the sunset clause
Cory Doctorow tells it like it is:
From the packaging, it’s very hard to tell if a music CD is going to infect your computer with spyware, a rootkit, or similar malicious, anti-customer technology. [...] Most of the major labels have decided that they need to punish their remaining customers with infectious technologies. I don’t trust them, so I’ve just stopped buying CDs. Between mashups, Creative Commons licensed music, Internet radio, and my gigantic collection of tracks ripped from my old CDs, I have all the music I need for now. If a hot band comes out with a hot album, they’d better be willing to sell me Oggs or MP3s, ‘cause I’ve had it with CDs. There’s no music worth risking my data for.
I’m not quite there yet, but it won’t be long.
Fuck ‘em.
Brena
4 December 2005, 11:49 #
Nicely put. I’m there.
Mr Reasonable
4 December 2005, 13:20 #
I’m right behind you Alan. With the imminent purchase of a Palm LifeDrive, I’m going fully MP3 and am busy ripping tracks today to load into my shiny new 80Gb pocketdrive where they can happy sit forever.
Alan
4 December 2005, 16:42 #
Saves having to argue with the kids over who gets to have the living-room stereo, too.
ben.run
5 December 2005, 18:47 #
The crapware they put on the CD doesn’t bother me. I won’t run it so it doesn’t make any difference. I can still rip CDs that have this on. The type of CD I hate is when they screq around with the error correction in the hope that a CDROM will read errors but an audio CD player will pass over them.
The problem with this technique is that the error correction is there for a reason, to correct errors!! The CD is designed around error correction. It is valid to even get a new CD that has errors on it as there are manufacturing blips. The whole point is the error correction is supposed to be at a level that will mean the CD will remain readable for its life.
Now when you start messing around with that for stupid copy control reasons you erode that nice safety buffer. Meaning the chances are in a few years you will not be able to read that CD properly any more because the natural errors that have been incurred will have pushed the error correction over the threshold given that it was right up to the edge when new!!
This is the reason I won’t buy any CD that has copy control on because I do not know what technique they will be using.
Silly thing of course is Copy control only changes my decisions as to what music to BUY. It changes nothing else. Maybe the record companies will one day get a clue and stop punishing those who actually pay for their producuts!!??!?!?
Ben.
Alan
5 December 2005, 21:05 #
Agreed on the error correction thing.