Fighting Music Piracy with Glue 610
Scott Granneman writes: "The New York Times (Free Blah-di-blah) is reporting that Epic Records, in an effort to prevent reviewers from creating mp3s or even playing the preview CD in anything they don't control, is not disseminating the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos CDs inside Sony Walkman players that are glued shut. Oh yeah ... the headphones are glued to the players too, to prevent any authorized output. A low-tech answer to a high-tech issue."
From the article (Score:5, Funny)
So, they can't even use glue properly, its not wonder everything else has failed.
Re:From the article (Score:3)
As long as it didnt' get on the CD I guess.
Re:From the article (Score:2, Funny)
Seriously (no really!) though, isn't this a textbook example of a DMCA violation? Isn't this just what that law was written for? How come this menace of a reviewer is still walking the streets?
When I said they could stick their CDs, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From the article (Score:5, Funny)
If anyone asks, I'm not human. But I think my coworkers already knew that.
Ed. (Score:5, Informative)
"The New York Times (Free Blah-di-blah) is reporting that Epic Records, in an effort to prevent reviewers from creating mp3s or even playing the preview CD in anything they don't control, is now disseminating the new Pearl Jam and Tori Amos CDs inside Sony Walkman players that are glued shut. Oh yeah
Re:Ed. (Score:5, Funny)
*Delete as applicable
Re:Ed. (Score:4, Funny)
nothing new (Score:2, Funny)
Not that it matters, though, as I've had 7 tracks from Scarlet's Walk for well over two months now...
Re:nothing new (Score:2, Informative)
Re:nothing new (Score:3, Funny)
Reviewer: I didn't want to meet Tori Amos.
a tad too carried away... (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe I'm missing the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that why they do it?
not new... (Score:2, Informative)
if i recall correctly, emi distributed walkmans with copies of Radiohead's OK Computer album glued into them, back in 1997. and i belive this was by no means the first time the idea had been used.
the cost of several hundred (or even thousand) cheap cd walkmans is hardly going to eat into a multinational record companies bottom line.
Re:not new... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:not new... (Score:2)
I wonder what they did with LPs ?
Roll up, roll up ... (Score:2)
the headphones are glued to the players too, to prevent any authorized output
Why not cut the headphone lead and solder a suitable connector onto the Walkman end?
Re:Roll up, roll up ... (Score:2)
The NY times story doesn't mention, if Epic wants the deivces back, so my comment is just wild guessing.
Bye egghat.
Wire cutting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wire cutting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wire cutting (Score:3, Informative)
Uhm, generally you don't return promo copies of CDs. That's why can almost always find them (marked "NOT FOR RESALE") at your favorite used CD store. (Not the national chains, who often won't buy them, but at smaller local stores).
I doubt they'd make them return a CD player that had been glue shut, either. What good would it be to Sony if you can't even get it open? It would just be a lot of work for the reviewers and the label.
Re:Wire cutting (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course sanity and media companies are rarely found together
Re:Wire cutting (Score:3, Insightful)
Why just cut the wires? (Score:5, Funny)
2. Remove CD. Rip, mix, burn.
3. Replace CD in player.
4. Back over player and headphones with your car.
5. Return electronic crumbs to Epic Records in plastic bag, claiming you "dropped it".
Problem solved...
Even Better (Score:3, Funny)
4. Write review about PJ's new stuff being really "mellow".
5. Return CD player to company.
It'd take them months to connect the review to the player. The look on their faces, as they opened the player, would be classic.
Re:Wire cutting (Score:5, Funny)
Thus making wire cutters illegal under the DMCA
Re:Wire cutting (Score:5, Funny)
I always use my teeth to strim wires - are they illegal too?
Re:Wire cutting (Score:2, Funny)
Only, your mouth is already illegal since you can speak copyrighted IP outloud.
We'll expect you to say goodbye to your loved ones and turn yourself in immediately.
Re:Wire cutting (Score:3, Funny)
In fact the act of strimming wires has been illegal for years -- regardless of what body part you use to do it.
You pervert.
Re:Wire cutting (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't even need to cut the wires. You can just put a coil around the earpieces or the wires leading to the earpieces and pick up the content inductively. Most journalists won't know that, but it only takes one leak :-)
Other ideas to ensure they're not distributed (Score:5, Funny)
Pay Tori to personally visit each reviewer with a guitar and play her songs.
Distribute the songs in Ogg Vorbis format. (rimshot)
Re:Other ideas to ensure they're not distributed (Score:2, Informative)
mmmh... maybe you haven't thought about this, but Tori plays the piano, _not_ the guitar! It would be quite funny seeing her carrying around a whole piano though...
