are for their little specific player.
The point of all this? None really, it does stop you ripping the music, but it's still playable from everywhere else, your CD player, your DVD, or your own player software. Almost seems reasonable when you think about it.
Re:whatever. (Score:4, Informative)
Not a single one, because it's not necessary.
Most cheap DVD players sold nowadays are region free and play whatever you feed them.
Re:Beat CD DRM for all time. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:not so fast to dismiss the law (Score:3, Informative)
And DeCSS is laughably simple. I liked the guys who put it on T-shirts, and there's even a haiku [cmu.edu]. Some scary precedent is getting set down. Don't even ask me to say where the line between protected free speech and unprotected illegal code is drawn, considering we've been pointedly calling them computer languages all these years. I'm a lawyer, not an oracle, but I do know the first amendment doesn't protect everything in writing (copyright for example; trade secrets, espionage, blackmail, obscenity, etc.).
The more complex solutions will be harder to spread around anonymously, and won't look as innocent or amusing as a haiku or T-shirt. (These folks are practicing civil disobedience and rubbing the industry's face in it, which I think is just fine, and probably illegal or it wouldn't be civil disobedience.) Public sympathy will be less, and that's important. Look how hard they came down on Sklarov! He is fortunate to attract a lot of sympathy, and to be a fairly innocent looking guy, an academic more than a black market profiteer. I was amazed, if you look at how lax the gov't is to enforce lots of other "economic harm" laws. I don't know many honest people will want to get involved inthis, and really it's the honest people who need to be won over to the cause.
So
Re:Hoontech Digital/XG, ca. EUR 60 (Score:4, Informative)
I recommend them over what you have discribed since having chinese-only drivers does not really do well for my confidence of the product.
and don't forget... (Score:4, Informative)
And don't forget radio talk shows, several areas have dj's who discuss consumer/and/or tech issues (clark howard, kim kommando,motley fools, etc), call up, state position. Play the word twisting propoganda game right back at them state you dislike being called and demonized as a "pirate' and to you it's the same as calling someone in public The N word or whatecver as it's inaccurate and demeaning. Enough stock market "investors"and store managers and whatnot hear these complaints on the radio, and they WILL hear it, it WILL get back to sony and hollyweird, and stick to your guns, don't buy any of the riaa stuff, ever.
I've been doing it for years, I just flat refuse to buy any of those overpriced pieces of "entertainment" whether audio or video. i got whizzed over the blatant zillion percent markups, because I know that moneyis pure greed profits well above any sort of normal rational level, and i won't support greed. I'll support some osrt of reasonable profit, but not making these bozos mega rich, "rich" should be good enough for anyone, IMO. I buy already purchased/used or independent and that's it.
As an aside,if you want a source of a good set of political/freedom/human-civil rights, etc. issues videos that you are encouraged to copy and redistribute, goto infowars.com, get any of alex jones videos, he has them on dvd or vhs, buy one, make 100 or 1000 copies, give them away or charge just for the media, exactly like linux distros, he don't care. He only asks you use a first gen copy you get from him for the copying efforts, very reasonable, IMO.
Re:millions who've bought MP3 players (Score:3, Informative)
And Digital Audio Tape (DAT). DAT was a perfectly good technology that is 100% dead because it had LEGALLY MANDATED DRM built in.
And to those of you who are pro-DRM, DAT prooves the horror stories about DRM are absolutely valid. People who bought DAT and recorded their own band discovered that they could not make copies.
THE LEGITIMATE COPYRIGHT HOLDER was unable to copy HIS OWN MATERIAL!
Situations like that will become common if DRM catches on.
-
Re:New protectable format. (Score:3, Informative)
Once again, the industry didn't realise that computers can already read LPs [slashdot.org].
Besides, I already copied a bunch of my parents' old LPs to CD by running the connection from the amp output into my machine. The pops and scratches were cleaned out by a simple low-pass FFT filter in audacity [sourceforge.net] and everything was good to go for CD burning.
(Note: I do recognise that the parent post is a joke.)
Vinyl far form unhackable! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Correction: (Score:2, Informative)
A minor quibble here--the article states that these CDs are CD Singles--they normally only have 2-4 songs (2 songs and sometimes 2 off vocal/karaoke tracks). So there is no music being left off (these aren't full albums).
Hopefully this scheme will die before it reaches the US (this is SME--the Japanese arm). Actually, since I buy a lot of Japanese CDs, hopefully it will die quickly in Japan.