DVD Players will not be able to play future Universal Audio CDs! (1 Viewer)

[Ted Todorov]

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/ne...t/cd121701.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...47&mode=thread
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,49188,00.html
According to the above news stories:

The copy-protection technology will also render the disc unplayable on Macintosh computers, DVD players and game consoles, such as Sony's PlayStation 2.

This also includes high end CD players and car CD Players.
This is very, very serious stuff. I for one have no intention of replacing my CD player when it breaks (and it's on its way) -- I'm just going use my two! DVD Players and Macintosh computer to play music CDs. It is absolutely outrageous for Universal to be selling defective junk masquerading as Red Book audio CDs! I won't even go into what they are doing to our fair use rights.
I urge HTF members to boycott any such CDs coming from Universal or anyone else.
Ted

 

[Ted Todorov]

Darn, I just saw the equivalent thread in the music area:
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htfo...threadid=33065
Moderators, please forgive me, but I never read the music area. Maybe you should leave this here for people like me who depend on their DVD Players for music listening, but do not read the music area of HTF.
Ted

 

[Scott Strang]

I have a vision. A vision of a future of software that is so trashed with encryption and copy protection as to render it unplayable or un-viewable/listenable.

So screw Universal up the ass for this. We buy their products with our hard earned money and they do this to us? Someone somewhere will figure out a way around this.

Keep it up Universal; we'll quit buying your stuff.

 

[Michael St. Clair]

Like Macrovision, these policies do not stop or even reduce piracy. All it does is keep the consumer from fairly using what they paid for.
ALL of the albums released this way will be available on file-sharing services. There are work-arounds.
Watch, when album sales go down they'll blame it on piracy (admitting that there are cracks and work-arounds), not on the fact that more and more people will not buy an album that they can't play on their portable MP3 players or on their PC or Home Theater.
Then, despite the fact that industry sales have grown immensely in the last few years, they will use the politicians that they buy off with hard and soft money to legislate additional copy protection by forcing the studios to include government-mandated encryption/rejection features. Jack Valenti is already planning it.
Fuck these ignorant asshole studio/label execs.

 

[John P Grosskopf]

Did someone say MACROVISION?

 

[Damin J Toell]

Fuck these ignorant asshole studio/label execs.

that's a great way to promote studio participation at HTF.

DJ

 

[Carlo_M]

If there's anything that history has taught us (in the brief history of technology, that is), it's that the more you encrypt something, the harder the hackers work to counteract it.

If you make a good, affordable product, the incidence of people buying pirated stuff will be lessened. Sure there will always be abuse, but those people are the ones who will buy cracked stuff no matter what you do.

Take, say, Nero for example. Can be had for about $50. Most people I know have bought it. The stuff going around that is pirated is like MS Office or Photoshop, stuff that's in the multi-hundreds.

Take DVDs. I know there are some people out there who buy pirate DVDs, but none of my friends or family do. Why? Because they're $20 a pop, and that's not too much to ask. Yet I knew some people who bought an SVHS a few years back so they could tape off of LDs. Why? Because LDs were $50-$150. And market penetration for DVDs is way more than LDs ever were, yet I knew more people pirating LDs than DVDs...

Just my thought.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

As a content provider who has been directly hit with commercial piracy of my product, and seen the effects of online distribution directly affecting my sales, I would be open to suggestions as to how to curb the unlawful use of my material while avoiding using restrictive copy protection methods.

The Napster situation has provided ample proof that content is being used well beyond the limits of fair use, so the question becomes how can those who invest millions in creating content provide reasonable protection from having their material stolen by unscrupulous users? Clearly the current open Red Book format isn't working, despite claims that the industry is growing. Piracy is rampant. I can tell you from first hand experience that as soon as my album hit Napster, sales decreased dramatically, and did not resume normal levels until Napster was gone. How should content providers deal with this, when our livelihoods are very much affected by it?

 

[Michael St. Clair]

that's a great way to promote studio participation at HTF.

You are suggesting we kiss studio butt?
I have seen worse said about specific studios and representatives in this forum (usually in the name of fighting pan-and-scan), and I didn't see you there complaining.
I'm not saying that all studio/label execs are assholes. Some are, as you will find in any profession. And inevitably, they know who they are.
They weren't whining and complaining when they stole music from artists. Hypocrites.

