Diamond will provide anti-piracy software for Rio 69
Anonymous Coward writes "Diamond is responding to the RIAA threat to their MP3 player by offering anti-piracy software that would 'lock-up' the recording after listening to one or two tracks. You can get the full scoop here. "
Copy protection: The Jargon File says it best. (Score:1)
A class of methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and
legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.
Why the RIAA can blow me (Score:1)
I don't pirate, I don't buy CD's. I have music to listen to. The RIAA can blow me.
For the conspiracy minded... (Score:1)
- The industry forces Diamond to put in copy protection to protect its legitimate copyrights.
- People react just as they are here: They see the new Divx and decide way ahead of time not to patronize products using the new copy protection.
- The industry makes a half-hearted rollout of aritsts with copy-protected MP3s, with press buzz all over the place.
- There is next to no business for the reason above.
- The industry comes out saying that no one is interested in "legitiamte" MP3s. It now has "justification" to ditch MP3 support forever, and generates more press buzz about the whole issue.
In the unlikely event that the copy-protected format works out, they just go the next step and pressure MP3 player companies to cripple playback of non-protected MP3s.
Ah, it won't work. (Score:4)
The important thing about MP3 is not wether people can duplicate with impunity anything that they want. The Music "Industry" can "protect" the canned product that they own all they like. The real revolution of MP3 will be when a whole lot of musicians (the people who actually own musical instruments and/or use the microphone jack on their recording equipment) are empowered to distribute their music THEMSELVES without all the suits acting as middlemen.
One point that just isn't covered well in the mainstream press is wether the schemes being devised to "protect the Musicians" from the dastardly MP3 will be closed, proprietary formats that individual musicians can't acquire and use to publish their music themselves.
If MP3 really takes off, it will be when any musician can put up a site to distribute his/her tunes, and kick the Record Companies out of their lives. The technology is here now for that. A major change in the channels of distribution is what has the Music Industry quaking in their boots, not the ability of people to distribute rip off copies of their Pink Floyd CDs.
The issue has to shift from people "pirating" stuff that's already "owned" by the Music industry. If the industry people keep the focus on "piracy" and manage to force proprietary standards where they continue to control the means of distribution, they have won.
You *don't* own a CD. (Score:1)
When you buy a CD, you are licensing a copy of the music for your own personal use. You don't own it. You own the physical medium itself, yes, but not the data on it.
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Yes, you do. (Score:1)
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For the conspiracy minded... (Score:1)
Eh, all that will do is get rid of products like the Rio, and such. But chances are, anyone that wants one, has already bought one.
And If you are talking about RIAA 'Industry' support, which I don't think you are, their support wasn't needed to begin with.
MP3 won't be killed by the likes of them, or even by Diamond. The MP3 codec wasn't developed so the record companies could more eaisly make money...
the record needle and the damage done (Score:1)
This wont hurt the Rio specifically or the idea of the Rio in general or even mp3s. Anyone interested in music, any music rags, and any partially underground internet sites will spread the word of the uncopy protected mp3s, and they will turn out to be the casette tape of the digital age. You don't have to be sophisticated to sniff these things out, so John Q Public won't even be affected by this change.
Yes, the old mp3s will run with this new software, so its not a big deal at all. I think Diamond would just rather get back to its real work, and put a fig leaf over the Rio in hopes that the recording industry will have an aneurism or something.
-phantom
man this is stupid... (Score:1)
Couldn't you just decode it, then re-encode it with the lossy compression disabled? The original encoding will have removed all data that needed to be removed to get MP3-level compression, so the gain in file size should be negligible.
ElpDragon.
Piracy/Anti-Piracy tech fixes (Score:1)
Although, perhaps I'm mis-interpreting the goals of the record industry. That their hope is not to actually stop piracy, but to make it just inconvenient enough that most stupid consumers won't go to the trouble of circumventing it. Of course, that's getting less true as time goes on.
Conclusion: They're screwed, regardless of what they do. Let's just sit back and watch their efforts go down in flames.
DAT: never again!
Uh-oh ... (Score:1)
Oh yeah, last I checked gun control still meant not flinching every time you rip off a .300WM :-)
/dev
Samsung also "supporting" SDMI (Score:1)
So What? (Score:1)
No.
Well then who cares what they do?
About the best idea I've heard yet for doing what they want to do, which I disagree with of course, is to come up with a technically superior format. Otherwise, who cares what they do to certain players like the Rio?
Technical vs. moral (Score:1)
is on a technical level, and nobody really focuses
if it is _morally_ right (against everybody else
who buys the music, or the artists who don't get
money for their hard word, for instance).
