Tuesday, July 20, 2004
CD Copy Protection - Missing the Boat
Macrovision and SunnComm court Apple for a seachange in CDs | The Register
In this article, the Register outlines how the two major CD copy protection companies are trying (unsuccessfully) to court Apple into an arrangement that would supply copy-protected AAC (Apple's semi-proprietary format) files instead of WMA (Microsofts completely-proprietary format) files in a special region of an audio CD. Presumably, this technology is to make it easy for customers to get legal copies of digital music for the CDs they buy the old fashioned way.
The only problem is that none of these vendors seem to realize that this isn't very convenient, and is certainly not as convenient as ripping MP3 (or MPEG-4) format tracks from the CD. Sure, the copy protection is supposed to prevent people from doing this, but there are several well-known vulnerabilities to the schemes currently in use. If you don't know one of these, I'm not going to be the one to tell you, lest I be subject to the INDUCE act, currently being deliberated in US Congress.
Somebody needs to come up with a better way. The public cannot tolerate how exposed the wiring is in this digital music landscape. Nobody is going to buy a Mercedes without a dashboard, and nobody is going to continue to deal with all of these complex technologies. I am sure they already know that the key to sales is removing barriers, but they seem to be suffering from an "I'm sure it's not drug-induced" paranoia about people sneaking around with their precious music. I'm happy to be a digital music (and spoken word) junkie, and I'd just like the industry to support my lifestyle far better than they are today.
In this article, the Register outlines how the two major CD copy protection companies are trying (unsuccessfully) to court Apple into an arrangement that would supply copy-protected AAC (Apple's semi-proprietary format) files instead of WMA (Microsofts completely-proprietary format) files in a special region of an audio CD. Presumably, this technology is to make it easy for customers to get legal copies of digital music for the CDs they buy the old fashioned way.
The only problem is that none of these vendors seem to realize that this isn't very convenient, and is certainly not as convenient as ripping MP3 (or MPEG-4) format tracks from the CD. Sure, the copy protection is supposed to prevent people from doing this, but there are several well-known vulnerabilities to the schemes currently in use. If you don't know one of these, I'm not going to be the one to tell you, lest I be subject to the INDUCE act, currently being deliberated in US Congress.
Somebody needs to come up with a better way. The public cannot tolerate how exposed the wiring is in this digital music landscape. Nobody is going to buy a Mercedes without a dashboard, and nobody is going to continue to deal with all of these complex technologies. I am sure they already know that the key to sales is removing barriers, but they seem to be suffering from an "I'm sure it's not drug-induced" paranoia about people sneaking around with their precious music. I'm happy to be a digital music (and spoken word) junkie, and I'd just like the industry to support my lifestyle far better than they are today.
