Of course, any copy-protected CD can easily be circumvented with one of these:
Simply use this marker to color the outer edge of your copy-protected CD (on the shiny side) and the measures are defeated.
Posted on 06/17/2002 7:20:27 PM PDT by SamAdams76
The five major record companies have been hit with a class-action lawsuit charging that new CDs designed to thwart Napster-style piracy are defective and should either be barred from sale or carry warning labels. The suit was brought this week in Los Angeles Superior Court by class-action specialists at the law firm Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach on behalf of two Southern California consumers.
It marks the first legal challenge of CD copy-prevention technology to "tackle the issue on an industry-wide basis," Alan Mansfield, an attorney representing the two named plaintiffs in the complaint, said Friday.
It also follows criticism from some members of Congress and from Dutch consumer electronics maker Philips, co-creator of the compact disc, that the anti-piracy CDs are technically flawed and could impinge on consumers' rights to copy music for their own use.
The suit names all five of the major record companies--Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and AOL Time Warner's Warner Music.
Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, issued a statement calling the lawsuit "frivolous" and defending the labels' recent efforts to deter digital piracy.
"Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said. "Motion picture studios and software and video game publishers have protected their works for years, and no one has even (thought) to claim that doing so was inappropriate, let alone unlawful."
The recording industry has recently introduced CDs with hidden electronic locks to prevent personal computers from copying the disc and in some cases, even playing it. These measures are intended to stem widespread swapping of music over the Internet and the production of unlimited copies, which the industry says has severely dented sales.
But the lawsuit, filed Wednesday under California's consumer protection statutes, says the copy-protected discs are "defective" products that are sold alongside conventional CDs with no distinction made between the two.
"Some versions of the Aerosmith greatest-hits CD have the copy-protection technology and some don't," Mansfield said. "Because it's not in all CDs, it's like Russian roulette."
Besides being deliberately designed to prevent the copying of music on personal computers, the anti-piracy technology often prevents playback altogether on PCs, and even on some CD players, Mansfield said. In Macintosh computers, the discs often jam in the CD trays.
Even when the discs can be played, their sound quality is inferior to standard CDs, and the discs often skip or fail to play all the tracks, he said.
These problems, the suit says, "interfere with customers' legal rights to back up, play or transfer their own music for personal, noncommercial use to other playback mediums."
The suit seeks a court order to either force the copy-protected discs off the market or to carry warning labels differentiating them from standard CDs. It also seeks to compensate consumers for the cost of repairing computers allegedly damaged by the discs.
Mansfield said the direct release of copy-protected CDs began in the United States about six months ago on a limited basis and is believed to represent a fraction of the overall CD market.
Of course, any copy-protected CD can easily be circumvented with one of these:
Simply use this marker to color the outer edge of your copy-protected CD (on the shiny side) and the measures are defeated.
Thanks for posting this - it's good see the RIAA start to get what's coming to them.
Click here: tech_index
I haven't seen one of these CDs from hell yet. Is the Kopy-proteKtion on the outmost track?
The recording industry should have to pay back every penny of AHRA money they have collected over the years.
But since I have a Sharpie...
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One might expect that involuntarily paying a piracy tax on the assumption that you were going to pirate things would constitute a tacit license for you to then go ahead and pirate things. Alas, it is not so...
Your reasoning is flawed. The tax imposed on blank media and the acceptance of that money by the recording industry for "royalties" legitimizes the transfer of copyrighted material onto the blank media. I have the legal right to make as many copies for my own use as I wish. Due to the recording industry collecting this tax on blank media, buying blank media is no different than buying the CD itself.
Technically, why is that? I assume the recording surfaces are the same and they're both digital...what's the diff between sound bits and info bits?
The problem is that this right of archival copies was simply codified by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1976 (and its 1992 revision) - it was not created at that point, as the piracy tax was. You had the right to make archival copies before that, it just wasn't a matter of statute law until that point. And if you check the record of that legislation, I think you'll find that the blank media tax was explicitly sold as a pre-emptive remedy for the piracy and distribution of copyrighted material - the tax is itself a presumption of guilt that you pay because it is assumed that you will use blank media to pirate copyrighted material.
Therefore, if you are paying for it, you must have a tacit license to do it - otherwise, you'd be paying for nothing at all except the "right" to do something you already had the right to do. And Congress would never allow such a ridiculous situation to come about, would they? Naaaahhhhhh... ;)
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I don't understand why the record companies don't just take the studio master recordings and lock them in a vault. It's this process of making copies and selling them to the public that causes all the piracy. If the major goal of record companies is to protect their intellectual property, they shouldn't be out there selling copies of the stuff. I'm sure their lawyers have been telling them this, why don't they listen? End piracy now: stop selling records.