Sony Music Testing New Copy Protection

RandyOo writes "According to this Reuters article, Sony Music is about to start testing a new type of 'copy protection' in Germany. It looks like they'll be releasing multi-sessioned discs with normal audio in the first session, and compressed, DRM'ed music files in the second session, as well added 'extras', including access to exclusive online content. The article explains that the disc's audio can still be copied, and there's a hilarious quote at the end by a BMG spokesman: "All copy-protections can be hacked, but if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer." "

so now what,

do we get to see iso's of cds on kazaa instead of mp3s?

Re:so now what,

Joe Teenager is a leech.

Joe lines up 20 ISOs for download and goes to bed. He is not worried if they take a day or two to download. He thinks nothing of downloading a 1.5Gb movie screener. He has a 24/7 connection and bandwidth to spare.

Joe also knows that only real men download ISOs.

Joe is your typical leech.

Re:so now what,

Then again, I don't think music files can be compressed easily.

Music can be losslessly compressed to about 1/2 of the original size on average, depending on the source material. There's a slight difference in size and speed when using FLAC vs. Shorten vs. Monkey's Audio, but nothing too significant. But most people are going to stick with the 10:1 compression offered by mp3 and vorbis since few care about the additional quality offered by an exact copy of the original.

Hilarious?

Why is that hilarious? Isn't that what you proponents of file-sharing and digital music have been clamoring for? to be trusted not to steal?

Re:Hilarious?

Because they aren't trusting us. They're putting DRMed files with untrusting restrictions on and hoping we'll use their software to use those files, accepting the restrictions, out of ignorance.

If they trusted us, they'd just print up CDs as usual and assume we wouldn't steal them.

I guess they're "trusting" that the ordinary consumer can't program his VCR, let alone evade a simple scheme, but that isn't the sense of trust that one wants.

Re:Hilarious?

If they trusted us, they'd just print up CDs as usual and assume we wouldn't steal them.

Trust has to be earned.

Judging by the vast amount of MP3's available on Kazaa, I see no reason why they shouldn't trust people who have shown time and time again that they'll happily make copyrighted material available to everyone for free.

Re:Hilarious?

Trust has to be earned.

So why didn't I earn that trust when I went out and bought the CD, rather than grabbing it off Kazaa?

I'm the guy actually buying music, and 99% of the time, I'm not the guy who then goes and puts it on Kazaa. And if I was, a little thing like DRM isn't going to stop me.

You might as well trust and give good service to people who have demonstrated that they are legitimate customers.

Re: Hilarious?

> Trust has to be earned.

> Judging by the vast amount of MP3's available on Kazaa, I see no reason why they shouldn't trust people who have shown time and time again that they'll happily make copyrighted material available to everyone for free.

You missed the other half of the formula, "if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value".

Your cynicism may be justified, but the full formula hasn't been tested for about a generation now. (I refer not just to the subjective quality of the music, but also to the price of the media. CDs' steep pricing was originally justified on the basis that they were retooling the industry and the output was limited, but curiously the prices never did come down. Except of course among counterfeiters, who can sell them for $1/disc and still make a killing.)

The other half of the formula

Well, Sony isn't testing the full formula either.

As you correctly point out, there is a problem in that current pricing has no link to the cost of production (which has dropped dramatically). Piracy happens when the product pricing motivates pirates.

Sony can either try and add value to justify the pricing, or they can fight a losing DRM battle. Unfortunately, most of the "value added" is just a workaound to the losing DRM battle. I see no need to pay them just to work around a problem they created in the first place. I can solve the technical problem without Sony's help.

At a price of $1/song or $2/disc, piracy would be a waste of time, and the product could still be profitable. At some price higher than that, piracy would be tolerable and the product would be more profitable. Then we have today's prices -- the pirates are in the driver's seat.

Re: Hilarious?

If CD prices dropped past the $10 range (to only 1000% of the break even point) there is far less economic reason to download an album. Hmm, let's see, spend 1 hour working, make $8. Spend 1 hour finding all the tracks of the same quality, testing,them, organizing them, and burning them. If a CD costs less than that $8, there isn't too much question about how I should spend my time (and money).

If CD's drop below that special price point for their main customers, they will be as 'free' as the stuff one can download.

Remember folks, the whole equation is over T.

You're missing the point.

people who -buy- CDs are not their problem. Never have been. People who no longer buy CDs, but download all their music online -are-. But these people are -not- buying CDs, so how will DRM stop them?