Example: This famous `24 hour rule', which is obviously invented as a lie to get a `technical' way around it. Show it to me in a real country's laws, and I'll believe in it.
/* Steinar */
Yes, you do. (Score:1)
That copy of the bits on the CD is your property, and cannot be taken from you without due process.
Provided you remain within the confines of copyright law, you are free to do anything you want with your copy of the bits.
Period.
Anyone who says different is selling something.
This whole "license, not sale" thing is absolute bullshit, and is worthy of nothing but ridicule.
Schwab
Yes, you do. (Score:1)
Technically, you would be violating copyright law if you did this, yes. It's important to remember there is no license involved in such a case, though the entertainment and software industries would desperately like you to believe otherwise.
Schwab
Snicker... (Score:2)
As earlier posters have observed, this will be about as "successful" as DIVX.
What I find annoying is that Diamond is caving on this issue. Diamond has plenty of legal precedents on which to stand (the Sony Betamax case being but one), so I can't understand why they don't just tell the RIAA what they can do with themselves.
Personally, I'd like to get a dozen or so friends, make some trips down to southern California, visit some Hollywood restaurants posing as record company executives, and start "jamming" them.
Jamming is trick whereby you go to a well-known hangout where you are sure to be overheard, and start talking about untrue things for the purposes of spreading rumors and FUD. Skillfully executed, I imagine the Secure Digital Music Initiative will completely crumble if they can be made to believe their solidarity doesn't really exist.
Schwab
Piracy is Not a Problem (Score:2)
The record, movie, and software industries are screaming like banshees about the incredible "economic loss" represented by piracy (a term used more for its emotional overtones than its accuracy). But the fact of the matter is that piracy is really no problem at all.
Example: Name one software company that has gone out of business due to illicit copying of its software. You can't, because no such case exists. Micros~1, who is arguably the largest "victim" of piracy, consistently turns in quarter after quarter of record profits. So it's abundantly clear that illicit copying has negligible affect on the software industry's bottom line.
Same deal with the music industry. They're charging $18.00 for a product that costs less than $1.00 to stamp out. There's no way you're going to convince me they are somehow failing to make money with such usurious margins. The movie industry is a shade different, since the capital costs are so much higher, but then so are the storage requirements. Until a gigabyte of storage drops below $5.00 or so, no one's going to burn hard disk space on a movie they can pick up legitimately for $25.00.
And as for all the statistics detailing those multi-billion dollar losses to piracy? Complete and utter fabrications. They are making the highly flawed assumption that every illicit copy represents what would have been a sale, so they just add them all up. Even the most casual observer will realize that such an assumption is disingenuous at best. There is no way to predict what a person would have done had free copying been impossible (most likely they wouldn't have bothered, or moved on to truly free software).
China is presented as an example of what can happen if piracy is allowed to run rampant. "Informed" sources claim that up to 95% of the software running in China is from illicit copies. China's cultural heritage (which spans some five thousand years, so don't expect it to change any time soon) sees such copying as perfectly acceptable. However, they're also discovering that, when Micros~1 Word/Excel/Windoze craps out, they have no one to turn to. So they are learning that there is an economic cost to freely copying software. While this could lead to more legitimate sales to obtain support, it could also paradoxically lead to a mushrooming of the installed base of Free Software, where copying is encouraged, and support is just one NNTP connection away.
So, no, I don't see "piracy" as any significant problem. The statistics they hand us are heavily cooked, and the extreme case of China can't be sustained over the long term (unless the whole country goes Open Source).
Schwab
DVD copy protection (Score:1)
OK, so I can't read bootleg DVDs from Europe. I also can't watch legit DVDs.
change this within the software once or twice, and you can format the HDD to change it again.
Technological solutions to a social problem. Ain't gonna happen.
Cybermedia Uninstaller and/or regedit can probably take care of that.
Pretty lame protection, if you ask me, and it seems indicative of the whole entertainment industry's IQ.
Orcslicer
Re:Yes, you do. (Score:1)
I think the dividing line, where people get confused, is that what you don't own is the copyright on the music. That resides with the artist (hopefully... although depressingly it's often owned by music industry monoliths).
But by my understanding, once you buy the CD (or tape, record, minidisc...) you have paid them to permanently own a copy of that music, and as long as you don't violate that copyright (generally by trying to sell it on to others, which is the exclusive right of the copyright holder or their agents), it's yours to do with as you see fit.
