BMG Takes Technical Ignorance to a New Level By George Ziemann "...this CD will not be able to be mass copied ... it is now possible to offer consumers the level of flexibility to which they have become accustomed while beginning to better protect our artists' rights." These were the words of Thomas Hesse, BMG's 'chief strategic officer,' in conjunction with the release of BMG's first CD to the United States (via Arista Records) equipped with the new 2003 incarnation of copy-protection. Considering the fact that this "protected" material showed up on Kazaa the day it was released, it appears millions of dollars that would have otherwise probably gone to pay artist royalties were wasted in a laughable effort to protect the "artist rights." If I were one of the artists whose rights were "protected" by wasting money on magic beans, I'd be irate. Instead of bothering to write something new about this subject, I'll just rerun a portion of an article that I first posted in October, 2002. Nothing has changed in the past year, so neither has the story. Nothing but the Facts Fact 1 -- If I can hear a song, I can record it. There is nothing the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) can do to stop it. Ever. Get over it. Worst case scenario -- Put a cassette tape recorder in the middle of the room. Play the CD, tune in the radio or otherwise locate your desired audio. Turn up the volume. Press "record" on the cassette recorder. Fact 2 -- Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing (with apologies to Ani [de Franco]) -- (c) 2001, The Highway Star The biggest problem with the worst case scenario illustrated above is that your recording is probably going to sound terrible. I didn't say it was going to sound good, just that you can do it. If you can record off the stereo or CD player directly into a cassette deck, you'll get better results. At the other extreme, if you can copy the audio files into your computer and burn your own CD (on recordable media), you'll probably get a really great sounding copy. Probably. If you do it right. If you burn a CD-R, there is a chance that it won't play back well on other CD players, especially if they're inside someone's computer. They might skip. They might not play at all. It's true. We've made about 100 CDs of our own music this way. One of them didn't work right. And the CDs don't sound as good as our original tracks, which are recorded at a higher sample rate than the finished product. In turn, if we make an mp3 out of it, the quality drops again, authorized or not. Fact 3 -- Any copy-protection techniques the music industry can develop will be rendered obsolete and useless almost immediately after being introduced into the market. For every genius at the record company that comes up with an innovative new way to make it tougher to copy something, there is going to be a bored rocket scientist at the Johnson Space Center or Hughes Aerospace that has nothing better to do with their spare time than figure out how to bypass it. The bored rocket scientist isn't a music pirate. He (or she) is just a part of the natural evolution of technology. Conclusion -- Copy protection technology is a useless waste of everyone's time and money.

©2003 George Ziemann All material on azoz.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties, but it all seems rather pointless. You may reprint any article on this site in whole, in part, in effigy or in ridicule. I really don't care.