Ripping a CD to any desired format for use in a personal mp3 player, or on the computer or for any other purpose is clearly covered under fair use. There's no reason someone who purchases a CD should be additionally limited by some hackneyed copyright scheme.

All the RIAA is trying to do, is make someone click 'ok' to some licensing terms when they copy music from a CD, so that when their watermarked copy shows up online, they don't even have to -prove- that it ever got traded, or even got traded outside fair use guidelines. its mere existence is proof of guilt. (lower legal burden of proof)

no copy protection scheme will ever stop hackers, and they know this - but they're trying to leverage an inconvenience against all their -paying-customers- to try to make life easier for themselves in punishing the few criminals.

it is however, a self-fulfilling prophecy for the labels. the more they sue customers, the more they illegally fix prices, the more they monopolize all methods of distribution and cripple their primary product -- the more customers they'll lose.

they of course will only interpret this as being 'due to filesharing', and in a sense they're right. but to be complete, it's due to their -response- to filesharing.

beyond all that, there has never been any data to prove that downloaded material online represents lost sales. CD sales rate fell well within the bounds of every other industry who has been taking a hit in the economy -- and only knocked sales Ffrom their -all-time-high- in 2000. (pre bubble bursting, post napster)

the RIAA is simply fighting to maintain their distribution monopoly. they aren't worried about losing customers - because if they win, you'll have no choice if you want music (as now). but if they lose - they'll cease to exist.

Re:Hilarious?

If they trusted us, they'd just print up CDs as usual and assume we wouldn't steal them.

This is a bit callous. The fact of the matter is that Lots of People(tm) pirate music and the music industry wants to stop it. This is the first sign that they are listening to consumers and their advocates. Instead of relying on just DRM (lest we forget CSS?) they recognise that its use is limited and they are offering consumers more bang for their buck.

Look at DVDs. I'm speaking only for myself but I would be far less interested in downloading a DiVX rip of a movie than a MP3 of a song. The fact of the matter is that more is lost in the translation of the DVD; I don't get surround sound and I don't get extras or outtakes.

I'm glad Sony is taking this tact; it's far nicer than dragging 12 year olds into court.

Re:Hilarious?

You assume that Sony is stupid. They know that you can get around this by going to the first session of the disk and ripping (see the quote). However to the bulk majority of people the DRMed files are acceptable.

You've almost hit I what I suspect is Sony's plan.

They know that, aside from piracy, there are good reasons to have copies of music on a PC, notably ease and convenience of use -- with music on a PC, I don't have to change CDs, I can play tracks from multiple CDs in one playlist, etc.

By including a version of the music that's already in a convenient PC format, they hope that users won't even bother to rip the normal tracks (and maybe they'll have made that harder to do, to, by including munged tables of contents or whatever).

Once enough people have swallowed this new format -- say in five years --, they'll point out that for many users, the audio-CD portion is redundant. So they'll come out with "Bonus" CDs that contain twice as much music, for the same cost as a regular CD, omitting the audio tracks in order to have the space for the bonus DRM'd tracks.

Once that's been swallowed, they'll start producing "CD"s that contain only DRM'd tracks, probably validated by phoning home to a central server, possibly with mandatory registration.

At that point, Sony will hope they've stamped out file sharng, and will raise their prices.

Now I don't do file sharing (at this point I used to plug emusic.com, but no longer), but I do want to ensure that ay music I buy is convertable to MP3, as I have hardware that only plays MP3s, andvcan't play DRM'd music.

For the moment, Sony's hybrid CDs will probably work for me, but if they go to full DRM, dropping audio tracks, it will be a problem for me. (And, no, I won't upgrade to a DRM capable player, as I assume that it wouldn't be open source.)

Re:Hilarious quote?

Who modded parent up insightfull?!

The parent-post and replies to it completely miss the irony of putting copy right protection on a disc and then claiming to be 'trusting the consumer'.

This is the kind of 'trust' I give to my three year old kid!

Unfortunatly, to 'the bottle-is-half-empty' me, the sadness of the statement overshadows the funny aspect. Others may well perceive the text to be hilarious though...

Sheesh people, wake up...

how can they ever stop it?

how can they ever stop people copying music? even if , at the worst case, it has to be take out as an analogue signal and re-digitised, who really cares? the people making millions (billions?) selling fake cds are going to invest in the equipment to do it. it's these people - largely mafia types - the industry should be worried about (something like 1 in 3 cds is fake) rather than a student copying a cd .

