Sony BMG getting carried away by the DRM beat

[admin]

In Sony BMG's latest triumph in public relations, its chief
lawyer has argued that copying a song you already own (such as onto your own PC from a legally purchased CD) is stealing.

http://www.tech.co.uk/martin-james/general/blogs/2007/10/03/sony-bmg-getting-carried-away-by-the-drm-beat

[youthinksoo]

Simply disgusting. I don't if we are allowed to criticize Sony on here, but I don't like them. That is just one man's opinion. Do not get mad at me.

[drfsupercenter]

Give me liberty or give me... wait I don't want to die! Never mind!

[RFBurns]

It wont be a workable solution IMO. For one...if someone wants to record a song they own onto a pc they own and it wont let them via a digital link...then there is always the tried and true analog connections. The signal wont be affected but by a miniscule fraction when using analog connections between digital devices. Since the source will be from a digital medium...the recorded copy will be just as clean and crisp as its original.

To measure miniscule losses one would need a piece of test gear far byond the average consumer's budget....and the ears wont hear any difference between the two anyway.

Recording at home is a right we all have, especially if its recording material we have purchased from a legit CD or DVD store.

Basically they are attempting to squeeze every drop of blood from the turnip that yields no blood to begin with.

Where there is a will.....there is always a way.

[Chewy]

rf,
everyone extracts audio cd waves and rips to their hard drives digitally converting into wma or mp3 then transfers such files to portable devices for playback?

[RFBurns]

Yes very true. If Sony BMG or other decides to put some sort of block that tells the pc to not "rip" the material that alone is wrong IMO. I mean we shouldnt have to pay anything to do that to create our own mp3's or wma's or ogg's.

Those companies are sneaky...as some have found out with some of Sony BMG's audio CD's recently. Its telling us that we have absolutely no rights whatsoever doing what we want with the merchandise we have paid for.

I all for piracy prevention, but lets look at the history of all this mess.

When the Macrovision copy protection came along to prevent vcr dubbing, what happend? Some hobbiest out there got smart and figured out how to blank out the saturation signals within the vertical blanking interval of the video signal, thus allowing copying of vhs movies. The same "fix" also worked for the Beta tapes. The signals would literally overdrive the recorder's APL circuits, which would cause the unstable sync and horrible copy. Even some television set APC circuits could not handle these pulses in the vertical blanking field because they went well byond 100 IRE units and would make the tv's APC circuits try to knock down the oversaturated pulses...the result was the shifting color, bright to dark video changes, and sometimes total loss of video sync and made the movies unwatchable....all of that was "fixed" with the popular device known as the "Copy-Guard Remover", a small black box that connected between the video player output and recorder/tv video input.

Then along came DVD video. The same oversaturating vertical blanking interval pulses were used at first, thus the old copy guard removers worked well for those. Then Macrovision got smart too and started using digital copy guard signals within the mpeg stream itself. This is why the regular analog copy guard removal units would not work at all, thus you would need one of those "digital" copy guard removers.

The point here is that there will always be someone that will come up with a work around. And the 2nd point is that we will all pay higher prices for the movies and audio material that incorporates these copy protection schemes. Someone has to pay for it cuz it wont be the manufacturers.

It would be very easy to incorporate into the TOC of an audio CD a code that tells the player to spit out an odd ball pulse or signal that would interfere with the transfer..or "rip". If OS's begin to build a code that recognizes and reads this from the TOC, then ripping will become impossible.

The only work around other than waiting for someone to come up with a hack or code breaker is to use the analog connections. Even if you inserted a sub-carrier audio signal that carried the copy guard signal, that can be filtered out very easily with a device connected between the analog output and analog inputs.

Look at the short time it took for that one fella to crack Blu-Ray encryption!

It will be the same if they copy protect audio CD's. History has proven that this is the result of corporation attempts at controlling what is legally ours.

[Hillary Clinton]

Stupidity got a name - Jennifer Pariser

[drfsupercenter]

Wasn't Sony the place with the rootkit that got a lawsuit against it? Don't they ever learn?

[blutach]

One thing is that in many countries (including recently in Australia), high courts have ruled that backing up audio CDs is not an offence. IIRC, SONY lost a case on this very issue in Australia in January 2007.

SONY are uninformed or (more likely) simply propaganda merchants.

Regards