The Times: Tech column - CD copy-protection backlash/Geek spying/William Shatner's blog
By David Rowan
IF you bought the latest Robbie Williams CD or even the Greatest Hits album by Five, then there is a good chance that you have been cheated. You might have thought that by paying £12 for a legitimate, un-pirated album you would be able to play that music at your convenience on whatever CD player you happen to own. Tut-tut. You have forgotten how far the music industry will go in its determination to maximise profits using whatever new technology is available.
The big record companies are so determined to control digital music that "copy-protection" software is finding its way on to more and more chart CDs. Intended to prevent music from being unlawfully copied and distributed, the software determines exactly how a CD may be played - and on what.
Last November we reported that Natalie Imbruglia's album White Lilies Island could not be recorded on to MiniDisc or played on certain PCs, thanks to software called the Cactus Data Shield. Since then, the practice has spread rapidly. Unless consumers make a fuss they will soon have no choice on how they enjoy digital music. The Campaign for Digital Rights is monitoring the spread of what it calls "corrupt" audio CDs and the examples on its website (uk.eurorights.org) are growing at an alarming rate. Midbar, the Israeli company behind the Cactus Data Shield, says it has issued more than ten million copy-protected CDs in Europe and the US, and is about to put a further million on the Japanese market.
It is, the record companies say, their best hope for preventing digital piracy. Increasingly low-key warning notices are appearing on CD wrappers. But that may not be enough to prevent a consumer backlash. Last month Karen DeLise, a concerned Californian, claimed she had not known that the album would not play on her computer. Suncomm, the digital rights firm behind the album, agreed to warn more prominently that it could not be used in CD-Rom drives or on DVD players.
The fight will not end here. If you legally buy music for your own use you should have every right to play it on the device of your choice. Copy-protection technology should not be allowed to limit your listening choices.
++++
STOP me if you have already read this on my screen, but I am anxious about computer privacy this week. Markus Kuhn, a smart computer lecturer at Cambridge University, has just shown how simple it is to eavesdrop confidential information merely by pointing a telescope at your window. By measuring how your computer screen causes light to flicker across the room - bear with me, this is serious - he can, with the right sensors, work out just what your cathode-ray-tube monitor is displaying.
And don't think you're safe if you have one of those slick new LCD monitors: in a separate piece of new research, Joe Loughry, a programmer for Lockheed Martin, has shown how the flashing red lights on your modem can be decoded by spies 20 yards away to reveal what your e-mails say. Just because the technology is there, that is not to say Big Brother will necessarily park outside your front room, staring at the light bouncing around the walls.
But if you spot the neighbours taping black binliners over the windows, you will know what is worrying them.
++++
NOT all Hollywood stars let the PR machine control their every word, and just as well. Here's to William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek, for giving us plenty of amusement (sometimes unwittingly) through his lively new website, williamshatner.com. Besides the normal live chats and fan-club updates, Shatner keeps a diary detailing everything from his lunches of halibut sandwiches to his need for humour to counter "the joke that God is playing on us".
His daughter, Lisabeth, has her own column where she elaborates on dad's zany wit: the time he turned a phaser gun on her during filming, for instance, and made Leonard Nimoy laugh "for several minutes. Ha, ha, I thought, he did it again." This site is a cult in the making.
(The Times, March 13 2002)
IF you bought the latest Robbie Williams CD or even the Greatest Hits album by Five, then there is a good chance that you have been cheated. You might have thought that by paying £12 for a legitimate, un-pirated album you would be able to play that music at your convenience on whatever CD player you happen to own. Tut-tut. You have forgotten how far the music industry will go in its determination to maximise profits using whatever new technology is available.
The big record companies are so determined to control digital music that "copy-protection" software is finding its way on to more and more chart CDs. Intended to prevent music from being unlawfully copied and distributed, the software determines exactly how a CD may be played - and on what.
Last November we reported that Natalie Imbruglia's album White Lilies Island could not be recorded on to MiniDisc or played on certain PCs, thanks to software called the Cactus Data Shield. Since then, the practice has spread rapidly. Unless consumers make a fuss they will soon have no choice on how they enjoy digital music. The Campaign for Digital Rights is monitoring the spread of what it calls "corrupt" audio CDs and the examples on its website (uk.eurorights.org) are growing at an alarming rate. Midbar, the Israeli company behind the Cactus Data Shield, says it has issued more than ten million copy-protected CDs in Europe and the US, and is about to put a further million on the Japanese market.
It is, the record companies say, their best hope for preventing digital piracy. Increasingly low-key warning notices are appearing on CD wrappers. But that may not be enough to prevent a consumer backlash. Last month Karen DeLise, a concerned Californian, claimed she had not known that the album would not play on her computer. Suncomm, the digital rights firm behind the album, agreed to warn more prominently that it could not be used in CD-Rom drives or on DVD players.
The fight will not end here. If you legally buy music for your own use you should have every right to play it on the device of your choice. Copy-protection technology should not be allowed to limit your listening choices.
++++
STOP me if you have already read this on my screen, but I am anxious about computer privacy this week. Markus Kuhn, a smart computer lecturer at Cambridge University, has just shown how simple it is to eavesdrop confidential information merely by pointing a telescope at your window. By measuring how your computer screen causes light to flicker across the room - bear with me, this is serious - he can, with the right sensors, work out just what your cathode-ray-tube monitor is displaying.
And don't think you're safe if you have one of those slick new LCD monitors: in a separate piece of new research, Joe Loughry, a programmer for Lockheed Martin, has shown how the flashing red lights on your modem can be decoded by spies 20 yards away to reveal what your e-mails say. Just because the technology is there, that is not to say Big Brother will necessarily park outside your front room, staring at the light bouncing around the walls.
But if you spot the neighbours taping black binliners over the windows, you will know what is worrying them.
++++
NOT all Hollywood stars let the PR machine control their every word, and just as well. Here's to William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek, for giving us plenty of amusement (sometimes unwittingly) through his lively new website, williamshatner.com. Besides the normal live chats and fan-club updates, Shatner keeps a diary detailing everything from his lunches of halibut sandwiches to his need for humour to counter "the joke that God is playing on us".
His daughter, Lisabeth, has her own column where she elaborates on dad's zany wit: the time he turned a phaser gun on her during filming, for instance, and made Leonard Nimoy laugh "for several minutes. Ha, ha, I thought, he did it again." This site is a cult in the making.
(The Times, March 13 2002)
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