Lawsuit Challenges Copy-protected CDs 341
acer123 writes "An article states that '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.'"
Now where have we seen this before? (Score:4, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/15/02502
Re:How to join? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How to join? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm not sure about this lawsuit in particular, but I do know that other firms are planning class action suits as well.
If you would like to join an upcoming class-action, here is some useful information for you (from Check Heffner).
"Larry Feldman of the law firm Feldman & Rifkin (www.leflaw.net [leflaw.net]) is in the process of filing a class-action lawsuit against the major 5 record labels - Sony, BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner Brothers. Please write Larry directly at leflaw@leflaw.com
Larry is looking for the problems you have had with a suspected corrupt CD. Please include this information if you write him:
1. Your name and contact e-mail address
2. Your city and state
3. The CD artist and album name
4. Where you bought the CD (store name, city and state)
5. Your CD experience. Were you able to copy your CD to MP3 or another CD? What software did you use? The more details you can share about your corrupt CD, the better.
Larry will contact you about your report."
Re:Unlawful? (Score:3, Informative)
they promised not to copy-protect CDs in exchange for a "royalty" on blank CD media.
This is not entirely correct. The royalty applies only to blank audio and video tapes. It does not apply to blank CD-Rs sold in the USA. Canada, however, does impose a tax on CD-R media.
Keep your Copyright (Score:2, Informative)
However the page discusses 'ethical' businesses and makes some interesting points.
Oh yes, if you're not familiar with King Crimson, go out and buy some right now!
Re:my own way around it (Score:3, Informative)
16 bits stereo PCM (often refered as WAV but that's inaccurate) is a digital copy! You can add "exact copy" if the ECC on the disk worked well.
Now, ripping from your stereo's CD may be a good idea if you can get the fiber output and plug it into your soundcard (many soundcards have fiber output, some must have fiber input too). If you copy from the jack output then you'll have a SNR of ~60-70dB (check the noise level with Soundforge!) whereas CD players give >90dB!!
(Difference will be noticeable at high volume, maybe not that important for your car or for a portable player)
Ripping from FM radio is a very BAD idea: the sampling rate is limited to 19kHz (the carrier that separates the Right+Left and the Right-Left (that's 'plus' and 'minus') channels is located 19kHz above the tuning frequency IIRC)
(You can add a crappy SNR on top of that)
Same idea for TV, don't do it
Re:Who is this Sherman fella? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RIAA Pres did make one valid point (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? Excuse me? What Slashdot have you been reading? People bitch all the time about CSS and Macrovision. Or did you miss all the fun stuff happening about DeCSS [slashdot.org]? Or maybe the story about how the Harry Potter DVD won't be Macrovision protected [slashdot.org]? The resulting discussion talked about loads of ways to get around Macrovision, as well as many people complaining about how Macrovision lowers the quality of the video.
I'll complain about video games using copy protection too - I could barely play my copy of Black and White since for whatever reason the copy protection would take a full five minutes to finally get around to deciding my legally purchased CD-ROM was valid. And then, since this is in the pre-patched days, it would start up, and then crash as soon as I tried to actually play the game.
I'd really much prefer video game manufactorer's don't use CD-based copy protection schemes. I'd like to be able to make backup copies of their CDs without shelling out money for CloneCD. I don't mind registration keys; they work fairly well and they allow people to just play the game without worrying about their hardware being unable to play the game due to some bogus copy protection.
I hate having to root around for the CD to a game that allows all the data to be stored on the harddrive just so it verifies I'm not using a stolen copy. It's a waste of my time and it suggests that they expect me to be a thief - not good customer relations, really.
Being a mostly-Windows 2000 user (although I do run Linux on my server and have my desktop set up to dual boot into Debian Linux), I really don't mind CSS since it doesn't effect my ability to watch movies on my computer. Since I'm an American and region encoding usually works out so that people in Region 1 get the DVD first and imported DVDs are usually more exprensive, I don't really care personally about the region issue - but I can understand why others might hate region encoding with a passion.
In other words, yes, people bitch about movies and computer games being copy protected.
Re:I would like to know ... (Score:2, Informative)
I seem to recall seeing this issue (from Philips' standpoint) on
Re:I would like to know ... (Score:2, Informative)