Random Incoherent Ranting

[dex Otaku]

1970. The cassette tape has been around [officially] for a couple of years. Journalists use it, hobbyists use it, but the public in general see it as something of a curiosity - expensive at the time, and definitely not high-fidelity. LPs are still better. Open-reel tape is far better.

Piracy in those days was very difficult to manage. It required large sums of money in order to reproduce bootleg recordings or copy albums that were probably legitimately purchased to begin with. Large-scale distribution meant having access to printing facilities to make album covers, pressing facilities to cut and stamp LPs.

Expensive, but not impossible - a copy of Pink Floyd playing Dark Side of the Moon live was released about a year before the actual album was; the artwork and the pressings were convincingly done - so much so that many actually thought the bootleg was the real album. The money trickled its way back to the pirates.

Fast-forward to the late-1970s, when Sony has released Betamax and the MPAA has sued them under the pretence that home taping of television broadcasts would cost them billions of dollars a year in lost revenues. The US Supreme Court rules in Sony's favour, the MPAA appeal, and they lose again. Sony ends up losing in the end, having invested millions in the development of a new product that was hampered by the lawsuits on one hand, and while the battle was still in court, put in competition with JVC's VHS format - which, ironically, borrowed a lot of technical innovations from Beta, since Sony had been enthusiastic about trying to make it a standard that other companies could also latch onto. VHS ends up winning the race [over Beta and, in Europe, Philips' doomed V2000 format] mostly thanks to longer recording times.

History was made, though: the advent of cheap videotape made those whose interests were protected by the MPAA [a lobby group] more money than they had ever imagined; pre-recorded cassettes were made and sold in the millions, overshadowing the vastly superior quality of formats like Discovision, later known as Laserdisc.

Fast-forward again, this time to the mid-1980s, when Compact Disc was introduced. It did not pose such a threat to the recording industry's lobby group, the RIAA - even as the first broadly-available digital audio format, it was still limited by one factor: it was read-only. This meant that mass-produced and distributed commercial recordings were more or less safe from piracy [at that quality level], as there were few factories producing them at first, and the industry could maintain control of things.

DAT changed this. With Digital Audio Tape, anyone with a CD player with digital outputs could perfectly copy the bits making up the recording to a DAT tape. The RIAA went into a frenzy and sued just as the MPAA did; Sony and the others who were trying to push DAT came up with a compromise system, the Serial Copy Management System, or SCMS.

SCMS included a flag in the data saying "I am an original," "I am a copy," or "I am a master recording." What this meant to consumers, along with the tweak to DAT that meant it used a different sampling rate [recording format, essentially] from CD, that they could make a copy of their CD for personal use, but could not copy that copy. It also meant, for professionals, that they could make as many copies as they wanted of their masters without having to worry about SCMS really impeding things. (Keeping in mind that there was a gap between professional and consumer equipment - in terms of both price and function, of course.)

The movie industry eventually made standard a near-equivalent with videotape; Macrovision copy protection, which essentially munged the signal on a pre-recorded videotape within the limits for acceptable playback on people's VCRs. When this signal was copied, however, it caused long drop-outs in the picture, making the copies useless.

DAT, however, proved to be an impractical format. Equipment was prone to breakdowns, tapes were prone to drop-outs [being magnetic], and to top it off, since consumers never showed much interest in it, equipment prices simply stayed high - keeping it out of the range that most people would ever consider paying for something, especially if it was basically unreliable in the long run.

Cassette tape, by this time, had undergone many changes. Despite still being fully-compatible with the first players that were introduced to the public in the late-1960s, the quality had increased greatly. Also, with the introduction of Sony's Walkman around 1980, the format had exploded in terms of use. 8-track tape cartridges disappeared and LP sales declined slowly but steadily as people bought cassettes instead, with CD picking up gradually at the same time.

The underground trade-networks of concert bootlegs existed as they had since the 60s and 70s, using cassette tape now instead of open reel, 8-track, and actual LPs. People still gave mix tapes to their friends.

Eventually many governments instituted a levy on blank recording media (including audio cassettes and videotapes) in order to try and defray the lost revenue caused by supposedly rampant piracy.

