Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Digital Lifestyles: Some Issues

There's a few points that I've thought about recently, while they aren't big issues at the moment I can see them becoming more important points of discussion quite soon.

Here's the first:


Digital Rights


So called "Copy protection" measures on CDs are now more and more commonplace, and from what I understand, most of these work by corrupting the CD standard, the "Red Book" standard et al (More info).


This is all very well and good, and the people selling these protection technologies all claim that their "Audio Discs" work in 90 something percent of CD drives (they can't label them as Compact Discs as that would infrige a whole lot of trade marks etc, protected discs just don't follow the standards so aren't CDs).


So I accept that there are a few current CD players that don't accept them (usually car CD players or similar) and a few Macs that get stuck. However, the disc vendors don't seem to have taken account of the fact that the standard is there so that all CD players, and all CD players that are currently being designed can work with the CDs around today, including those created years ago (the CD standards are now over 20 years old!).


How can they possibly guarantee that a "copy protected" "Audio disc" will work in the players of the future? I don't think they can. Especially with the convergence of the home entertainment devices so common today, CD players are also becoming DVD players, getting functionality to play the family digital photos on the TV. In fact the "media centre" as Microsoft call it, is becoming a reality, and broken discs are not going to help this technology progress.


More importantly, copy protection like this don't even work


Personally I question the legality of these discs being sold on the shelves with other real (non-corrupt) CDs, as their placement alongside the genuine article may have trades descriptions or similar implications in UK law at least.


I certainly won't be buying any corrupt discs.

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