At least, that's how I understand it. Reread the disclaimer. :}
Good Thinking Diamond (Score:1)
They have a right to control their own property, just like I have a right not to buy it if their licensing is incompatible with my intended use. They do not have a right to legislate a monopoly however, and this is what they are trying to do by killing MP3.
Diamond is smart here, they are giving the RIAA the tools necessary to protect their own property (via supporting some sort of protected MP3), but also giving other organizations and artists the right to not participate (via supporting normal unprotected MP3's).
I think this will substantially undermine the current RIAA lawsuit against Diamond, and help protect the MP3 movement in general. Before adding this feature, the RIAA could easily spread FUD and get people to confuse piracy with legitimate uses of the MP3 format.
Now, it will be much easier for MP3 advocates to show that it is up to the individual who owns the rights to the music to decide the level of protection to be implemented. It draws a clear line between illegal MP3 distribution (a protected MP3 that has been cracked), and legal MP3 distribution (an uprotected MP3).
The RIAA wants to ban MP3 all together. The adding of this feature by Diamond makes it clear that if they continue pressing their case, they are acting to enforce a monopoly, not acting to protect their assets.
I applaud Diamond for this decision (and I am no big fan of Diamond Multimedia... they abused me terribly as an owner of one of the orginal Wietek 9000 based Viper video cards, and I am still ticked off). They have made a smart tactical move here, and probably done a lot to protect the future of MP3.
This RIAA thing is getting annoying (Score:1)
Thank You! - finally someone else has worked this out, and said it. Anyone here tried "Mjuice"? Not only doesn't their secure download thing work if you've got anything resembling a firewall or proxy between you and them, but you can only play their music in their crappy player, on the PC you download it to.
This sucks. I bought a Rio to take music away from my desktop. How clueless are these people?
Kris.
Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Snicker... (Score:1)
Actually, I think they're just patronising the RIAA. "There, there, we'll support your little format."
Kris.
Win a Rio [cjb.net] (or join the SETI Club via same link)
Comparing secured-MP3 to DIVX & other (Score:1)
Yeah, all that smoke and flame might be kinda rough on the hardware...but it would be interesting to watch. I know I'd like to burn up a whole load of DIVX players
Ah, it won't work. (Score:1)
This RIAA thing is getting annoying (Score:2)
I don't see any reason why I would buy encrypted music. Not only is it totally proprietary, but I no longer "own" it, like I do a CD. It's now almost like a "licensed copy" of the data. I don't pirate music, but I don't think I should be hampered by anti-piracy technology.
What if I want to play my encrypted music on something else, like X11Amp or another MP3-playing device that doesn't support the secure format? I guess I'm SOL there. Well, looks like this is another technology we're going to have to boycott. Anti-piracy technology has *never* worked for an industry and I don't think it will. All it does is piss people like me off.
Oh well.
BTW, hopefully Creative Lab's player won't support trash like this.
Diamond trying to get rid of customers (Score:1)
It looks more like a useless feature rather than a new restriction in the new models. The article says:
If we ass/u/me that "download" is synonymous with "play", then it sounds like the new Rios will still be able to play MP3s in addition to this new (useless) format. I don't see how this is any inconvenience for the consumer. So who cares?
Article implies that home-rolled will still work (Score:1)
It says
Are we interpreting that last clause differently?
Ah, it won't work. (Score:1)
Eh?? (Score:1)
That's almost as pointless as expecting criminals to follow gun control laws.
--John Riney
jwriney@awod.com
Just like DIVX (Score:1)
Also, the point of having MP3s is to be able to play them in _many_ different places. On your computer, in your car, on your Rio. If this is just implemented on the Rio, who's gonna buy the encrypted music?
The thing record companies fail to see (Score:1)
Unless you have copy-protection compliance end-to-end (original distribution, all means of transfer, and all players supporting the protection scheme), you have no protection at all. Granted, if someone wants to offers songs with limited playability, they could encrypt it using the Diamond software but there is still nothing stopping a person from ripping a CD and making it available to people in the regular MP3 format. I don't see how this will curb piracy so maybe I'm missing something here...
outside a box (Score:1)
namely d/l MP3s, converted to AIFF, then burned Audio CD's
so I can listen to them in the ol' Discman.
As long as the MP3s are not encoded with VBR, it sounds great!
Perfect for those parties where you need a mix tape/CD
Personally, I think the RIAA has thier heads up their asses,
I still have some records I bought in the early 80's with
their brilliant tagline "Home taping kills music."
I see, and how about all those albums I bought because
a friend lent me an album??!
Silly silly silly.
