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Another example of the madness. Adobe has had Dmitry Sklyarov arrested! Expect more of this. Intellectualy property owners cannot secure their digital information, so the only recourse they have is to fight back with this sort of draconian police state mentality. Hey, reminds me of another no-way-to-win war that they keep fighting. Maybe we can get 50% of the population behind bars. Hell, let's just lock everybody up and be done with it.
There's been a lot happening in the intellectual property wars lately. I haven't been able to write anything informative. But I am digesting, so something will come out eventually.
One thing I can't pass over is that the music recording industry has quiety started distributing "CDs" with "copy protection" mechanisms built in. I put those words in quotes because these are not CDs (they do not conform to the Red Book standard that defines audio CDs) and it's questionable whether what they are doing is really copy protection. I can think of a few better descriptions, but none of them are too polite.
Here's the slashdot story.
Seems like the copy protection consists of inserting small errors all throughout the CD. An audio CD player (a good one at least) has all sorts of error correction circuitry built into it so that when an error is encountered the player looks at the data on both sides of the error and interpolates what it thinks should be in place of the error. So the error filled (I mean "copy protected") CD will play correctly (well, not theoretically correctly because all the information is not there, but apparently you can't hear the difference, so practically correctly.) But a CD drive in your computer is just making exact copies of the data. If you try to rip one of these CDs into MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis, or Windows Media Format, or whatever) the computer will dutifully copy all the errors as well which will now destroy the sound of the music (because your MP3 - or whatever - player isn't doing this same sort of error correction.)
The solution is just a software release away. Someone just has to write a software ripper that does this sort of error correction. And, in fact, cdparanoia is a software decoder that does just that. It was written for the obvious reason of enabling people to rip audio tracks from scratched CDs. The comments on /. are saying it will work for these new disks, and that seems to make sense. The catch, of course, is that cdparanoia is a free software product and only runs on linux. And this is the whole battle in a nutshell.
Digital information is copyable by definition. The only way to control the ability of people to make copies is to control the entire consumer electronics industry. And this is what is being attempted, although I fear not many believe such a campaign is underway. If we all used Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems, and can only buy CPRM hard drives, and all our monitors, TV's, stereo speakers, headphones, etc... have built in protection mechanisms - then they could make an attempt to control this stuff. Linux would have to be illegal (and it could be made so by arguing that linux is a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.) All old stereo and computer equipment would have to be made illegal. All new equipment would have to have these electronic protections built in.
But that's impossible you say. People won't stand for it. But they made plants illegal, and that's even more ridiculous. These things happen. Word to the wise: don't throw out your old computers. You may need them to fight the good fight some day.