Re:how can they ever stop it?

it's these people - largely mafia types - the industry should be worried about (something like 1 in 3 cds is fake) rather than a student copying a cd

Some people, and even some organisations, are capable of being worried about more than one thing at once - and even as they try and deal with one situation, they also try and deal with others. The pirates are a known problem which doesn't change people's buying habits that much - Napster and Kazaa on the other hand are new for these companies - and they're right to be worried. With codecs improving and broadband access increasing, it's really not hard to obtain an even better selection than the big music stores have, and at a cheaper price.

In the past it was easy enough to copy from the radio - if you wanted to listen long enough and be taping all the time just in case the song you wanted came on. It was easy enough to copy a CD that a friend already had - but harder to search for anything and everything. There's also the matter of convenience - it used to be more convenient to go to a store and browse shelves of music than hunt around amongst your friends for the song you wanted. Even putting price aside, it's now easier to download off the net than to search in a store. Get a good enough codec at a high enough bitrate, and the stores have nothing to offer:

* not cheaper
* not more convenient
* not sufficiently higher quality

As for how - well, laws of course. They work well enough for other things - underground markets don't hurt the established providers anywhere near as much as legal and better alternatives.

Place your bets!

So, what's gonna crack it this time? Green felt tip pen? Rubbing a small kitten on the disc? Looking at it funny? Placing sliced cheese on it?

Dumb software drive

Here's a project for the EEs among you. How about replacing the controller on an IDE drive with an utterly stupid device that is driven entirely through software? The load on the CPU would be somewhat ridiculous as CD-ROMs and audio drives do quite a bit of error correction and so forth. But this drive could not be fooled by anything they do to a CD. These copy protection schemes all hinge on interfering with assumptions that CD-ROM engineers have made. This is not a new idea. In the eighties, there were hardware modifications for diskette drives that basically made them software controlled devices.

Re:Place your bets!

So, what's gonna crack it this time? .... Rubbing a small kitten on the disc?

Not gonna work, dude. Slashdotters have already killed so many kittens.

Re:Not new..

i've got a couple of 'em lately, they apparently won't work on Macs (according to the blurb on the back) but funnily enough do work without any problems whatsoever. odd!

Will it play on my discman?

I've stopped buying copy-protected CD's since none of them plays properly on my discman. As soon as they manage to come up with a form of protection that won't keep me from actually playing my legally bought CD, I might reconsider my boycott...

Hilarious QUote?

Why is that quote hilarious? Isn't that what we've been saying here all along? If you're waiting for the music companies to start saying that music swapping is just fine and they really don't mind, then you obviously don't understand the situation. There will be some form of DRM, period. This may be one solution. Apple has another solution. The market will decide what works, but you should realize that sooner or later, some form of reasonable DRM will come in to play.

If they really trusted the consumer...

If they really trusted the consumer, wouldn't they forget about the copy prevention and the DRM stuff?

I just don't get it. Large scale-piracy outfits have access to large commercial presses, hence their being able to put out CDs that look just like the real thing. They sure as hell don't use burners, so all this copy protection is useless in combatting large-scale organised piracy. So, the only people that these new copy prevention and DRM techniques inconvenience are the consumers.

Tell me again how Sony is showing trust in the consumer?

Seems like a fair system

I expect that the logic behind this is simple - the average consumer will simply use the DRM music on their computer instead of ripping the audio files (which is more complex), and this DRM music will not be sharable, hence the real issue, music sharing, will be cut down.

However, it only needs something along the lines of

1) relying on a custom music playing application (windows only)
2) relying on Windows Media Player (ugliest nastiest application ever)

to make the whole system pointless.

But it is a step in the right direction of not messing with the audio on the CD, adding more value to the CD, and yet trying to maintain the rights of the copyright holder without messing with the rights of the consumer.

Trusting the customer

It's a sad sad day when a record company executive can (even if in jest) refer to "trusting the customer" as a novelty. I'd boycott it for this cavalier attitude alone. However, as I have not purchased any new cd's in over 5 years, it's a non issue for me. Further, instead of "trusing the customer" on the DRM front, I think executives should be focusing on pumping quality out of the artists they sign. To paraphrase his quote, "If you give people what they want in terms of value," you'd five them music they actually wanted to hear instead of two or three singles on a cd chock full of crap.

Better article on The Register

The Register also have an article [theregister.co.uk] today on the subject.

According to the article in The Register, the old discs where unpopular with consumers because they could not be played on PCs, or riped to portable music players.

