Hows TTRE's beta test goin?->Earlier this year BMG Germany came under fire for releasing 130, 000 CDs with copy-protection from Israeli digital security experts Midbar. The level of customer complaint was phenomenal as listeners asserting that the discs wouldn't work in their home players; BMG was forced to recall the discs and stop the trial. Aquilino, however, claims that the SunnComm techniques are far more compatible, with only pre-1995 players likely to suffer problems. "I've only had one machine fail - an old early 1990 Pioneer machine... But we're not going to pull the project based on that because there's always further development and refinement."
google.com
Friday, December 22, 2000
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Protection racket
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American record company Fahrenheit Entertainment, which represents country artists such as Willie Nelson and Roy Clark, is to sell its catalogue on copy-protected CDs starting early next year.
The discs will be encrypted by Phoenix-based SunnComm, whose spokesman Mario Iacoviello claims that "whether you purchase it in the store or download it off the Internet, you will not be able to copy it onto another CD if it is manufactured through our encryption software." SunnComm aims to achieve this end by altering the data portion of the CD rather than the audio itself. "There's a whole lot of data aside from the audio such as the table of contents" says John Aquilino, SunnComm chairman. We've altered data at multiple points in the disc to render it incapable of being copied or recognized from the standpoint of data." While such a solution is obviously attractive to a record company, the compact disc itself was not designed with anti-piracy measures in mind. Past attempts at preventing CDs from being copied, therefore, have been far from succesful.
Earlier this year BMG Germany came under fire for releasing 130, 000 CDs with copy-protection from Israeli digital security experts Midbar. The level of customer complaint was phenomenal as listeners asserting that the discs wouldn't work in their home players; BMG was forced to recall the discs and stop the trial. Aquilino, however, claims that the SunnComm techniques are far more compatible, with only pre-1995 players likely to suffer problems. "I've only had one machine fail - an old early 1990 Pioneer machine... But we're not going to pull the project based on that because there's always further development and refinement."
Thursday, December 21, 2000 |
