For the first time the happy folk felt fearful
Posted by Tim Riley Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:59:00 GMT
Mike is right: copy control on audio discs blows goats.
I bought the Gorillaz album on the weekend, not noticing the copy control labels on the packaging. It was a nasty surprise to see nothing but a blank screen when I tried tried to view the tracks in sound-juicer. Like many people, I like to copy my music onto the computer for convenience of listening and for the ability to drop the files onto my portable audio player.
It turns out that, due to a combination of multiple sessions, false TOCs, and deliberate low-level errors, many typical audio extraction applications won’t be able to read from the “CD.” cdparanoia, however, ripped it fine, though it had to work hard to correct the disturbing amount (at least 85% of the disc) of read errors.
So thanks EMI. The only thing your copy control achieved was to make it harder for me to do what I wanted to do with the music that I bought from you. I will keep this album because I like the music, but I will think twice about buying anything from the EMI label in future. There’s nothing like a lose/lose situation to taint the enjoyment of music.
It's illegal to rip CDs to your computer, you know. Pretty stupid law, huh.
It's not a crime to rip a cd, but it is copyright infringement. One count per track on the CD. You can be sued for doing so, by the copyright holder. If you sell the copyright infringming material, or you infringe copyright on a 'commercial scale', you have broken the law, can be arrested and tried in court. Yay Australia!
No kidding, it's rubbish. Fortunately I'm not often burnt by this (being into music released by more experimental labels that have half a clue about this sort of thing), but bought a bunch of CD's the other day from JB Hifi and was rather pissed off when I tried to rip them. What's even more annoying is with one particular CD, the copy protection seems to be such that not even my normal CD player wants to eat it. I ended up giving up (lack of time) and downloading the bloody album instead. Very strongly in the mindset to only buy vinyl from now on. Like to see them put copy protection on that... :-)