Pope, having rescued his cookie, resumes normal posting
DVD copy protection (Score:2)
Arnold Brown, president and CEO of San
Francisco-based Audio Explosion, noted that
DVDs, available in six regions, include
technology that prevents consumers from playing
back a disc from one region to another. The
technology is "intended to prevent cross-border
piracy and price dumping," he commented.
The DVD player software I've worked with (under Win 95) implements this "protection" by letting you pick the region when you install the software. You can change this within the software once or twice, and you can format the HDD to change it again. Pretty lame protection, if you ask me, and it seems indicative of the whole entertainment industry's IQ.
Re: Samsung also "supporting" SDMI (Score:1)
profit from creating/supporting multiple redundant standards). MP3 is good, and free. Everything else ~may~ be as good, maybe better, and cost you and me money to use. You do the math. Guess who wins...
MP3. To hell with the RIAA and all those who would ally with them.
Nope, smacks more of SCMS all over again (Score:1)
DAT and Minidisk have a thing called SCMS (serial copy management system) which seeks to limit multigenerational digital copies. However, since the stupid fscking recoding industry fatcats all but killed those formats (though Minidisk is undergoing a bit of a renaissance of late), it didn't affect consumers overmuch.
However, it DID affect musicians on a tight budget, trying to make decent copies of their masters etc. All of a sudden, they couldn't use the $500 sony consumer level DAT, but had to either use a big expensive pro level machine(which are lovely, but cost a bomb), or shell out for a widget like the behringer sample rate converter and SCMS filter...
Of course, a friend in
I also worked out how to get SMCS disabled on one of my minidisk machines, after throwing it into service mode, but again, this won't be an option for most people...
What relevance does this have? Well, just to point out that the RIAA and their greasy fatcat friends have a nasty habit of screwing EVERYTHING up when they turn consumer audio into crippleware. They like to control the means of production, and delivery. It's clearly a restrictive trade practice, and morally bankrupt.
It's also short sighted, they need to get with the program, and realise that there's money to be made for those who can evolve and make the paradigm shift.
That said.. every new medium faces opposition from the old school, who stand to lose their power and control. Look at how scathing Radio people were about TV. Look at how people were burned, and presses were smashed when movable type started to spread, even..
Plus ca change, eh?
If you need to flame me for being horribly wrong, I'm ancipital (at) hotmail dot com...
reverse engineering (Score:1)
For example, he said, the fair use doctrine would allow someone to copy a song for legitimate purposes, such as parody, or to reverse-engineer a computer program in order to build a compatible system -- options precluded by some anti-piracy software measures.
Oh WOW! I heard about fair use law for parady, but didn't realize it also can be used for programs! Wow so we really can reverse engineer win95 to make a good WINE. HMM WOW.. accually now that I think about it I knew this all along, because I know that the guys who make console emulators are in the law, I just was never sure why. Well thats really good to know, now where can I buy that windows 2000 source again???
Piracy is Not a Problem (Score:1)
Comparing secured-MP3 to DIVX & other musing (Score:2)
It seems counterintuitive to me that one would want to compare a product to DIVX as a model for success. Given that the market has essentially spurned DIVX, and that the enthusiast community has rejected it even more violently, I would strongly advise any vendor from drawing this kind of parallel, as Professor Lemley. Either he is taking a dig at Intertrust's system, which I doubt, or he is especially clueless.
To say, "See! This product is just like DIVX!" seems to be a recipe for disaster.
"Technology makes enforcement essentially costless," says Mark Lemley, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, who adds that tech fixes offer IP holders more control over their products than they would otherwise get.
Here Lemley seems to suggest that the cost of developing a secure distribution system, as well as maintaining it, is very low.
Tell that to cable TV operators, who have seen analog descramblers proliferate to the point that they are moving consumers in a forced march towards "digital cable," which provides them only some semblance of control over distribution.
Tell that to the DSS folks, who suck in the (admittedly fairly low) cost of distributing fresh keycards every few months, and who must maintain and operate their monitoring systems to authenticate users and manage channel distribution.
Tell it to Microsoft, the company that has arguably experienced the biggest brunt of software piracy, despite any number of (fairly half-hearted) attempts to curb piracy in order to drive profit upward.
Technology isn't cost-free, especially not secure digital distribution technology.
All this without factoring in the biggest problem that content distributors face in the current age: end-user acceptance. The RIAA, for example, is so late to the party that it's almost inconceivable that they can have any impact on the market's direction, and certainly not by pushing "secure" technologies that have a higher hassle factor and little benefit over existing free and open distribution.
