Music Industry Increases Focus On Casual Piracy

MercuryNews: Here's another article addressing the challenges and opportunities regarding secure CD's, which not only prevent people from making endless dubs of CDs for friends, but the technology promises to help significantly reduce the leading source of unprotected MP3 music files that feed the P2P networks. That's great news for the industry's future growth, but bad news for some rights holders though - because songs that are already ripped and available freely will never totally disappear...

Overall, the new focus on casual piracy is broadening as Sony BMG plans to copy-protect all music CDs sold in the United States by the end of the year and EMI plans to introduce copy-protected CDs in its two largest markets (US & UK) soon.

Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's president of global digital business stated that tracks from Sony BMG's copy-protected CD's, "Do not play on iPods simply because Apple has this proprietary approach...We would be willing and able to put FairPlay on CDs in an instant if Steve Jobs would flick the switch and allow us to do that."

The article also points out that even though the industry's focus is getting sharper, the copy protection technologies from SunnComm, Macrovision and Sony DADC differ in subtle ways. "There are, however, some similarities. Many come with two sets of recorded music - songs in the unprotected format that plays whenever the disc is inserted into a CD or DVD player, and a separate session of compressed, copy-protected files that open when the disc is inserted into a computer..." However, SunnComm's newest offering doesn't require two recording sessions on a disc (so you can fit more tunes on the disc if so desired) and it reportedly adds the copy protection on the fly, in whatever format the labels choose: Windows Media or Sony's ATRAC. Furthering its interoperability efforts, SunnComm discs will also play on Macs, which is not true for the Macrovision technology behind EMI's copy protection....