Still - the music industry made billions selling albums. The public didn't stop buying music (or movies on video, for that matter). If anything, the popularity of mix tapes spread the word about many artists, encouraging people to go out and buy the album that their friend had given them a copy of one track from.

Fast-forward again. To Napster.

The commercialisation of the internet, the advent of fast, low-cost broadband connections, and the evolution of computers and data compression to the point where it became both possible and practical for people to make copies of music using their computers - and then to distribute them semi-anonymously to (potentially) millions of other people. This stirred the RIAA's pot once again.

This led to lawsuits being filed left and right against small companies who were taking huge risks an a totally untested environment - which in turn lead to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the US's response to the proliferation of many types of media on the internet.

Digital media are changing. The days of analogue are basically gone in terms of mass-distributed media; most record companies stopped making LPs years ago, open reel tape has been gone since the 1970s, pre-recorded cassette sales have fallen to the point where only limited numbers are produced (though cassette will likely stick around for a long while yet due to its enormously widespread use).. Laserdiscs are also no longer produced except by specialist companies, having been replaced by DVD.

DVD was the first of its kind in the realm of digital media; those who created the standard attempted to implement several forms of copy-protection in order to protect their investment.

First, the world was divided into regions, and the licensees of the DVD forum attempted to maintain a stranglehold over where which equipment got sold. In plainer English: they built in regional incompatibilities by having the discs identify themselves by where they were purchased, and limiting what discs you could play on your unit based on where it was purchased. Japanese discs do not play on American machines, American discs do not play on British machines, and so on.

Second, the encrypted the data in the hopes that if anyone did find a way to copy it, it would be unusable as the players would see the copy, quite simply, as garbage.

Third, the video on the disc would be embedded with a flag, like SCMS with digital audio, which would either turn on or leave off a Macrovision encoder built into every player. This would make it difficult to copy DVDs to videotape.

In the end all of these schemes have failed. With the widespread use of DVD drives in computers, it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere figured out how to crack the rather simplistic encryption, not to mention the ability to simply bypass the region codes. Many large DVD player manufacturers produce and mass-distribute region-free players, now. DVD-ripping software on computers can decrypt video on the fly. And players also exist which simply don't have the Macrovision encoder, or can be hacked to disable it. Processors also exist and are widely-available which can correct the defects that Macrovision introduce into the video signal, making it possible to copy - technology that has been around since before Macrovision, and was adopted as "scrubbers" even though it was originally intended for other, more legitimate, purposes.

Music has turned another way altogether. Many attempts have been made to copy-protect the easily-rippable CD format, none of which have been particularly successful - since all are essentially retrofits to an established standard. Further to this, and in an interesting twist, Philips [the co-creators of CD] have started suing companies that put the official "Compact Disc" logo on their CDs that include certain forms of copy-protection. Simply put, once the copy protection is on the disc, the disc no longer conforms to the CD standard, and therefore cannot be called a CD. While this may seem like insignificant quibbling, it could in fact cost many of the companies that have made copy-protection systems for CDs a lot of money.

The newer formats, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD) have taken routes similar to that of DVD.

In the case of DVD-A, once again, the discs are encrypted. The encryption, however, is much, much harder to crack. At the moment, it is impractical to copy these using methods similar to what are used for DVD.

SACD, on the other hand, relies on using a completely different system to record audio. There are currently no computer drives that I know of which can even play let alone read or rip an SACD. Even if they could, the copying would have to be followed by along process of converting the data (which, to the tech enthusiasts out there, is not in the same traditional pulse code modulation formats used by CD and the like, but rather in a form related to pulse width modulation) so that it can be manipulated, copied to more conventional media, or even simply played at all.

The rest of the newer formats rely most on data compression, using cousins to or descendants of the now ubiquitous mp3 format (which has been around since the late-1980s, incidentally).

These formats, including those primarily used to sell music to be played on the iPod, Minidisc, Hi-MD, and others - all rely on something called DRM.

Digital Rights Management is the supposed way of the future. Most future media formats that are commercially-distributed will rely on one form or another of DRM.

