Petteri Pyyny
30 Mar 2003 2:57
Arista Records, a subsdiary of BMG, plans to launch copy-protected CDs in American markets around May/June this year. This will be the first major push towards copy-protected CDs in the U.S. Rest of the world has been experiencing the "joys" of copy-protected CDs for well over 12months now.
Arista plans to use copy-protection technology from SunnComm Technologies to protect its CDs. CDs will most likely be unplayable with PC CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives as well as in big number of stand-alone DVD players (most notably "Chinese" DVD players that are based on PC hardware such as IDE drives) and car CD players.
To compensate the playback problems with PC drives, the discs contain copy-protected WMA versions of the tracks that can't be transferred to portable audio players or to other PCs.
The fight is impossible to win from consumer point of view: if the sales increase after the copy-protected CDs are being introduced, labels can claim that copy-protection works. If the sales drop, they can blame ever-increasing P2P piracy and justify adding copy-protection mechanisms to more and more CDs. Arista's artists include Pink and Santana.
Some hardware manufacturers, most notably Apple have taken a very aggressive attitude against the copy-protection mechanisms, since the copy-protected CDs actually are CDs with severe read errors on the discs that PCs can't cope with, but normal CD players can. Apple has announced that playing copy-protected CDs with Macs will void warranty.
Source: CNet