All thumbs in the digital dike

[unixronin]

An article (available to subscribers only, sorry) in the September issue of Scientific American, talking about HD-DVD and Blu-Ray encryption being cracked, includes the following quote:

Noting the futility of access-control measures for digital material — even Microsoft security engineers have acknowledged this problem in a 2002 analysis popularly called the Darknet Report — content providers seem to be considering other approaches.  At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Disney chief executive Robert Iger remarked that "the best way to combat piracy is to bring content to market on a well-timed, well-priced basis," which would make media piracy less lucrative, if not irrelevant.  [...]

It must have been ten years ago that I read an interview with an Eastern European professional media pirate who said, as best I recall the comment:

"There is only one thing the [entertainment] industry can do that would put me out of business, and that is to start charging a fair price for their products.  But they'll never do it."

The entertainment industry finally gave up fighting DeCSS, but they thought they had everything locked up with the AACS content-protection system on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs.  Now they're finding out that crackers can break new AACS codes faster than they can change the codes, and ten years after that interview, the light is finally beginning to dawn.  Perhaps we may yet see a future without AACS or regional coding.

Comments

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Information wants to be free.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but there's a price I would pay to have a legitimate copy of something, with a splufty box and liner notes. The $20-ish that many movie studios seem to be charging for sell-through DVDs seems about right. I'd buy a lot more CDs if they cost $9.99 for a single CD--that's an amount of money I'm willing to gamble. As it is, they're just barely the wrong side of "expensive" for me to buy it unless I know darn well I'm gonna listen to it over and over.

Of course, there are considerations other than value-for-money. Like the extortion-like lawsuits in which the RIAA engages against its own customer base--that's enough to turn me off buying anything from a major label no matter what the price. And Sony's CD rootkit fiasco, for which Sony has never apologized, and in response to which I will let no Sony product darken my door until they do.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd feel better about paying major-label prices for CDs if I knew that some substantial fraction of that amount ended up in the artist's pocket, instead of almost all of it being (frankly) stolen by the record company through "creative" accounting procedures. Only in the music business can an artist release a major new work that generates great sales at full regular prices and still somehow end up out of pocket over it. And that's before you even get into the record companies stealing the rights to their artists' music.

The honest truth is, the major labels have been cheating their artists blind for fifty years, and it's only really in the last ten that the dirty laundry has started to come out.

These days, I honestly can't remember when I last bought a CD from a label other than Metropolis or InsideOut.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, artist compensation is an important issue too.

I'm a big fan of Metropolis, Projekt, and Cleopatra. Projekt sort of occupies the same place that 4AD did, back in the 80s...lots of ethereal stuff. This Mortal Coil is now on Projekt IIRC.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Cleopatra, I'd forgotten about. It's been a while since I bought anything on Projekt, but that's just chance really. (I actually don't have any This Mortal Coil more recent then Blood.)

InsideOut is the label all of Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Ayreon Project material is published on. I don't know who else they carry.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Cleopatra has pretty much jumped the shark at this point but in the 90s they were "it" for goth music. They released a lot of compilation albums of various goth acts covering well known songs. They had a bunch of name acts for a while--Switchblade Symphony, Gary Numan, and Kraftwerk--but all of them have either disbanded (Switchblade) or signed with other labels (Numan, Kraftwerk) since.

I have It'll End In Tears and Filigree and Shadow on vinyl. :-) And I don't think TMC released anything after Blood, which I find, after checking my music collection, is on 4AD. I could have sworn at least one big-name 80s-era 4AD act defected to Projekt and they were it. Weird. I know Cocteau Twins left; not sure what label they're on now.