Consumers Shun Copy-Protected CDs

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106368,tk,dn102502X,00.asp">http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106368,tk,dn102502X,00.asp</a><br /><br />Do the results of this survey surprise anyone? They don't surprise me in the slightest. Right or wrong, consumers have become accustomed to a certain amount of freedom when it comes to using their media. When I buy a CD, I rip it to a high-quality VBR MP3, put it on my server, then put the CD away and rarely touch it again. This system lets me share the music to any PC in the house, or onto my Pocket PC. What would I do if I bought a CD that I couldn't use with my system? I'd return it, regardless of how much I liked the music. Then I'd probably buy 20 more copies, open them all, and return them - just to make a point. :twisted:<br /><br />There's a showdown coming, no doubt about it - consumers on one side, and the music companies on the other side. Any bets on who will win?<br /><br />"Music companies thinking of distributing copy-protected CDs to protect their content from piracy will likely raise the ire of consumers while lowering their revenue, a new study warns. According to a survey recently released by GartnerG2, the research service of Gartner/Dataquest, 77 percent of respondents thought they should be able to copy CDs for personal use in another device. Also, 60 percent said they should be able to give copies of CDs to members of their families. Meanwhile, 82 percent of respondents said that they should be able to copy CDs for personal backup purposes."

[Cybercop]

I purchased a CD here in the states, The Fast and the Furious soundtrack and it was copy protected. It would play in a regular CD player but on the PC it would just beep as it scanned each track, the whole CD played in 15 seconds. It scared me that this was going to happen soon due to the greedy record companies not paying the artists enough for there work, that's what started this whole revolution. 8O

I called the 800 number on a card that was inclosed in the CD explaining you can get your money back for the CD because of the copy protection.

Long story short, I called and told the guy at the other end that this BETTER NOT HAPPEN. :x He said it was not well recieved and that the CD's that are copy protected will not sell. As a matter of fact, becase this CD is protected it is most likley that any CD in the future that is protected will only run the consumer around 8.99 to purchase because they wont sell and the stores will be sitting on a ton of inventory and P2P sharing will become bigger. When the record companies find out they have to cut the sale price in half just to move units then they will stop this madness :twisted:

I was able to copy the CD to a Digital Minidisc recorder then run it through the PC to create MP3's but it took almost 2 hours of my time to do so. The guy also told me that this is what is happening in England and through out Eurpe, that's why the Mini Disc Recorders are so popular and the MP3 Players are virtualy obsolete as my friends from London have told me.

I took the CD Back to Tower records and explained to the manager and she said that would be insane for them to do this and will force the store buyers not to carry any CD's that are protected due to low sales.

I have over 1300 CD's in my colection that I have ripped onto a 60 gig hard drive and love to listen to music on my Windows iPOD everywhere I go, If any of this data gets corrupted I always have the option to dust off the CD and re-rip it again. I don't think this will be happen any time soon unless Sony has a hand in it. :roll:

[Master O'Mayhem]

Is there a label or symbol on these cd's that say they are copy protected? I guess this will make the import business a bigger sell then buying them in north America, or will all CD's have the copy protection on it.?

[mookie123]

ah...I can smell market here.

How come nobody has made a CF card with built in ripper/OGG/mp3 en/decoder so a person can plug optical out of a CD player and ripped the song directly inot a PDA. Sounds like a simple enough device to make.

I bet at $60-80 bucks this CF card will sell like hot cakes. (before RIAA shut down this company accusing them selling pirating tool probably...heh..)

[ThomasC22]

I think there will be a face off between consumers and the recording industry in the near future but I'm not sure it's the consumers that will win.

I think both sides have something going for them...

On one hand, as much as everyone thus far has insisted they will return any CD they can't copy I doubt that's the case. The thing you have to remember is that each record company has a monopoly on their artists, now can you honestly say you wouldn't buy the next CD from your favorite artist because it had copy protection, being that you couldn't get it any other way? I doubt that, and that will probably be the consumers problem.

On the other hand, consumers do seem to always find away around copy protection which puts the recording industry at a disadvantage. Plus, the more the recording industry tries copy protection, the more effort consumers will put into getting around it.

So, we're an an impasse. What will happen? I don't even know, but both sides are kind of scaring me at this point.

[pro_worm]

The solution is blindingly easy. Instead of sitting on their fine velvet sofas smoking Cuban cigars, record company execs have:
1) team up
2) buy Kazaa
3) end their whining
The prospect of selling goods on the internet with NO production costs, NO printing costs, NO disc-making costs should be enough to make any Record company shake with joy. And with the record company's combined financial might would make purchasing Kazaa not even a blink on the monetary radar. Hell, Kazaa probably WANTS to be ensured a safe financial and legal future in exchange for minimal (one cent?) royalties on every downloaded song.
Record companies CANNOT win because, as Cybercop pointed out, digital transfers will simply give way to analog (i.e. minidisc) copying - as long as the CD makes noise, that noise can be turned into a digital file with nothing more than good old MS Sound Recorder.
So now it is the end of CDs. More space at Fred Meyers for - you guessed - Pocket PCs. And the Record Execs need to start a profit file sharing service before a new generation of vritual "Record" companies beats them to it.

