10:01 AM ET 06/29/99
CDs To Have Anti-Piracy Feature
CDs To Have Anti-Piracy Feature
By RON HARRIS=
Associated Press Writer=
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ The latest round of portable digital music
players will soon be available in stores nationwide, equipped with
security features designed to prevent piracy, designers say.
Members of the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced Monday
they had completed design specifications for the Walkman-like
devices they claim will thwart online piracy.
On a yet-to-be determined date, new CDs released by the major
record producers will be digitally encrypted to prevent piracy, and
the digital players will need to be upgraded to accept the new
music, the Secure Digital Music Initiative said.
''SDMI will enable the future of music and today's announcement
signals to consumers that this future is coming quickly. This
future holds the promise that consumers will have access to vast
amounts of exciting new content with a new level of portability,''
SDMI director Leonardo Chiariglione said in a statement.
Diamond Multimedia, which makes the popular and controversial
Rio portable digital music player, said it will comply with the new
standards. The original version of the Rio player has served as a
focal point for the music piracy debate because it doesn't require
copyright protection to play music using MP3 technology.
New devices, available as early as Christmas, would initially
support all current digital music formats, including MP3. After the
new digital standard is implemented and the machines' software is
upgraded, the only new songs that work on the machines will be ones
that are digitally encoded with copyright protections.
Even with the new protections, the players will still be able to
play old music already illegally copied using the MP3 format, a
major concession by the recording industry.
Future versions of Rio players will be completely
SDMI-compliant, said Lorraine Comstock, of Diamond's RioPort
division. A spokeswoman for Milpitas, Calif.-based Creative Labs
said its Nomad digital music player, to hit store shelves in July,
will also comply with the SDMI standard.
Industry members adopted the design specifications at a
conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. They are under
technical review and are to be ratified and made public by July 8.
Analysts said the security features, however cumbersome, were
inevitable.
''I think for the traditional music industry to back this, there
has obviously going to have to be some fairly rigorous copyright
protection,'' said Clay Ryder, an analyst for Zona Research.
He suspects computer-savvy hackers will try to find a way around
the security features, but the chore will prove labor-intensive.
''Nothing's 100 percent crack-proof, but you would go through a
hell of a lot of effort to descramble something,'' Ryder said.
The SDMI members include each of the big five record labels _
BMG Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music, Sony Music Entertainment,
Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group _ all looking to
capitalize on the growing digital music marketplace while
protecting artist and label copyrights.
The Recording Industry Association of America lost a suit
earlier this month to halt sales of the Rio _ a portable machine
that carries about an hour's worth of CD-quality MP3 music on a
computer chip.
Comstock thinks the design specifications will help make popular
music available to online consumers.
''For the consumers the SDMI specification is a good thing
because today you cannot buy music online from well known
artists,'' Comstock said.
Currently, most of the music available for sale on the Internet
consists of lesser-known artists. |