I don't exactly condone piracy -- I'd be out of a job if honest people didn't pay for software -- but I don't believe that introducing additional hassles and restrictions into end-users' lives is the right direction to go.
Maybe if the RIAA, SPA ("Don't Copy That Floppy!"), and other organizations of their ilk used education instead of FUD, they would see more positive results? Believing in the essential badness of human nature does not endear one to the marketplace.
man this is stupid... (Score:1)
Because GZIPing (or using simular non-lossy compression techniques) 16bit audio data achives VERY low compression ratios (3-8% size reduction at best) so it is more trouble than it is worth.
No matter how much network bandwith increases, I don't think we'll ever see transmissions of raw uncompressed data over 'net. Unless technology becomes such that we're never able to use more than 5% of bandwidth, which I don't find likely.
man this is stupid... (Score:1)
Of course, the lossy nature of MP3 compression is already something a lot of us have little or no interest in doing to our music. When I rip a track off a CD, I burn it back onto another CD without touching it. CD players aren't _that_ hard to lug around, and if you only like a few tracks off each CD, throw them all on a single CDR disk.
For Net distribution, as bandwidth increases, I see no reason why any form of Lossy sound compression will be needed. We'll GZIP (or the equivalent) our waveform (AIFF, WAV, whathaveyou) files. (If the network transmission medium doesn't automatically do it for us, which it does and will even more in the future)
It won't really work and why (Score:1)
DVD copy protection (Score:1)
The most offensive part of all this is that it isn't a social problem, like "piracy" or "bootlegging". The region coding exists solely to protect the movie studio's distribution plans. They obviously have global copyright for any major film they plan to distribute. The region system just allows them to stagger release around the globe, in order to minimize the number of prints, and have the stars on different lame talk shows at different times.
I wish I could make MY job easier by bribeing congressmen and threatening lawsuits to get selfserving legislation passed. And with the advent of digital theater projection and printless distribution, the whole region coding system will be rendered pointless.
man this is stupid... (Score:1)
This won't happen. Raw wave files encode the same amount of information for all frequencies, more or less. However, we humans perceive certain ranges of sound more acutely than others. Compression techniques can degrade the less important parts of the spectra and use the saved bandwidth to improve regions we're more sensitive to. Thus for the same bandwidth, compressed streams can deliver higher perceived quality. A good mp3 uses about 128kpbs of bandwidth. A pair or raw telephone quality streams (for stereo) also uses 128kbps (8kHz * 8bit * 2channels). Which sounds better? THe mp3. It makes better use of the bandwidth. Likewise, a raw cd stream uses 1400kbps and 1400kbps mp3 would sound better. Maybe humans wouldn't motice but your pet bat would definately appreciate the 1400kbps mp3. Of course nobody will ever really encode mp3s at that bitrate. 384kbps would be better than cd quality (and 1/4 the bandwidth).
http://www.ryans.dhs.org
Smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
One thing I can't understand is how anyone can possibly think this copy protection fisaco is going to help combat piracy at all. Maybe they think that all of the sudden, everyone will switch to a new format which prevents them from doing what they wanted or something along those lines. Even if that were the case, it's only a matter of time before people write utilities to strip the copy protection out of protected material anyway. Copy protection usually relies on keeping a format proprietary or secret, and as everyone knows, that is a piss poor way to protect anything. It'll be reverse engineered before too long.
To me, this is all just a lot of smoke and mirrors made to buy time for corporate people to figure out what to do.
Recording industry, wake up, the times are changing and your profit margins will be slimming soon.
DVD copy protection (Score:1)
OK, so I can't read bootleg DVDs from Europe. I also can't watch legit DVDs.
From what I hear, talking to a salesman of consumer VCR style DVD units, the only ones that are selling are the ones that ignore the localization protection scheme. All those that support it, noone will buy. So guess which one the manufacturers that tried to follow the guidelines are now starting to produce :)
Diamond is in "prevention mode" (Score:1)
Speaking of the RIAA, I don't think that we will see SDMI in this lifetime. If it does ever come out, I have a hard time believing that people will jump on the band wagon. If I were to buy a single, I would want to back it up so I wouldn't loose my investment. But with SDMI it will be a pain in the ass. Then again, I would probably just convert it to MP3.
Diamond may have started something important. I could see a modified MP3 format with protection sooner than I see SDMI coming. And the new Microsoft proprietary format, there are to many sound artifacts to make it listenable. Although, if you are on a slow modem, it might make more since than MP3. . .
bah! (Score:1)
--
Alan L. * Webmaster of www.UnixPower.org