Possible Legal Challenge to SCMS protection.

[1kyle]

There's an interesting by product to the ongoing SAGA between Philips who own the CD patent and EMI who are trying to introduce copy protection on some of their CD's by adding extra illegal sessions or other stuff attempting to stop these being played (and therefore "ripped") on computers.

Phillps is about to get legally embroiled here with EMI on the grounds that the EMI disks deviate from the Philips Patent on the CD format and therefore can't be legally sold as 'CD's or even called 'CD's --- should be interesting to watch this one.

However the by product of this is that the SCMS mechanism is prohibiting "Bona Fide" musicians from legally distributing their music in a manner conducive with the principles of "Free and Unfettered" Trade, and therefore as this acts as a "Restraint of Trade" contrary to the Rules and Charter of the European Union and in consequence of this must therefore be deemed illegal and as such must be discontinued forthwith.

This would clear the way therefore for anybody (residing in the E.U countries) who wishes to set the SCMS bits off by SOFTWARE such as using a Disk Sector Editor would be 100% within their rights to do so --and it would be up to the Music Industry to prove Piracy Intent rather than the other way around.

If this case wins maybe Firmware can be retrofitted to the zillions of MD recorders out there now.

Interesting times ahead especially with the giants of the music biz squabbling over an already lost cause.

Cheers and a happy New year everone.

[Syrius]

Great to hear about that, thanks for the info. I can live with SCMS on MD, because it restricts me from making copies from copies. But not DRM because it restricts me from even playing my music whenever and wherever I want.

heck, I'd be happy even if they only fixed the bugs when uploading from Hi-MD to the PC.