| Product: |
Rally in General |
| Date: |
24/03/06 (221 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Erm
Disadvantages: Stops you playing the music
In this wonderful age of technology we are able to buy things from the comfort of our own home, check our finances and tap into a wealth of information. We can now have thousands of music tracks on our person as we walk around town. Yet sadly some record companies have taken their product and retreated like a caveman scared of the sun.
Just what am I talking about? Copy Protection on CD’s, that’s what. Namely those great folks at EMI who put out cd’s and then invite you to attempt to play them.
Now the music industry were no doubt worried about their product when the likes of Napster came online and made it easy to download tracks for free. But did sales dwindle so much; figures seem to suggest they didn’t. In fact I’ve heard of countless stories where people have downloaded a track to sample and went out and bought the album as a result.
Sharing of music without buying it is nothing new. Back in the school days of the eighties and early nineties who didn’t tape an album for someone else? Now it’s just moved on to a digital age. Now up until this point I’ve had very little trouble with cd’s that come with copy protection software on them. I’ve imported them to my Ipod with no worry, most haven’t given me a problem in my car cd player although it does take a while thinking about it. If worst came to worst, there was software out there to get round the problem. The ironic thing is that you may have bought the cd but end up downloading the tracks anyway just to play in your car. Is it theft of music if you've bought the thing? I don’t really know.
Things for me came to head when I received the Corrine Bailey Ray CD this week. What used to be copy protection on a cd has now become content protection.
I popped the cd into my computer to load it into Itunes, it wouldn’t recognise it. Instead the cd loaded up a cumbersome music player that installed itself on my computer. The software then gives you the option to copy the songs onto your hard drive or create a cd copy! Yes that’s right the software allows you to create a playable cd that you can then copy again and probably rip to MP3 format to share around at your will. I had to ask myself what the point of this content protection was.
I then got my answer; the software wouldn’t allow creating a playable cd or MP3 files. It just refused; a look at the help files was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. I had to go to someone else’s computer to see if it worked and thankfully it did. But I still can't get the album onto Itunes and frankly that's pretty crap.
So EMI it’s all well and good trying to protect your product but you have to accept that music sharing is not necessarily an evil. The content protection you use it just making consumers frustrated and angry that they can’t listen to the music they’ve legally paid for without jumping through a lot of hoops. I honestly believe that cd’s are so cheap now that downloading the thing isn’t really worth the time and effort when you can fork out £6.99 and have the thing delivered to your door.
When Corinne sang ‘go put your records on’ in track three I had to smile. If only she knew how much trouble it was just to do that!
Summary: Content protection on cd's is getting my goat
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