[Dave Beauvais]

Is there a label or symbol on these cd's that say they are copy protected? ...I'd read somewhere that copy-protected CDs couldn't legally use the "Compact Disc Digital Audio (http://www.cdplant.se/logotyper.htm)" logo since, technically speaking, they are no longer compliant with the "Red Book" CDDA specs. Although, looking through my collection, more than half of those I checked only had the CDDA logo on the inside of the jewel case, not the CD itself or the paper case inserts, so you wouldn't know from the sealed package in a store.

Edit: Here are some articles on the subject: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23736.html http://uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/bad/ (I love the logo on this page: "Corrupted Disc Inferior Audio" :) http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/05/10.10.shtml http://news.com.com/2100-1023-876055.html?tag=rn--Dave

[Dave Conger]

Will they take them back though if you return them? It seems like stores would start saying that it isn't a valid complaint/reason to return or they could just charge you a restocking fee.

I think Jason has a completely valid solution for storing his music. He isn't sharing it with other people, only those who have a legal right to it...those in his household. I feel like it is similar to when we used to transfer CD's or Vinyl to tape. You often need your music in a different format to allow it to be enjoyed. Next think you know they will only let you play the disc in one CD player.

I receive 10-20 CD's a week from various record labels for our campus radio station. If any of them ever started doing copyright protection, they would be in massive trouble since none of us would play it. We do almost the exact same thing as Jason and many others and load the music into our computers. Are they going to start saying it is legal for us (the promoters) and not legal for the consumer?

[Ce]

The problem is even a bit more complex.
Last week there was a consumer program on Dutch television and there was someone speaking on behalf of unsatisfied consumers who had stated that they couldn't listen to their copy protected cd on a regular DVD player. There are more and more consumers who replace their old CD player by a modern DVD player. However some of these modern DVD players don't now what to do with the code on the CD and therefore refuse to play it.
Over here in the Netherlands it's not so easy to return a CD and get a refund. The record industrie is "thinking" about how to deal with this problem and in the meantime it's up to the shopowner whether you get a refund or not. SHAME..SHAME...SHAME!! When I buy a CD I first look if it's copy protected. If yes.....Sorry.....I don't buy it!

[vincentsiaw]

Greedy cd makers never think what cause piracy on their product, all they think is making a copyright tecnology, which in 2 weeks time get crack by a hacker and loss all it means,

i have a simpler cure for piracy: just make the cd price cheap enough, so nobody ever bother to pirate the cd! :D

if the cd price is to expensive according to consumer, most probably they will just buy the pirated cd, which by the way is not copy protected and can be share by everyone they wish!, so to me the more they copy protected a cd, the more people will buy pirated cd without copy protected in it ! :twisted:

[Pony99CA]

The thing you have to remember is that each record company has a monopoly on their artists, now can you honestly say you wouldn't buy the next CD from your favorite artist because it had copy protection, being that you couldn't get it any other way? I doubt that, and that will probably be the consumers problem.

If it's an artist you really like, you may still buy a copy-protected CD, but what about those artists that are marginal buys?

Normally I only buy a CD if it has two or three songs that I like. However, I've bought CDs that were on sale for $7.99 to $9.99 if they had one song that I liked. If I can't copy a song to an MP3 to play on my iPAQ, I may well not buy that CD.

Steve

[Janak Parekh]

you wouldn't buy the next CD from your favorite artist because it had copy protection, being that you couldn't get it any other way? I doubt that, and that will probably be the consumers problem.
Actually, most CD copy protections are crackable, if by no other means than to pipe the analog output into a sound card, recording as WAV's, and then converting to MP3.

As a result, consumers who are faced with this choice go to KaZaA or some other means to obtain the pre-cracked music. I think you will uneqivocally see sales lower even of popular artists. The question is who will control the spin as to why that's the case...

--bdj

[Jason Dunn]

How come nobody has made a CF card with built in ripper/OGG/mp3 en/decoder so a person can plug optical out of a CD player and ripped the song directly inot a PDA. Sounds like a simple enough device to make.

Not quite what you were looking for, but that closest I've seen:

http://www.pogoproducts.com/direct_record.html

[Timothy Rapson]

We went all through this 10-15 years ago with applications software. Print Master was copy protected on the Dos and Apple II but not on the Atari or Comodore. Print Shop was copy protected on the Atari and Comodore but not on the Apple or Dos systems. It turned out that no matter how they worked it and no matter how they figured the theft due to lack of copy protection vs. higher sales due to convenience of nonprotection, the non-protected software was more profitable for the companies.