Re:Other ideas to ensure they're not distributed (Score:5, Funny)
Better idea: she uses a different instrument for each reviewer. That way, when a ripped off mp3 appears of her playing her new album accompanied by a trombone you can figure out which reviewer leaked the song.
(Don't ask me how Tori Amos plays a trombone and sings at the same time - I'm an ideas man).
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
And of course the headphones... (Score:5, Funny)
low-tech could work ... (Score:2)
Not having read the linked article, in pure /. tradition ...
Make the players pretty colors, with about 400 slightly different models to compare and collect. Make them super cheap and flimsy; it's not like your going use one of them anywhere near as much as a general purpose player.
And best of all, just use a crippled format or something. Tech support problems solved! "Um, sir, you're not allowed to open it up and put the CD in your computer ...
Environment (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't think a Sting preview will be released this way.
Are there plans to reuse or recycle the returned CD walkmans?
Re:Environment (Score:2)
So don't review it (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably other artists' CDs are put through the reviewers' own systems, set up the way they like them. Just say a fair comparison is impossible without putting these new CDs through that same system.
Of course, if you're feeling vindictive, you could always slate them instead...
Cheers,
Ian
Nothing really matters.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't help but wonder if the publicity around the stunt won't generate more press than the releases alone, after all, they just successfully told half a million slashdot readers that there's a new Tori Amos and Pearl Jam album coming out.
Re:Nothing really matters.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The second album, on the other hand, is done under pressure and under contract, and usually written a lot faster.
Re:So don't review it (Score:3, Insightful)
Record companies are filled with drooling fuckwits.
tinny sound (Score:2, Informative)
How can a music reviewer be expected to give a favourable review solely by listening to the said CDs on a Walkman?
All the Walkmans I've owned have given the music a really tinny sound - even the supposedly decent quality ones.
Even if they hooked up the output to a proper speakers, they still probably wouldn't get the quality you would get from a good stereo set up - which these guys would be used to.
This idea should be taken to it's logical end ... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of Nintendo's tactics... (Score:5, Interesting)
Glue... shmoo (Score:2, Interesting)
They've done pretty well here though. How many of you vague Tori Amos fans knew she had a new album out before this article?
Hammer = Copyright Circumvention Device = Banned (Score:5, Funny)
Gravity (Score:5, Funny)
This is not realistically a DMCA issue... (Score:5, Insightful)
The DMCA is a bad law, and I know you guys are half joking, but blowing it out of proportion like this I think does our cause disservice. Actually understanding what it makes illegal, and being able to hold intelligent conversations about it's implications -- that's what helps us.
Not the first time this has been done. (Score:5, Informative)
More info: http://www.followmearound.com/press/083.html [followmearound.com]
Re:Not the first time this has been done. (Score:2)
Re:Not the first time this has been done. (Score:4, Funny)
self destruct mechanism (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the stupidest thing I ever heard... (Score:2, Informative)
Reviewing these CDs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't that just strike people as being stupid? How will they get a subjective review of the audio quality? Are the music companies trying to hide poor audio quality from the reviewers by making them review the music through sub-optimal equipment?
This is just a sad example of how paranoid the music companies have become...
Re:Reviewing these CDs... (Score:2)
Monopoly companies stopped worrying about this twenty years ago.
This is an extremely dumb idea obviously; the smarter (though not by much) companies are putting on special listening rooms for journalists to come and sit in to previw new recordings.
Probably, all monopoly companys are going to get themselvs "screening rooms" so that they can control who has access to what before its released.
Re:Reviewing these CDs... (Score:2)
Seriously - poor audio quality hides all the nuances that make a lot of great music great. Precise timing, complex harmonics, musician interaction. Those are musical qualitities that we lose when we listen to our records on a pair of shitty monitor-mounted speakers, or flabby headphones. You simply cannot get a proper gitar roar out of a tin can.
Has nothing to do with copy protection (Score:4, Funny)
No coincidence about the artists (Score:2)
The executives are probably hoping that the reviewers will be pissed off by the stupid restriction, and vent their anger in the reviews. That way, the executives can push more cooperative bands more effectively, since Tori Amos and Pearl Jam will be sidelined.
Whenever I hear about such acts of stupidity, I get more convinced that I should donate funds directly to the artists, and just get the music online.
NYT: Epic Records Takes Steps to Seal ... (Score:3, Informative)
Epic Records Takes Steps to Seal Its Newest Music
By CHRIS NELSON
The Epic Records Group, a unit of Sony Music, is approaching the sticky problem of prerelease music's being traded online with an even stickier solution.
Writers receiving review copies of two soon-to-be-released albums -- Tori Amos's "Scarlet's Walk" and Pearl Jam's "Riot Act" -- are finding the CD's already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut. Headphones are also glued into the players, to prevent connecting the Walkman to a recording device.
