Posted on 04/05/2002 9:04:31 AM PST by Recovering_Democrat
Celine Dion's latest release is generating heated discussions on Internet message boards. But the subject under fire is not the star's music -- it's that the CD will not play on computer CD drives. Epic/Sony released "A New Day Has Come" embedded with Key2Audio copy protection in Germany and several other European countries. According to a spokeswoman for Sony Music Entertainment, it is clearly stated on the front of the booklet and on the back of the jewel box that the CD "will not play on a PC or a Mac" in the language of the country in which it is sold. Besides those notices, which the spokeswoman said were readable before purchase, the disc itself bears the same warning. Should the consumer try to play Dion's CD on a PC or Macintosh, the computer likely will crash. (Chris Marlowe)
Then it is not a 'CD'. Just ask Phillips, the creator of the format.
Do people with computers want to play Celine Dion CDs?!
Mark W.
Logical when the people who own the record companies also own CD technology.
Us electrical engineers have a saying--Anything that can be scrambled can be un-scrambled.
Make sure that you also get rid of that little Trojan Horse that comes with KaZaA.
Should the consumer try to play Dion's CD on a PC or Macintosh, the computer likely will crash
Something seems wrong with that. This seems like a purposeful attempt to destroy someone else's property. Which, I think, is worse that distributing MP3's over the web. What's next, the recording industry will encode viruses?
Though I think that MP3s are the best possible promotional tool for any artist and the artists and the recording industry are idiots for thinking otherwise, I had supported the copyright angle out of respect for property protection issues. But, causing the destruction of someone elses property? I'm sorry, but I can't agree with that.
What a relief!
An interesting comeback by the recording industry. Will the "fix" be hacked? Just wondering.
Just as soon as I get my hand on one of these CD's, count on it.
If for nothing more than an intellectual exercise. I just don't like when these kinds of engineering problems exist in plain sight. :)
Do people with computers want to play Celine Dion CDs?!
ROFL! Good point.
What a relief!
Now if they could just get them to not play on regular CD players, mankind would be safe again.
They can also put "will not be purchased with cash or credit."
I hear you my brother!
I think its funny how some agencies, corporations and government groups think there is such a thing as infallible technology. I disapprove of theft, make no mistakes, but I find the idiocy of said groups astounding every time they trott out with their "super double secret security" programs/algorithms.
Thanks for the update!
I'm tempted to buy a copy of this "CD" just so that I can sue Epic/Sony for intentionally propagating a computer virus.
Some will tell you that this analog to digital conversion loses some of the sound quality of the original recording. While this is true, the loss is very small and the vast majority of people would never notice the difference. The end result is still MUCH better than the old casettes and eight tracks most of us grew up listening to.
Let's just suppose that a publisher is able to come up with a new type of printing ink & paper. The print in books done with this new technology can be read by the human eye, but if you try to photocopy or scan it, you would end up with blank copy, for the ink is "invisible" to any imaging technologies.
Now, this would presumably be done because the publisher was thinking that this would cut down on copyright infringements. It would deter anyone going out, buying one copy of their book, and then making multiple other pirate copies. Their assumption is that they would make more money because those people who would not be able to get pirate copies would instead go buy their own legit copy of the book.
But what really happens? Just how many people really go to the trouble of photocopying an entire book for their own use? And just how many people would want to buy a photocopied pirate edition, when they can purchase the professionally printed and bound legit edition for not much more?
So who does do any photocopying of these books? Well, it turns out that most of the photocopying is done by students and researchers at libraries, who only may need are a page or two or ten out of each for a paper or research project. They photocopy these because it is easier for them to just make a photocopy of a page or two than to have to either check out the entire book and lug it home and back again, or to hand-copy the desired material out if the book does not circulate. There is no way that these people would ever buy all these books, since they would only need them for one time, and in many cases would only be interested in a small part of the total book at that.
But what happens, now, if these people are no longer able to photocopy from these books? Are they going to go out and buy the book? NO!!! More likely, they will just bypass that book, and rely if at all possible on other sources that are more user friendly.
A book that hardly anyone can use will thus become a useless book. There is not much of a market for useless books, either among students, or researchers, or libraries, or book buyers.
Thus, the likely outcome of implementing such anti-copying technology would be to DECREASE total sales of the book, rather than to increase them. If a publisher stubbornly insisted on continuing to publish nothing but such useless, undesired books, then it would not be very long before they found themselves out of business. Meanwhile, authors who actually wanted to see their books sold would find publishers that actually wanted to stay in the business of selling books, and are thus publishing books that are actually more useful to readers.
The moral of the story: If music companies make their CD recordings useless enough for consumers, then consumers will migrate to more useful formats that are being put out by artists who want to actually sell recordings.
The assumption that there is this huge market for pirated copies of entire music CDs is incorrect. What there is a demand for is: 1) the ability to custom mix favorite tracks into a custom package; and 2) the ability to access and play this custom mix across a number of different devices.
If someone likes one track from each of twelve different CDs to listen to while they drive, the recording companies are idiots if they think that they can FORCE this consumer to end up buying twelve different CDs, and thus make him carry those all around in his car and constantly be changing CDs and fidlling with the CD player to listen to the tracks that he wants. No, what will happen instead is either that this consumer will buy FEWER CDs and make do without, or else migrate to another format that will give him what he wants as soon as possible.
Cant we make cure that Celine Dion can NEVER be played on a PC..
Anyone who tries to play a Howling Dion number on anything deserves his computer -- and especially if he has so little respect for a Mac -- at least his computer, that is -- to fall down, crash and fly apart!
And it will take a computer person worthy of the name about half an hour to hack it.
It would be much better if people bought them and then returned them the next day as "defective". That would put an end to this very fast. It's one thing to implement copy-protection, but quite another to make a disc unplayable on certain hardware (I've read that even some non-PC cd players will have trouble with these things).
Don't know where this guy finds some, well, most of the songs, but he had a couple of them picking on Celine.
Yep...hundreds of copies...as individual files or as the entire album! And now already burned on cd...and already playing in the pc cd-rom drive!
Besides, that's irrelevant if you're encoding to MP3 (or other compressed sound file formats such as Ogg Vorbis, WMA, or whatever). A chain is as strong as its weakest link -- if the equipment is good enough, the information lost in D/A conversion would have been lost in the compression anyway.
Do you know for a fact that this is true?
I've heard a couple of people post about compression as if it were obvious that compression causes lost resolution but nothing could be farther from the truth.
There are many compression schemes that sacrifice some detail for space or speed. But there are many compression schemes that just do things like encoding of bit runs or patterns which cause NO LOSS OF DATA OR RESOLUTION OF ANY KIND.
Do you know that MP3 uses a compression method that causes data loss?
Mark W.
There are indeed lossless compression schemes for digital audio, such as "shorten", but the advantage of lossy codecs lies mainly in the file sizes. "shorten" typically gives you a 2:1 compression ratio, whereas 10:1 ratios are common for mp3.
As a side note, the fact that mp3 is a lossy format means that the commonly held belief that you can decode a low-bitrate mp3 to .wav and then re-encode to a higher bitrate and thereby gain quality is not true. The information is lost - there's no way to reconstruct it in such a fashion. So while you can do that, it doesn't really gain you anything in terms of quality.
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