Aug
11

The War on Piracy: Casual Piracy?

Cd_lockedThe war on casual
piracy rages on! ("Casual Piracy" being the new, meaner term for what used to be know as "casual copying.") Two of the big record labels, EMI and BMG, are now
manufacturing all of their CDs with copyright protection built in. The copy
protection limits the number of copies you can make of any CD to three. Also, it
prevents you from porting the songs from these protected CDs to your iPod unless
you request a workaround from Sony. The protection itself isn’t designed to be
ironclad, there is a very easy way around it: rip the tracks to your Windows
Media Player library and burn a CD using the ripped tracks. From this CD, you
can upload the tracks back into WMP or into other media players, like iTunes.
From the media player, you can burn CDs of these tracks as often as you
like. Still, it’s a lot of work just to burn CDs…and that’s the idea. "Our
goal is to create a series of speed bumps that make it clear to users that there
are limits [to copying]," says Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG’s Global
Digital Business Group. "If you attempt to burn 20 copies and distribute them to
all of your friends, that’s not appropriate."

 
The lesson the
labels have yet to learn is to stop fighting the future and embrace it
instead…a la iTunes. Casual copying is not to blame for the ever-lower CD
sales. In fact, a friend’s mix may have actually encouraged people to go out and
buy the complete CD of an artist their friend had just exposed them to. Burning
a handful of CDs for family and friends, often in a mix of your own, has been a
social norm ever since the cassette tape’s invention. It’s how people enjoy
their music collections. Further locking down a CD is not going to encourage,
and certainly won’t increase sales. It’s only going to drive the masses back to
the net to find the mp3s…one way or another. The labels should have built
their own online stores ages ago, before the trend exploded. The time is still
right for them to do so – especially now, as people are moving away from
Peer-to-Peer sharing, since most P2P programs come with a price: spyware.
Meanwhile, online music stores are raking in the dollars. Wouldn’t it be nice if
a label, like BMG, had an online music store at their corporate site where you
could burn custom mixes of mp3s from any of their artists? Yeah…but instead,
they’re locking down the music – feel free to make that custom mix, but god
forbid you may want to burn it more than a few times.

Source: PCWorld

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