How the Internet took money from record companies

Many have already heard about the fate of the portal Napster, legal proceedings against which lasted more than a year. But, since it turned out that uncontrolled reformatting of music recordings in the MP3 format "will not stifle, will not kill", last autumn technologies were tested to prevent copying tracks from licensed CDs or copyright free music. In other words, the logic of the right holders was as follows: if it is impossible to stop piracy, then at least it is possible to try and take away the "primary source" of their enrichment. The project, as it turned out, was not particularly successful.

Moreover, the developers of the CD standard, Philips and Sony, stated that copy-protected CDs do not comply with the standard. This means that the main trump card of digital technology, i.e. the compatibility of media and readers, is lost. It is believed that it was the unified technology that enabled CDs to become as widespread as they are today.

As you know, the MP3 music format makes it possible to compress huge tracks from ordinary music discs into more or less compact files, which are then either "burned" onto blank CD-ROMs or sent out to roam the Internet. Naturally, no royalties are involved. According to estimates by the Recording Industry of America, on average, as many as three billion music files passed over the Internet every month in 2001. In addition, there has been a steady growth in sales of CD-Rs, the very cassettes on which ordinary people (not necessarily pirates!) can record music downloaded from the net.

According to representatives of the Association, this is the main reason for the falling sales of licensed music albums (in comparison with the first half of 2000, in the first half of 2001, the Association members were short $300 million in monetary terms).

A small study by the Association found that in the U.S., one in two people who love digitized music download MP3 files to their hard drive, and 70% of them transfer the music to their CDs.

According to Hilary Rosen, executive director of the Association, many record companies are concerned about the growing use of CD-Rs. That is why record companies have turned to technologies that limit listeners' ability to copy music CDs in the first place.

"Disposable" CDs

But it's not all that simple. The first protected CDs on the market caused a chorus of complaints from users. It turned out that computers and older CD turntables either "don't see" these CDs or play them back with errors.

What made the most noise was the release of Natalie Imbruglia's latest album White Lilies Island (music label BMG), released last autumn. The protected version of the album was tried out in Europe.

There was no indication on the CD itself that it was copy-protected. Only the most meticulous users could find the phrase that the disc had the "Cactus Data Shield 200" system from the Israeli company Midbar Tech. Of course, there was no information about the fact that nothing good could come out of listening to the disk on a computer.

On the disk, next to 12 regular 16-bit music tracks, there was another 30-megabyte file into which all the tracks were compressed.

If such a CD is played with Windows Media Player (which is what many music lovers do at work), the program recorded on it takes control of the process. As a result, the user is forced to listen to a compressed version, which is played back at 80 kilobytes per second, whereas the normal CD standard is 1.4 megabytes per second. In the language of sound quality, this means that the listener is dealing with a very low-quality sound.

In addition, the disc would not play on Macintosh computers, some CD players, or Sony game consoles.

Almost a similar story took place with the experiments on the NSync pop band's 'Celebrity' CD (Zomba record company). It was released in three versions - the toughest protection system was designed for Germany, a little softer - for the USA, and completely unprotected discs saw the light of day in the UK. As in the previous case, there was virtually no indication that the disc was different. Only the German release was adorned with a warning that "this disc cannot be played on a computer". This time a Sony DADC technology called key2audio was used.

As it turned out, the British and American versions played and copied on household devices and computers without problems. However, the German version was not only not copied, but often not readable by Windows computers.

Representatives from Zomba and Sony declined to comment on the release of the NSync album. According to Julian Midgely, co-leader of the UK Campaign for Digital Rights, "Record companies are using customers' money to fund their experiments by throwing different [copy protection] systems on the market and seeing who noticed them, who reacted and which devices are compatible with them.

Generally speaking, all unsatisfied fans were handed "normal versions" of the spoiled albums, but some aftertaste remained.

Are pirates the future?

Representatives of Philips, the company that personally developed the "Compact Disc" standard back in the 70s and 80s, believe that copy-protected CDs have no future. In addition, as the entity that licenses the production of "original" CDs, Philips can simply deny licenses to companies producing such discs, or "put a spoke in the wheel" to firms engaged in such practices. This negative attitude of the company towards the protected compact discs is caused by numerous problems caused by the incompatibility of the new discs with older machines and computer players.

Plus, those protections "wouldn't work anyway - any hacker could make copies. But it could hurt law-abiding customers - and it already has," Gary Wirtz, head of Philips' copyright division, told New Scientist magazine.

According to Jim Peters, spokesman for the already mentioned Digital Rights Movement, copy protection systems first and foremost limit the rights of the listener to play the recording on whatever platform they deem possible.

For those who still prefer the MP3 format, the record holdings have left another chance - Internet services where a certain number of songs can be downloaded for a certain monthly subscription fee. For example, RealMusic, for $10, allows you to listen to 100 songs, which self-destruct after a certain period.

However, analysts predict that the "music for hire" service will not gain much popularity. For example, according to research by Roxio, one of the leaders in the production of CD software, people still want their "personal values" - records of favorite bands and artists, films, and photographs - on a tangible medium rather than somewhere in the depths of a hard drive in the computer. Not to mention temporary use of music files. Therefore, it is likely that, unless the recording giants change their policies, digital piracy will flourish.

In addition, some pirated discs are now "released" on CD-R which may indicate that some pirates are producing them in-house, although this activity is not profitable. Although it is possible and another scenario - the plant, formally producing only blank media, can "stamp" pirate copies on them. But if you are not caught, you are not a thief.

Considering that the cost of production of a CD is approximately the same (about one dollar) both in Russia and abroad, this fact only emphasizes that only the power struggle against pirates is designed to protect primarily the financial corporate interests of record companies, and they do not care about consumers. Society, on the other hand, with the help of unspecified legislation or new media (the Internet), tries to cope with this distortion.