Petteri Pyyny
3 Jan 2004 13:42
Belgian consumer watchdog, Test-Achats, has sued four out of five world's largest record labels in Belgium. The lawsuit is filed against the EMI, Sony, BMG and Universal because these companies have released so-called copy protected audio CDs in Belgium that fail to work in various CD players, including many leading-brand car stereos and home PCs.
Group says that consumers acting in good faith were victims of an ill-designed attempt by the big record labels to stop piracy. Virtually all CD copy-protection mechanisms function in the same way -- they "break" the standard CD audio disc by artificially manufactured "scratches" or other similiar mechanisms. Regular home CD players typically ignore such "problems" with the disc, since their purpose is to produce music out of audio CDs, not to read the CD 100 percent exactly. But the problems start piling up with computer CD-ROM drives that are meant for totally different purpose; to read 1:1 the data that is stored on the disc -- everybody knows that programs or data files stored on CDs have to be read exactly right in order for them to work. But the problem is that for many consumers, PC is a multimedia device, just like a home stereo, that is meant to play movies and audio CDs correctly. And to make things worse, many "stand-alone" CD player manufactures use nowadays same parts that are used in CD-ROM drives and therefor such CD players aren't capable of handling these "copy protected" discs either.
Test-Achats also points out that virtually all the European countries allow copies of audio CDs to be made for personal use and copy protection mechanisms introduced by record labels intervene with this right.
More information:
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The Register