Sure some people stole it because it was easy to copy. They made up for it with higher sales to people who wanted the convenience and security of keeping the original stored away and using copies on a hard disk or floppy. (Yes, children, we old timers remember actually running software off floppies.) But even with copy protection some hacked a way to steal it and shared it with friends feeling they earned the right to it when they invested all the hacking efforts.

One of the things the recording industry is not facing is that they cannot expect to just increase their prices (and therefore their profits) at two or three times the rate of inflation forever. People will pay 8-10 times the cost of a loaf of bread for an hours worth of music. They won't pay 20+ times that amount. If the companies don't realize this, they are setting themselves up for the law of diminishing returns from trying to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs, the customer.

[Jonathan1]

I purchase 10 More Fast and the Furious CD's within 2 weeks time and returned them all just to be a pain in the ass. This CD is copyright protected and you can't even play it in your puter without the this proprietary CD playing software from the manufacturer. Never mind that the software only runs on windows and not Apple or Linux.

So I just kept taking these CD's back over a weeks time. All of which gets sent back to the manufacturer. Screw them. :twisted:

[mookie123]

Not quite what you were looking for, but that closest I've seen:

http://www.pogoproducts.com/direct_record.html

I read it somewhere (slashdot i think) that company is not quite legit. They have been announcing several beyond amazing product, take money and the product is never heard of again.

[szymon]

What exactly do you mean by copy - protected CDs? AFAIK there is no way to copy protect a cd.
Are you talking about this joke by Sony "will not play in a PC or Mac"?
I've just got a cd with this sign as a present. It just needs the outer ,5 cm of the disc surface to be covered by a black marker and then it plays. Even is recognized by CDDB :-)

Best,
Szymon

[Janak Parekh]

I've just got a cd with this sign as a present. It just needs the outer ,5 cm of the disc surface to be covered by a black marker and then it plays. Even is recognized by CDDB :-)
Of course, (a) why should you have to do this?; and (b) you're assuming that more foolproof technologies won't develop.

--bdj

[DanNotDan]

These days I download most of my music legally from emusic.com, which is a subscription service. When I do buy CDs, the first thing I do is rip them so that I can listen to them in my car. To me this seems a legitimate use of the CD I have paid for. I don't do filesharing much because of security concerns, and when I do it is just for one song--if I want the entire album I will generally pay for it (and getting that free song really does make me more likely to do so). More often then not, if I listen to the actual CD it is on my computer. So a copy-protected CD, the way it has been described, would be completely useless to me no matter how much I like the songs. I can't belive that people who work this way are such a small portion of the market that we can be disposed of in the interest of piracy controls. And just an aside, off-topic even for this off-topic thread, how does the RIAA get off charging Internet radio broadcasters per song? FM radio broadcasters aren't charged this way and people have been able to record a cassette from the radio for a long, long time.

[Take1]

Copy protect CDs and guess what? People will simply be forced to go to Kazaa to download the album in .mp3 format so they can listen to the music they BOUGHT on CD on their iPAQ, NR-70, Rio, whatever....

How much money will Pressplay and the other 'rent music by the month' schemes lose before the RIAA decides to call an end to their pathetic attempt at online music? Get the folks at Audiogalaxy adapt a pay per download function to their filesharing engine and let the consumers make them money that they are currently losing to Kazaa.

[ThomasC22]

Copy protect CDs and guess what? People will simply be forced to go to Kazaa to download the album in .mp3 format so they can listen to the music they BOUGHT on CD on their iPAQ, NR-70, Rio, whatever....


Well, I think the point is that if the CD is copy protected no one will be able to rip it and put it on Kazaa, WinMX, et al(and yes, I realize how unrealistic this is right now). I really don't think the recording industry minds copying as much as they mind digital copying.

By forcing you to make an analog copy they can maintain an advantage and still get you to buy CDs so while it will always be possible to use Sound Recorder to get the song you won't be getting the same level of quality.

[Janak Parekh]

By forcing you to make an analog copy they can maintain an advantage and still get you to buy CDs so while it will always be possible to use Sound Recorder to get the song you won't be getting the same level of quality.
Except you can get nearly the same quality given good equipment. The sad irony is, DRM and related technologies won't control the most egregious forms of privacy until they have end-to-end security (e.g., secure computer, secure OS, secure speakers), and that won't be accomplished without rendering moot our ability to do many different things we now can do with our computers (such as installing or reinstalling various OS's, formatting the hard drive, etc.).

--bdj

[ThomasC22]

Except you can get nearly the same quality given good equipment. The sad irony is, DRM and related technologies won't control the most egregious forms of privacy until they have end-to-end security (e.g., secure computer, secure OS, secure speakers), and that won't be accomplished without rendering moot our ability to do many different things we now can do with our computers (such as installing or reinstalling various OS's, formatting the hard drive, etc.).


Well, this is where I think people consider Microsoft to be a lot more powerful than they actually are. True the recording industry would like MS to force digital media protection on the consumer by putting it in Windows and not allowing it to be taken out...but at the same time it's just that kind of dramatic move that could really drive consumers to Apple, Linux, et al.