 

[Ed St. Clair]

Has anyone at Non-Universal given the smallest amount of thought to how many of these disc will be returned because they will not play on the paying customers equipment?

I thought not!

 

[Michael St. Clair]

The Napster situation has provided ample proof that content is being used well beyond the limits of fair use, so the question becomes how can those who invest millions in creating content provide reasonable protection from having their material stolen by unscrupulous users? Clearly the current open Red Book format isn't working, despite claims that the industry is growing. Piracy is rampant. I can tell you from first hand experience that as soon as my album hit Napster, sales decreased dramatically, and did not resume normal levels until Napster was gone. How should content providers deal with this, when our livelihoods are very much affected by it?

Jeff,
I don't disagree that there is a problem (despite the fact that the industry is indeed growing). However, these protections do NOT stop piracy. These albums will and do appear on file sharing services. A simple analog loop on mid-fi equipment will make a copy indistinguishable from the original at 128k mp3, and there are other ways to defeat this stuff with even higher quality.
It stops the honest guy who wants to listen to the album on his PC at work, or to download tunes into his player to listen to while he jogs. And that, ultimately, will really hurt sales.
"There is no right to fair use. Fair use is a defense against infringement."
- Preston Paddon, Executive Vice President, The Walt Disney Company

 

[Damin J Toell]

They weren't whining and complaining when they stole music from artists. Hypocrites.

DJ

 

[Greg_C_T]

This is unacceptable. I have a nice 5-disc changer that I play my DVDs and CDs on. One less component to wire up and worry about, and now new CDs won't play on it?
If companies are so worried about losing profits from people burning CDs, why not just jack the price up on blank CDs to something like $5 per disc and take their royalties from there? Don't invent some nonsense that makes our equipment obsolete!

 

[John Beavers]

nope, not even close. i merely think it's possible to complain about studios doing things we disagree with without resorting to saying "fuck them."

In most cases I would agree, but in this one, Universal is so on my shit list for this I can't even tell you how mad I am at them. I have a $1500 DVD/SACD player that just got obsoleted by this copy protection scheme of theirs. Perhaps some can remain calm in the face of a forced equipment upgrade, but it ain't me. I'm more of a music fan than I am a movie buff, so to me this is the equal of what Richard "Divx" Sharp tried to do with the DVD medium. I am now in full boycott of all products made by Universal. You may say that won't do anything, but then again, if we hadn't started an uproar back when with CC and the Divx nightmare, we might not have DVD today.

You simply don't institute software changes that won't work on current hardware. It's bad for me, and in the end it's very bad for Universal. Wait till J6P buys his next Shania Twain CD and it won't play on his DVD/CD player. Wal Mart thinks the black bar complaints are bad, wait till they get a load of what Universal has cooked up.

 

[CamiloCamacho]

You people have make a good point. Price something good, and it will sell. I hope someday the studios heard, and release their zone 4 DVD's at US Prices (Hear Warner, No more censored / no-documentary releases for 35 US$).

If they continue this way, we will see soon pirate DVD's (Don´t worry about me warner, i'm happy with my zone 1/2 uncut releases)

 

[TyC]

This is stupid. The people who want to pirate the music will find a way around it, and it only serves to hurt the average consumer.

I understand the music industry needs to find a way to stop people from making illegal copies, but this is going just a little too far...
I know a lot of people who use their DVD players as a CD player in their family room. In the age of convergence, Universal Music Group is not helping.
-Paul Russel
President, DVD Angle

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

I agree that applying excessive copy protection to CDs is not a good option, and as a producer, the last thing I want is to inconvenience legitimate users of my product, but there has to be some way of protecting the very substantial investment I have made, both in time and money, by curbing unauthorised use of that product, which, interestingly is an entertainment product, not something like food or clean air necessary for survival.

