Avast
Topic: Music and Video
Sony apparently is concerned with "schoolyard piracy." No, it's not keelhauling a playground. Schoolyard piracy seems to be the act of copying a CD and giving it to your friends... all 6,427 of them.

According to this article, they've pretty much come to grips with the fact they're not going to keep music off of peer-to-peer networks. As fast as they create roadblocks, the hackers find ways around them.
But they have decided that they'll limit the number of copies that can be made. Essentially, once you've bought a CD, you can make 3 copies. So you'd be able to play the music without the original CD on your computer, a backup of the CD, and maybe give a copy to a friend. Oh, and the original CD will still work anywhere too.

On the one hand, this is one way that music piracy is making the cost of CD's higher; by making the companies pour money into researching futile ways to limit the piracy.

On the other hand, I'd kind of like the ability to copy the CD as many times as I want. If I wipe my hard drive, I may be out of recordings fairly quickly, and end up able to use only the original CD.

The laughable part is that it's a digital format, and a cassette is analog. Once the ones and zeros are converted to an analog signal and piped through your cassette recorder, the copy protection won't stop you recording to the casette. Then you can use the cassette to convert it back to a CD, and all it'll get is the audio, without the copy protection. You'll lose a little bit of sound quality, but you'll have not only bypassed, but completely eliminated the copy protection. It's a little time-consuming, but once you're done, you never have to do it again, and you can copy the new files as often as you like. Or you can just plug a patch cord into the headphone jack or "line out" of your CD player, and into your computer's "line in" jack on your sound card, and record it that way, directly, with almost no loss of quality.

But you don't even need to do that! Apple has decided not to participate in the endeavor, and so the iPod, one of the most popular MP3 players, is incompatible with the system. To get around this, there's a web site you can visit once you've bought one of these protected CD's. You simply complain that you can't transfer music to your iPod, and they'll email you a back door, allowing you to bypass the copy protection completely.

In short, the copy protection is worthless, but anyone that legitimately buys music pays extra for that worthless copy protection that they don't want and will keep them from using the music the way they really want to use it, and the music pirates will still get free music anyway. As usual, it hurts the legitimate purchaser far more than it hurts the pirate.

When I was in high school and didn't have much money, I would occasionally go in two ways on an album with a friend. We'd buy a cassette of the album, copy it, and take turns with who kept the original. I guess that was schoolyard piracy. But it was never a problem until now, for some reason.

I can understand that, though. Schoolyard piracy can't be traced by Big Brother monitoring your downloads. It's still piracy, but it's not something that the RIAA can watch, so they're probably pretty pissed off about it now.

The article says the format's purpose is mainly to make people think a little more when they dub their CDs to another system. All it makes me think is that I already spend way too much money on a CD; limiting the number of recordings I can get from it will only encourage me to download it from somewhere else, rather than waste one of my precious 3 legitimate dubs.

It seems to me that people just can't buy music any more. Nowadays, with all the fuss about file sharing and copy protection, it seems more and more like we're just renting it.