Lawsuit Challenges Copy-Protected CDs

[iisbob]

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The five major record companies have been hit with a class-action lawsuit charging that a new breed of CDs designed to thwart Napster- style piracy is defective and should either be barred from sale or carry warning labels.

The suit, was brought this week in Los Angeles Superior Court by class-action specialists at the law firm Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach, on behalf of two Southern California consumers.

It marks the first legal challenge of CD copy-prevention technology to "tackle the issue on an industry-wide basis," Alan Mansfield, an attorney representing the two named plaintiffs in the complaint, told Reuters on Friday.

It also follows criticism from some members of Congress and from Dutch consumer electronics maker Philips, co-creator of the compact disc, that the anti-piracy CDs are technically flawed and could impinge on consumers' rights to copy music for their own use.

The suit names all five of the major record companies -- Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, Bertelsmann AG's BMG Entertainment, EMI Group Plc, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music.

Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, issued a statement calling the lawsuit "frivolous" and defending the labels' recent efforts to deter digital piracy.

"Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said. "Motion picture studios and software and video game publishers have protected their works for years, and no one has even through to claim that doing so was inappropriate, let alone unlawful."

AIMED AT STEMMING SONG-SWAPPING

The recording industry has recently introduced CDs with hidden electronic locks to prevent personal computers from copying the disc and in some cases, even playing it. These measures are intended to stem widespread swapping of music over the Internet and the production of unlimited copies, which the industry says has severely dented sales.

But the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday under California's consumer protection statutes, says the copy-protected discs are "defective" products that are sold alongside conventional CDs with no distinction made between the two.

"Some versions of the Aerosmith greatest-hits CD have the copy-protection technology and some don't," Mansfield said. "Because it's not in all CDs, it's like Russian roulette."

Besides being deliberately designed to prevent the copying of music on personal computers, the anti-piracy technology often prevents playback altogether on PCs, and even on some CD players, Mansfield said. In Macintosh computers, the discs often jam in the CD trays.

Even when the discs can be played, their sound quality is inferior to standard CDs, and the discs often skip or fail to play all the tracks, he said.

These problems, the suit says, "interfere with customers' legal rights to back up, play or transfer their own music for personal, non-commercial use to other playback mediums."

The suit seeks a court order to either force the copy-protected discs off the market or to carry warning labels differentiating them from standard CDs. It also seeks to compensate consumers for the cost of repairing computers allegedly damaged by the discs.

Mansfield said the direct release of copy-protected CDs began in the United States about six months ago on a limited basis and is believed to represent a fraction of the overall CD market.

This can be found over a Reuters, Sweeeeeeet in my opinion. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif



------------------
iisbob

There is no such thing as a stupid question; just an improper one.-my own belief

[HewittC4]

What's funny is that the RIAA caused the whole problem in the first place. If they didn't cause such a big deal about a small group of people swapping files, they alerted the rest of the world about how great MP3s are. Now MP3s are a main stream music format. And now they are crying because everyone uses MP3s. It will bankrupt the music industry, they say. Of course, they said that about VHS tapes, audio tapes, CD-Rs. Hopefully, the plantiffs will win this case, and all of the appeals, and we can go on using MP3s for personnal use again.

Or if the defendants win, hopefully everyone will boycott buying CDs and the music industry will go out of business.

[Stevie Blunder]

Copy protection reminds me of chemical pesticides. Poison the fruit so the bugs can't eat it. Course, no one else wants to either! And, we now know that what bug do is pollinate the plants in the first place. Ditto the popularity of a given entertainment. These media exec's that think they are loosing money are just stupid, arrogant and greedy. If radio and TV didn't give it away for free, no one would want any of their stuff.

And no one with ears to hear thinks 128kbps MP3 etc is anywhere close to CD quality. About 192Kbps is roughly audio cassette quality. Technically a different kind of signal loss, but about equal "quality" to my ears.

The MPEG-LA group made a similar blunder, demanding silly royalties for mpeg-4. Now they're desperate to sell their "product", as better technologies leaves them go the way of Betamax.

That's my $0.02. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

------------------
You don't learn much when you do it right the first time.

[HewittC4]

"Music creators have the right to protect their property from theft, just like owners of any other property," Sherman said. "Motion picture studios and software and video game publishers have protected their works for years, and no one has even through to claim that doing so was inappropriate, let alone unlawful."