Part of the idea behind DRM is to try and follow what most countries have in place to try and protect consumer rights, laws usually known simply as "fair use". Under the terms of fair use, a person is allowed to back up a recording, or basically to copy it for personal use, since they have already bought the license for it. As long as the copy you make is not distributed or broadcast to anyone else, it is within your legal rights to make the copy.

The other part of the idea is to simply make all copies of the original file that are not on the originating system and being accessed by the purchaser.. to make them completely useless. Meaning that copying the original renders it unplayable.

The problems with DRM are many and multifold, though. For one thing, there are multiple competing standards, none of which are even remotely compatible with one another. Examples of this include Sony's "Open Magic Gate" (OMG), Apple's version of DRM-wrapped AAC (mpeg-4 audio), and Windows Media (for both audio and video), among others.

For another, trying to make sure that fair use is maintained means that you have to keep track of all the copies, and you have to identify who is making the copies, as well as where the copies are being stored. Basically, the media itself has an ID. And you, the purchaser, have an ID. And your computer or music player has an ID. Every time you try to make a copy, those IDs get shuffled back and forth to say that "purchaser X has copied song X from computer X to a CD," for example. With CD being an insecure format, rather than trying to copy-protect the copy, your software simply says "You already made 1 copy, you can only make 4 more."

This may sound like a recipe for disaster, but it's not even the worst of the situation.

The worst of the situation occurs when your legally-purchased library of music, residing on your computer, is suddenly orphaned by something like a system crash, or a virus, or your 6 year-old breaking your operating system (i.e. Windows) to its knees - which forces you to reinstall.

In all these cases, even if the music files are still intact, the installation of the OS and the music manager (say, iTunes) means that all of your licensing information is completely lost.

This doesn't just mean that you can't copy the music any more. It means that you can't even play it, since the computer now has a different ID, and the music manager has a different ID. As far as the player is concerned, the tracks have been copied to another computer that belongs to someone else - making them entirely useless.

If you want to play those tracks again, you will have to contact the company you bought them from and re-establish all the licensing information, basically re-authorising your own use of something that you already paid for.

Which is, in mind mind, all a crock of shit.

What the industry pundits don't realise is that filesharing, the number one piracy threat in the music world at least (bootleg DVDs in the world of video), actually helps to sell records.

There have been numerous well-documented examples of bands finding their own album on filesharing systems months before it is to be released. Standard marketing practices include sending out pre-release copies to record stores, radio stations, journalists, &c. Somewhere in there, a few of those people make a copy and put it on the net.

The interesting part is that in most of the documented cases, despite the worry of the record companies (and, in some cases, the artists), the early release of the album has established it for some of the audience already; by the time it comes out, they're so eager to get their hands on a real copy of it that it sells even better than expected.

What the record companies and the artists are getting out of this is, essentially, free marketing.

And they're complaining about it. And trying to stop it.

Simply put, they're dumb as rocks.

Some artists (and I mean major ones) have actually started putting their own albums on the net before the official release simply as a way of advertising themselves. When it comes down to it, it's really not much different from getting airplay on the radio or on MTV.

Lobby groups like the RIAA and MPAA should be stopped. Period. Their interests reflect neither those of the artists they prostitute, nor those of the public they rape.

[streaml1ne]

Lobby groups like the RIAA and MPAA should be stopped.  Period.  Their interests reflect neither those of the artists they prostitute, nor those of the public they rape.

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Why stop there. All lobbies are this bad. Unfortunately you'll never stop the underlying cause of all of this, GREED.

[dex Otaku]

I was trying to be somewhat optimistic and assume that somewhere there's a lobby group that isn't motivated purely by avarice.

[streaml1ne]

I was trying to be somewhat optimistic and assume that somewhere there's a lobby group that isn't motivated purely by avarice.

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I don't think such a thing exists

The biggest joke of all is that the MPAA and RIAA will NEVER stop these protection schemes from being cracked. Given time any system will be hacked. The only way to officially stop piracy is to stop reproduction of their product entirely. Once things go analog there's no control regardless of the protection scheme.

[722Forever]

What an interesting read.

I totally agree - piracy control mechanisms generally screw-up consumer enjoyment rather than secure it.