By locking up the discs, Epic hopes to keep writers from converting the music to MP3's that can then be traded over the Net. But even a "glueman" player is unlikely to deter a diehard critic.
"I'm a pretty big Pearl Jam fan," said Bart Blasengame, a staff writer at Details magazine who was sent one of the contraptions with "Riot Act" inside. "I brought this discman home with me, and I found a way you could go in the back of the CD and, like, pop it open. So I got the actual disc out."
Mr. Blasengame said he had no intention of making MP3's . "At the same time, if I want to give it a proper review, I'm going to listen to it how I want to listen to it -- and in my stereo is where it sounds best," he said.
For several years, prerelease music has turned up online before it reaches stores, distributed without permission by journalists, radio employees, record company employees or other sources. This July, for example, a six-song sampler from Ms. Amos's upcoming album was shipped to writers the old-fashioned way. The songs soon appeared on file-sharing services like WinMX.
The Recording Industry Association of America blames Internet music-sharing for declines in CD sales, though proponents of MP3 trading dispute the group's arguments.
A Sony spokeswoman confirmed that the glued players were being used to combat piracy, but would not talk about their effectiveness or responses from writers.
This is not the first time prerelease music has received the glue treatment. Gil Kaufman, a freelance journalist in Cincinnati, said he owns a prerelease copy of Radiohead's 1997 album "OK Computer" that is glued into an Aiwa player -- an Aiwa analog cassette deck. That makes MP3 conversions a bit more difficult.
The future of music reviewing... (Score:4, Funny)
What's the problem? (Score:2)
What's that? You mean he meant is now disseminating? Oh, well, in that case, Flame On!
Ears, (Score:2)
Therefore, their ears must be chopped off.
Why not digital? (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine building a custom player with built-in earbuds and only one album on it would be cheaper than this dumb glue thing.
Circumventing at any cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of times these methods result in getting a much lower quality piece of software/media than if it were simply bought. A lot of times (mostly with software) the result barely works at all.
So is it really worth it to copy some of this stuff at any cost? I can't help but think that sometimes it would cost less time and aggravation to just go out and buy the damn software/music CD/DVD. And don't give me that "information wants to be free" crap either. There comes a point when it's just not worth the time or effort to circumvent copy protection just because you can.
Re:Circumventing at any cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so. Not in general. Back in the Amiga days, quite a few cracked games could be installed on hard disk, while the "simply bought" game couldn't. Sometimes the crackers did actual bug fixing. Today, in the copy-protected CD days, any CD-R can be played by the disc changer in my car, while there are "simply bought" CDs that can't. The industry has reached that point were the copy is not only cheaper, but also more useful than the original.
Now They're Going To Sue Netwon? (Score:2)
<tap><tap>RIAA? That word you keep using? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Been done before (Score:5, Funny)
Wow... (Score:2)
Pearl Jam?? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Especially since Pearl Jam became the Neil Young backup band.
Soon we will realize.. (Score:2)
Been to a concert lately? It beats the hell out of buying a cd.
You can't get laid listening to cd's anyway.
Stop buying music. Go out and listen to some instead.
Sony exec watch too much Mission:Impossible (Score:2)
It would be funny (Score:2)
Simple way around this (Score:2)
Plug the taps into your recorder/sound card.
Place taps over headphones.
Record signal, clean up, MP3.
????
Profit!
Or, just realize that the stuff is crap, and will be out far too soon anyway, and ignore it.
Who's responsible for p2p pre-releases? (Score:2)
Is this how they get there.....
Is the 'music industry' itself (well, the reviewers but as they are part of the industry hype machine) responsible for the leaking of music onto these services? Is this so much of an issue they have to resort to lame tricks like this.
Pot, kettle, black.
How can anyone take record companies seriously... (Score:2)
Compare this to secure document transmission. (Score:3, Interesting)
When applied to music, if you don't trust the reviewers at all, you make them come to a hotel room where you've set up a hi-fi, give them a comfy chair to sit in, and let them listen. You don't ever give them the CD. The best they can manage is smuggling a Minidisc recorder in, and the quality won't be great.
Glued-together Walkmans? I'd only settle for _that_ if they supplied quality headphones. You can't possibly review music properly on anything less than proper hi-fi equipment. Walkmans, micro systems and the like just don't have sufficient quality.
Wave of Future (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, my TiVo has recordings of copyrighted media inside of it, and it's likewise pretty hard, though not impossible, to get it out in perfect digital fidelity for archiving on other devices or to play on different players.
I expect to see more of this in the future as hardware prices continue to slide. Media will become more and more locked into a particular device one way or another. Your next CD player could well require an Access card in it to enable it to play the latest CDs.
What about Quality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh the Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
Article 1: Record companies are sending expensive sealed players to reviewers instead of just CD's.
