Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
 |
Posted: July 27 2003, 11:06 |
 |
But the people who want to break the law are freely able to - like you said, you can get it to play in your PC fine, so can many of the people who want to make illegal copies of it.
This reveals what's silly about the system - whether it's going to work in a particular device or not is entirely random.
If it won't play in one person's CD player, but they've bought the album and want to listen to it, it seems by all accounts that they're likely to do exactly what the record companies are trying to stop and make a copy of it...because a lot of people find that burning a CDR copy of the album, with the inherent errors of the original corrected, makes a copy which plays fine in their CD player.
I will however agree that there are some people who are complaining simply because they can't carry on with illegal activities. That certainly is not everyone, though. If you were the owner of an expensive CD player (or even a cheap and well trusted one which you had no intention of replacing) and a large collection of CDs, all of which play fine in that player, and suddenly along comes an album from your favourite artist, and you find it won't play, or worse it breaks the player, because the record company has deliberately corrupted that disc...wouldn't you feel a tad annoyed?
I would have no objections if the copy protection does what it says on the tin and stops people from illegally copying it. The problem is that it doesn't - it just stops people from listening to it.
If artists want to get the money they deserve, they should steer clear of large record companies for a start. Not only do they legally manage to wrangle as much money as they can from the artist's earnings (you'd be amazed at the twists and turns it all takes - it's nowehere near as simple as Mike getting a certain percentage no matter what the format...they take more money from the artist for releases on newer formats...with copy protected CDs being a new format, that probably means Mike gets less than for a standard CD), but the industry is absolutely crawling with fraudsters and large sums of royalties can often mysteriously go missing (of course, it only comes to light if someone does a full audit)...
Personally, if I was in Mike's position (or even in my position), I would be concerned with the quality of the product which reaches the end user, and as a result, this current system of copy protection would not make me happy at all.
It would certainly also not make me happy that some people were so lacking in respect that they felt it would be ok if they stole a copy of the album. However, I would be far more concerned with selling copies to more households, than trying to get one person to buy multiple copies of the album so that he/she can listen to it in the car, on an iPod, on the computer and so on, especially with my album sales in the hundreds of thousands. I'd much rather it was respectfully bought by more people, who are fully able to enjoy the album and listen to it in the way which they are able to most enjoy it in (I mean heck, if I wanted to control what people listened on, I'd put in a system that meant it could only be played back on the equipment I mixed it on and in the same acoustic environment...which would probably mean that nobody at all would listen to it, as anyone with a studio correctly equipped to play it would be working in there and not listening to albums). I think it's important to look when marketing a product and work out how people are going to use it - if it seems that people want to listen to it on computers, then they should be allowed to, but a proper system should be found that makes that a viable business proposition.
A very interesting website is http://www.weblisten.com - there you can legally download albums (including Tubular Bells 2003) for a small fee. Similar is Apple's iTunes store. Businesses like these are at least recognising that people want music on their computers and are trying to sell it to people in a convenient format (will people pay for it? They might be more likely to if record companies promoted such services more heavily, instead of wasting their money on copy protection which doesn't work).
So this debate as I see it is far from worthless - the way I see it, it concerns the future of the music industry. I personally believe that going down the path of copy protection could well lead to the slow but steady introduction of more restrictions - already it seems that the copy protection methods have become more extreme with more recent releases such as Tubular Bells 2003. When they see this system isn't working, they'll look for something more heavy duty...and when they realise that any CD player with an analogue output can be used to make a copy of an album...what will a desperate record company do then?
|
