Saturday, February 26, 2005

GOODBYE TO YOUR RIGHTS, A BIT AT A TIME: Sony-BMG are planning to tighten up the 'copy-protection' on forthcoming American releases,


Apparently, Sony-BMG are convinced that people are just crying out for CDs which won't let them use their music in ways they always have done:

"What matters the most to us is the consumer experience," Sony BMG Sales Enterprise co-president Jordan Katz says. "Both technologies offer playability across all standard players, including CD players, boomboxes, DVD players, PCs, Macs, car stereos, video games and clock radios."

Katz says the company wants to alert the industry that it is implementing the content-protection technology, because extensive consumer research indicates widespread customer acceptance of it.


The 'consumer experience', then, doesn't involve making mixtapes for your friends or to play on long journeys, or doing a separate copy of an album to have in your car. We're wondering exactly how Katz has come to the conclusion that consumers have accepted this; perhaps he's confusing "People haven't really thought through what they're losing" - or maybe he thinks that people saying "Well, at least it plays on my PC" as 'consumer acceptance. But are we really in a place where record companies are marketing their records as being a leap forward because they'll actually play on your CD player?



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is a site that gives step by step instructions on how to disable the copy protection used by Sony BMG (which is MediaMax by Sunncomm).

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/

I just bought the new Kasabian CD and didn't realize it was protected because a price sticker had been placed over the SMALL copy protection sticker. But luckily I will be able to play it on my iPod with the instructions above.

Anonymous said...

Wanna rip Kasabian? Use Nero. You can view audio & data tracks seperately.

1. Select the audio tracks
2. Select Recorder/Save Track

Or use CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

The Dude

Anonymous said...

Wanna rip Kasabian? Use Nero. You can view audio & data tracks seperately.

1. Select the audio tracks
2. Select Recorder/Save Track

Or use CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

The Dude

Anonymous said...

Wanna rip Kasabian? Use Nero. You can view audio & data tracks seperately.

1. Select the audio tracks
2. Select Recorder/Save Track

Or use CDex http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

The Dude

Anonymous said...

From the link above, this command will remove the DRM software and allow you to rip the Kasabian CD successfully under Windows 2000/XP:

Click Start, Run, type CMD and hit enter. At the command prompt, type the following commands and hit enter after each:

net stop sbcphid
del %systemroot%\system32\drivers\sbcphid.sys

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.