Article 2: Artists are fed up with being screwed over by the record industry, but the industry keeps bleating about how expensive it is to handle their artists.
I see a nice cycle here: They have to spend more money to keep their music controlled because they need to make more money to spend more money to keep their music controlled because they need to make more money to spend more money to...
Just one question. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this in any way important, interesting, vital, relevant or worthy of consideration on any level whatsoever which is not petty, braindead, boring and totally fucking Prozacked up the wahzoo?
This question has been brought to you by the ever-present, effervescent,
-Fantastic Lad
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:3, Funny)
Read the story!!! (Score:2)
Reviewers don't even buy the cd, they usually get them from the record companies. The problem is rouge reviewers putting the music on the internet before the cd is released! This way, the reviewers can listen to the music and write their reviews as they otherwise would, but there's less of a chance that they'll put it on kaaza or whatever before the CD is available to the public.
Re:Read the story!!! (Score:3, Funny)
I hear ya brother! Those damn ladies' makeup magazine writers are the worst! Freaking Cosmo!! [thedent.com]
Oh.
Never mind.
Re:Read the story!!! (Score:2)
Sure, crack it open if you want. Don't expect Sony to send any further preview copies after you've returned the remains of the first player.
Ironically, at that point, said reviewer would then have to got to Kazaa/Winmx to get further CDs for review!
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2)
Did you skip your reading lessons at school? This is for journalists only! Journalists don't buy anything, they receive CDs and in this case a walkman for free so that they can write reviews. Like for all reviews, be it music or software, you are not suppose to use the item in question for anything else than testing.
I think it is a neat idea to avoid journalists abusing their privileges.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Here goes my piddling little amount of karma, but this has to be said:
Did any of the moderators who modded this up and thought to mark it "Insightful" actually read the article?
Not getting at the poster, but the comment does completely miss the point - I thought the whole idea of moderation was to keep things on track. Too often it seems to be a mechanism for ensuring that scum floats to the top, as moderators just "follow the herd"...
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Funny)
8-tracks, baby!
Re:Bad Idea (Score:2)
But not entirely. The main point of my post was that this is a Brittle system. When it fails, it fails miserably.
Having a CD that will work in ANY player being glued shut seems to be like having treasure in a treasure chest. When everyone knows where the treasure chest is, it's only a matter of time before it's picked open.
That's why I think it'd be better having it kept on some kind of memory medium. When you crack open the device, how many of the journalists are going to pop the CD directly into a CDrom and start ripping. On the other hand, how many of them are going to try to hardwire the memory to another device to try and digitally extract it :).
As funny as the thought of Music Journalists going to all those guys who rip ROMS might seem, the chances are pretty low.
Yes, yes, yes, blah blah *cough* wire cutters, etc.
Umm, umm, you could always make headphones with a chip on each earpiece that somehow modulate the receiving signal and feed it back to the player. Without the modulated feedback signal, it stops playing.
Yeah, yeah, it's killing a fly with an atom bomb. But if you're going to attempt to solve a problem, do it RIGHT.
One question (was Bad Idea) (Score:2, Insightful)
How does the resource/effect ratio compares to say DRM?
Epic invested $3.99 and covered 95% of their area. DRM would be more like $3.99G / 97%.
Most geeks would love to crack this mom-and-pop security. Just for the fun of it. My first try would probably involve of three tiny needles. A second, a couple of mikes. A third,...
Most reviewers would just do the review and return the player afterwards.
IMHO Epic plays quite fair.
Re:One question (was Bad Idea) (Score:2)
I wonder if this is not just a ploy to find out who the bad apples of the bunch are. Maybe the record industry knows this is futile battle and hence wants to combat it somehow.
I even wonder if downloading previews are a bad idea. Consider the following. The record industry makes tons of money with new releases. Likewise with the fashion industry, where being first with a trend is where you make money. Now if the reviewers take that income away the record industry can make no money.
So maybe as an informal truce people should stay away from downloading the new material, wait a few weeks and either buy or "look".
Re:Wire cutters and some speaker wire... (Score:3, Informative)
--Mike
Re:Wire cutters and some speaker wire... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, I haven't shopped at Radio Shack in years. Odds are, someone has declared them to be terrorist tools or something...
Re:Wire cutters and some speaker wire... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wire cutters and some speaker wire... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wire cutters and some speaker wire... (Score:2, Funny)
No one's gonna mess with the "little guy" who's just protecting what meager possession he has, right?
Re:Nothing a low-tech smashing won't cure.. (Score:2)
Re:really hard to circumvent? (Score:2)
The latest in IP circumvention (Score:4, Funny)
what is the world coming to?
Re:The latest in IP circumvention (Score:3, Interesting)