Music Copy Protection Has Gone TOO FAR!!!

[Mariner]

I actually just bought a CD (The Finn Brothers) which has 'copyright protection' warnings all over it.

Ohh... that's a shame. I've got most of their earlier work (well, except for early Split Enz recordings) on CD but that's enough to stop me getting the latest CD.

Out of curiosity, how would you rate it relative to, say, "Woodface"?

To be honest, I was never really all that interested in Crowded House at the time so I've no experience of their albums although I do recognise the singles.

I saw a decent review of this album somewhere (possibly in the Sunday Times) and then 'obtained' MP3 files for it to see what it was like. After a few listens through I found I quite liked it so I bought it from play.com for 9 quid.

As a rule the songs are all very 'upbeat' (song titles such as "Won't Give In", "Luckiest Man Alive", "Anything Can Happen", "All God's Children" give an indication of this!). Personally, I possess a bit of a cynical take on life so the lyrics are somewhat saccharine for me but I am more of a "tune" man and quite like the musical aspect of this album as opposed to the lyrical. Overall I'd say it's worth a listen - nice harmonies and good production.

As I mentioned, I already have MP3 files for this album so I don't need to muck around trying to crack the copy protection for my portable players.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

2. Supply a code (whether embedded in the CD or in the booklet) that allows you to *freely* download FLAC/hq OGG/hq MP3/WAV off the web. Most audiophiles will demand near-lossless audio, if even compressed at all. This would be difficult however, as pressing CDs with different embedded codes is at the moment either financially impossible or not yet realistically accessible.

On the one hand the RIAA tell you that you don't own the music, merely licence it, but they don't want you to use the music you've bought and paid for independently of the media you've bought it on.

Sensibly licenced downloads won't happen because the publishers want to charge you for every version. They want you to buy one version for your house, one for your car, one for your kid, one for your PC and one for your IPod. Don't even think about lending it to a friend. If they could get your CD player to bill you for every track you listened to, they'd do that too. It's the evil twin of fair use.

All these DRM schemes do is drive people towards not paying for music at all, not because it's cheaper, but because it a lot less hassle. Once they are used to downloading music and not paying for it, the product itself is devalued and people wonder why they should ever pay for it. It's not stopping the downloaders or the professional counterfeiter. And there's always going to be a source, because if you can play it, at the very worst you can pipe it into a PC via an analogue hi-fi output and get MP3's that way.

Until the publishers allow people to own the product they buy and use it in a fair fashion for their personal use, the record publishers are just digging themselves deeper into a hole, but the ongoing quest for dollars blinds them. Why give people fair use when you can charge them for the same thing over and over?

Even Philips and Sony hate these bastardised discs that break the CD standards, and their latest DVD writers flawlessly rip music off these protected discs.

 

[_xxx_]

As a last resort, you can always use the headphone output of your stereo plugged into the line-in input of your sound card. So there'll NEVER be a true copy "protection".