The new discs will have a second session, containing encrypted audio data, that can be played on a PC, using Sony's software (On supported platforms, non lintel users need not apply). The audio can also be copied to a portable music player, but only sony players are supported.

In conclusion, I would say that while sony have listened to consumer complaints about their last copy protected disc, their solution is hardly any better. Even John Q Public will see these new discs as no better than the old ones if he owns another brand of portable music player.

still not worth it to me

I have become more accustomed to spending $2 or $3 on the 2-3 tracks I like via iTunes, and getting a superior-quality AAC sound file that I can convert to a high quality MP3.

Spending $14-18 on a CD-ROM (no longer an Audio CD) that has CD Audio, low-quality WMA files, links to low-info "exclusive" websites, and tiny music video files, just isn't worth it.

hellooooo

If they used the millions that they spend to research this "copy protection" on finding good artists and not the same junk they've been putting out for the last 10 years, then maybe they could start trusting the consumer to purchase their products.

what we are asking for in terms of value....

Cannot be fixed by adding useless crap to the CD's. Make the CD's cost less. Piracy will always exist and always had, it just wasn't quantifiable before the Internet.

Back to vinyl Album Lengths?

These multi-session discs with DRM-enabled content, videos, etc has got to be taking a toll on the actualt minutes of music you get on a disc. Or is it possible to downsample CD audio files to free up some room? Even without the protection issues, I think these "Extras" like videos aren't worth less music or lower-quality audio.

What's pathetic is the DVD and CD prices differences of like releases. Take Rush for example with their latest "Rush In Rio" live releases. 3-CD set and 2-DVD set are roughly the same price, even though the DVD set gives you a documentary, Dolby Digital audio, etc.

And this will work how?

OK, I'll bite...

How will this prevent CD copying? Where's the real extra value in the "compressed" (which I read as lossy) DRM'd content? Oh, I get to go to an "exclusive" website with extra content. Whoopee. If I have the CD, I'm ripping tracks in an unprotected format regardless of whether there are already pre-ripped tracks available. Why would I want to copy DRM'd material to my machine?

Seems to me that by having a multisession CD, that means there will be less unprotected music since it takes up a majority of space. Unless, of course, there is plenty of unused space on today's recordings. I wouldn't know, I haven't bought a "major label" CD in years. Last CD I bought was from a local performer, bought right from the guy after he played a club one night (got it autographed too...another perk in supporting local talent.)

I don't know maybe I'm one of the unwashed, but this makes no sense to me. I agree with the other poster that said "just make a regular CD" and I'll add "and price it reasonably" and we will come.

Nice quote, but....

"All copy-protections can be hacked, but if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer."

His heart is in the right place, but he really has to move away from RIAA word abuse. "Stealing" is something that has never been involved in the issue of copy protection, the p2p issue, etc.

Will it work on my system, though?

Audio systems have got more complicated these days, with many able to read ISO-9660 formatted discs.

My DVD stereo system can handle MP3 and WMA CDs as well as Audio CDs, DVD-Video and DVD-Audio (and some other image related formats as well).

The odds on such a system not playing back the audio tracks and instead playing back the WMA content may be quite high!

Clever

This is actually a rather clever move. You see, Average Joe is going to put the CD in his computer and copy off the prepackaged music files, cos it's easy.

They're going to work fine on his computer, and he runs Kazaa so they are made available over Kazaa too. Problem is, others won't be able to play them after they download them from him. However, I wonder if Joe cares. The only thing Joe will be upset about is not being able to play music he downloads from others who are simply copying DRM files from similarly packaged music. But I somehow doubt Joe will make the connection between the files copied off the CD in this manner and the problem he's getting when he downloads random track X from Y.

Re:Clever

They're going to work fine on his computer, and he runs Kazaa so they are made available over Kazaa too. Problem is, others won't be able to play them after they download them from him. However, I wonder if Joe cares. The only thing Joe will be upset about is not being able to play music he downloads from others who are simply copying DRM files from similarly packaged music. But I somehow doubt Joe will make the connection between the files copied off the CD in this manner and the problem he's getting when he downloads random track X from Y.

This could actually have a very pleasant side effect working in favor of the free world, if those files contain DRM (which they most certainly do)...

The collective thought process of the file sharing world will become: ".WMA files are broken, .MP3 files will play."

I don't know about you, but I'd be happy to see DRM and WMA become hated among non-technical users. It would be great to see the user community truly revolt against closed technology for the same reason us open source geeks do.

I like Apple's drm approach

I hate drm with a passion.