What has to stop is the unauthorised, free distribution of content. Whether that means charging file sharing services for distribution royalties (just like radio stations pay to provide content, which is financed by ad revenue) and heavily prosecuting those who violate the usage rights, or providing pay per use, or some other subscription service, there has to be a way of allowing content providers to earn their rightful income from the use of their product, just as you are compensated for the work you provide your employer. It is the online repercusions that are the worst, not the casual CD burning, though that too is an issue.

Copy protection should be a last resort.

 

[Jon Cauley]

"I don't disagree that there is a problem (despite the fact that the industry is indeed growing). However, these protections do NOT stop piracy. These albums will and do appear on file sharing services. A simple analog loop on mid-fi equipment will make a copy indistinguishable from the original at 128k mp3, and there are other ways to defeat this stuff with even higher quality."

Exactly! The main problem here is that these studios are lashing out at the consumers for their own mistakes. Their problem is that they did not take the mp3 format seriously early on and develop a standard and now this file trading is out of their hands. Even though the "secure audio" formats are not secure (locks keep honest people out), if portable players long ago required this secure format to work and didn't accept mp3s, they wouldn't have as large of a problem. The only solution I can think of, is for the studios to push the DVD-Audio and other higher quality audio formats and plan for the inevidable affordable DVD-R. Sure customers don't mind lesser quality at a much lesser price...but hype it up and keep a decent price on the new format and they could gradually work away from all this nonsense of copyprotection madness. I'll say it again, locks keep honest people out, and that's exactly what they'll be doing. Anyone agree?

- Jon

 

[Ryan Wright]

Whether that means charging file sharing services for distribution royalties and heavily prosecuting those who violate the usage rights, or providing pay per use, or some other subscription service

Again, I say to you, there is nothing you can do here. You can't track what everyone does on the Internet. There are millions of people using P2P file sharing services; are you going to arrest and throw them all in jail? Not likely. The industry's aggressive push to get rid of P2P sharing is simply pushing the next evolution of it. And the next evolution will be a Gnutella style network with Fasttrack network convenience and speed. That is, they won't be able to take it down. Period.
Even if you could, you'll still never stop people from pirating on a large scale. You can't stop someone from putting up an FTP server. You can't stop them from emailing files to each other. You can't keep them from putting files on web pages, or using ICQ, or simply copying from their friends. You may arrest a few people and throw them in jail, but you'll never stop piracy. My buddy has his entire music collection (thousands of CDs worth) on a private FTP server. You can't stop him and people like him - you can't find them in the first place, and even if you could, you have no idea what's on that server unless he gives you a password.
The only way to combat piracy is to give your customers a reason to buy your material. If you try to rip them off, they'll turn around and do the same to you. Once you offer the best value you can, you also have to understand that there are still going to be people pirating your content. That's something the industry needs to learn to live with. You also cannot claim lost profits over this. If a hundred people download your album, that doesn't mean you just lost a hundred sales. Most of those people wouldn't have bought it anyway (that doesn't make it right, but it's a fact). More likely, it means that you lost 5 sales. It also often means that you gained a few sales. I've downloaded lots of music that I had never heard before, then went out and bought the whole album. I'd say a large percentage of my collection came from this sort of activity.

 

[Rob Robinson]

jeff-

it's called "tough shit"- the ISO approved audio CD format doesn't have any sort of digital distribution control mechanism built in-

therefore anyone pulling some microsoft like moves and "extending" the format is not making an audio cd- they're making something else, and it sucks.

It's too bad for the industry that they released a format and the world changed around it. To "tweak" it and make it incompatible with machines that have both the technical and legal right to play is NOT COOL.

the only thing the studios can do is to get behind a "new" format that supports what they want- of course, we're not going to buy it untill they give us a more compelling reason than "it's harder for you to do anything other than play this back by our embedded rules".

I read a great article about how pissed the industry was about the drawbacks of the CD. I still say tough shit, you'll have to deal with those issues next time- in the mean time, there should be laws about such disregard for consumers. CD's should play in all CD players- that's what we have standards for. Or else, unviersal should lose the right to call, label, or classify their discs as cd's. They are more like " processed CD flavored products." So now do laptops have to change their ad copy to indicate that they can't play ALL Cds.?

And for what it's worth- their bitching is fucking hillarious. Profits are up. Sells are up. better crackdown on the consumer.