Re: This quote from the RIAA idiot.

Their whole arguement here is flawed. How many people only want to copy 5 minutes of a movie to a DVD. Do you want to play only 5 minutes of a game? Music is portable, movies and games are not.

------------------
Someday, we'll look back at this, laugh nervously and change the subject

[iisbob]

Motion picture studios and software and video game publishers have protected their works for years

Come on class, can you say " Clueless!!?? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

------------------
iisbob

There is no such thing as a stupid question; just an improper one.-my own belief

[randyrhoads1981]

Sorry to pick up on a week old post but i always get cracked up when i see people carrying on about copy protected music cd's. Anyone who loves music has a quality cd player at home. They all have some sort of preamp audio outputs. And computer souncards have audio imputs..with that thought,,grab a quality wav recorder..lock the doors and pull the shades..with just the lighting of the monitor showing the way, take a peak out of ya window time to time for good measure..if you hear any knock on the door ..quickly kill all running tasks..break the cd in half..format your hardrive and hide under the bed. :D

[HewittC4]

Anyone who loves music has a quality cd player at home. They all have some sort of preamp audio outputs.

Not really, some of us are poor and spend what little money we make on computer stuff or CDs. My CD player is either my computer or my car.

[joea64]

Do the major record companies really not realize that they are alienating more and more consumers every day with their paranoia about copying? Are they really that clueless? Or are they simply control freaks par excellence?

Copy protection schemes have been tried ever since software began to be widely distributed for the PC, and none - let me emphasize that, NONE - of them has really worked. You can do a Google search for just about any program you can name and, if it requires (for example) a serial number, you can find sites offering programs designed to generate valid serial numbers for your copy of the program. (NOT, mind you, that I am condoning or advocating any use of those crack programs - I simply note them here as an example of how ridiculously easy copy protection is to get around.) Virtually every review I read online of a CD-burner pays significant attention to how well the drive can deal with copying "protected" CD's in usable form. The technique - I forget its name - that is used to supposedly protect VHS tapes from being copied actually is good for nothing much more than making it more complicated for devices like DVD players to be hooked up in a daisy chain in your average home stereo setup. And so on, and so on...

And just how useful is a copy-protection scheme for a CD when you can defeat it by the simple expedient of the application of a black Magic Marker in the right places?
The music and film content providers had better wake up to what's actually going on. Their zero-sum, hyperparanoid approach to copyright is, as I said, beginning to alienate people to the extent that one day soon there's going to be a major backlash - and I do mean _major_.

-Joe-

[HewittC4]

Originally posted by joea64
Do the major record companies really not realize that they are alienating more and more consumers every day with their paranoia about copying? Are they really that clueless? Or are they simply control freaks par excellence?

...

The music and film content providers had better wake up to what's actually going on. Their zero-sum, hyperparanoid approach to copyright is, as I said, beginning to alienate people to the extent that one day soon there's going to be a major backlash - and I do mean _major_.

-Joe-

They really are that clueless. They argue about how MP3s are hurting their business, so they impliment copy protection and say nasty things about their paying customers and people get pissed off, so they stop buying CDs, sales go down, the record companies are obviously right, because their sales are down. They only see that profits are down, like they said they would. They can't even begin to imagine that they could be responsible for their own loss of profits. It is always someone else's fault.

[joea64]

I'm sure it's been proposed before, but why couldn't a "shareware" model for music be tried, along the lines of the shareware principle for computer software? For instance (to name one possible solution I thought of earlier this afternoon), individual songs could be made available for free download on a time-limited basis - say, 30 or 45 days. At the end of that period, you would be required to pay a nominal fee - one dollar, say, or - if you wanted to add the song permanently to your collection. The kicker is that the time limit would not start running until the first time the song was actually played in your own system (I imagine some kind of routine or algorithm could be written to permit this, though there would be privacy issues involved in keeping track of where the file was played); this would allow the file to be traded, in its "demo" version, on peer-to-peer networks. It would also allow the user to "preview" the song as many times as he/she wanted in that time period, and if the user liked it enough to add to his/her permanent collection, then the copyright owner would get something back moneywise.

Mind you, I don't know that this would actually be a workable solution, but if the major record companies would actually _apply_ themselves to thinking about things like this instead of letting their control-freak impulses run riot, there wouldn't be such an acrimonious debate going on today.

-Joe-