But Apple at least lets you transfer drm rights from one computer to another. THe tracks are yours as long as you own a system. And you can use 3 devices and systems at once. This means a friend or two can hear and decide if the file is worth buying.

Face it guys. Pirating is stealing. Yes I like downloading music but it costs serious bucks to make an album.

I hope Sony will do something similiar or just use the Advanced AUdio Codec that Itunes uses. Great sound quality.

how is this hilarious?

The article explains that the disc's audio can still be copied, and there's a hilarious quote at the end by a BMG spokesman: "All copy-protections can be hacked, but if (we) give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer."

isn't this exactly the way we would prefer the music companies to respond? i mean, we all know that there is in fact no way they can lock us out of copying current cd technology, so as opposed to spending lots of money on the problem, why not accept it and just move on? oh yeah, and give the consumer pre-ripped digital copies of the music as well. sure, it's DRM protected and we don't like that, but BIG F!@#in DEAL! they haven't actually tried to protect the CDDA tracks, so you can just rip with your encoder of choice.

so what's the problem? why is this hilarious? is it that they actually trust us for a change? is it funny because we can't be trusted not to steal their music? it seems to me like somebody at BMG finally "gets it".

Yet another reason to buy a Mac or run Linux?

It seems, from a cursory examination, that this "copy protection" scheme relies on a behavior of Wintel PCs -- specifically, when there are multiple sessions on an audio CD, the data session gets mounted instead of the Red Book audio session.

It seems that any computer running Linux would be able to bypass this scheme easily enough, simply by force-mounting the appropriate (music) session and ripping from it. And on a Mac, multi-session CDs mount all sessions as separate disk images, so the user should be able to rip to MP3 or AAC from within iTunes. So unless the record label does something to break these CDs on Mac OS X and/or Linux, they should rip and play just fine on those platforms.

File Sharing in Action

I like this folk artist named Peter Mayer [petermayer.net]. My wife and i saw him perform live and wanted to buy his CDs but didn't have any cash on us so we went home and resolved to buy them on-line [visi.com]. One thing leads to another and we're busy and we forget.

A few months later i'm goofing around and i search for him on Amazon [amazon.com]. I am surprised to find such a "small" artist on a mainstream site, but happy to see that he has some free [amazon.com] downloads [amazon.com]! (Don't ask me why there are two separate pages for "all free song downloads by Peter Mayer.")

I download the songs and spend a few days enjoying them. I copy them for my wife and for a few friends, then decide i really do want to support this guy. So i go to his label's site, Peppermint Records [peppermintcds.com] order his stuff (No money for Amazon today!) and check out some other artists while i'm there. Some sound good, but Anne Heaton [peppermintcds.com] really impresses me [peppermintcds.com]. Amazon has some downloads [amazon.com] for her too. Turns out i'm crazy for one song and not so hot on the others so i don't order but i enjoy (and share) the mp3 and vow to check her out live if i get the chance and to look out for any new CDs she makes.

At the same time, my friends are doing the same thing because of the stuff i shared with them. They've bought several of Peter's CDs and some of them thought Anne's was worth the investment too. We were all being responsible and trading publicly available stuff, but when my CDs arrive i'll be ripping them to listen via WinAmp and if the occasion arises, i won't hesitate to give a few out.

I didn't have to buy anything, nor did my friends. I've got what amounts to a nearly complete album of Peter Mayer's Greatest Hits on my hard drive, but i know that if i don't send some cash his way, he'll have to go get a real job and i won't be hearing any more of his thoughtful, beautiful songs.

So is this post for or against file sharing? On the one hand, i didn't engage in any Napster-scale swapping. On the other hand, if Peppermint put some DRM crap on their CDs that made it a hassle for me to rip them i probably wouldn't buy them as a protest.

I think the RIAA doesn't take people like me into account. Most of what made me buy Peter's CDs was the music, but a part of it was my desire to support an independant label and artist. The only major-label CD i've bought lately was the Dixie Chicks. I like their music, but i was content to hear it on the radio on those infrequent occasions when i turn off NPR. I bought their CD to counteract some of the crap [holyobserver.com] they were getting for exercising their first amendment rights.

I'm using my cash to reward those whose products and policies i like and withholding it from those i don't like. Maybe the RIAA doesn't have to take people like me into account. Maybe i'm just an insignificant statistical blip to them, but i'm talking to my friends and family about this stuff and some of them are doing the same thing, so maybe that blip will become significant if they don't change their ways.