Universal Releasing Copy Protected CDs In The U.S.
from the here-come-the-big-guys dept
Universal, who says that all of their new music releases by mid-2002 will have copy protection included, is starting this week with a followup soundtrack to "Fast & Furius". They claim that owners of the CD won't be able to make MP3s out of the music, and also warn that it won't play on Macintosh machines, DVD players or game consoles. Isn't it nice that they're now releasing music that won't work for a percentage of their customers? I won't go into the same tired arguments as to why this is a dangerously short-sighted move by the recording industry because we've been screaming it for a while and it's not doing any good. All I know is that it's moves like these that will actually make me buy less music. The fact that I can't record any CD I buy to my computer makes the music worth significantly less to me. It seems like an odd strategy to encourage your customers to buy less...
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I guess I won't buy them, then
I guess now that I won't be able to play Universal audio CDs on my stereo, there is no point in my ever buying Universal audio CD's ever again.
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Re: I guess I won't buy them, then
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This could only get better
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Re: This could only get better
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A lot of it is crap anyhow
I am buying more and more music on-line and am downloading it to disk. Then I make my own CD's. No shopping at music stores and being forced to listen to kiddy pop.
The traditional recording industy is going to find themselves "irrelevent" sooner or later.
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Re: A lot of it is crap anyhow
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Re: A lot of it is crap anyhow
I was thinking of that.
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Re: A lot of it is crap anyhow
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Re: A lot of it is crap anyhow
The next problem is that you need to tell where each track ends. You can detect the gaps with a program like "gramofile" (I'd link to it, but I'm too lazy.. search sourceforge if you really want it). Not 100% perfect, but I've ripped tapes with it and it does a pretty good job. Unless they start to record CD's with no gap between songs.
The real kicker for me is that you can't do an automatic CDDB lookup and have it name all the tracks for you. Typing them all in manually is a total pain in the ass.. Looking up the disk by title is marginally better, but if no CD drive can read it it's not going to get into CDDB in the first place.
Copy-protected CD's are for all practical purposes "factory pre-scratched". Buy a CD that's damaged to the point of being only-just-playable in most equipment? sure..
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Do they really want to stop pirates?
Phillip.
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Re: Do they really want to stop pirates?
The problem lies with the *average* music consumers. They are lazy and this is what they get - same with TV - someone else tells them what to like. I doubt if the majority of CD buyers know (or care) what a copy-protected CD means.
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