No more music CDs without copy protection

For better or worse, there will not be much must-buy new music to complicate the issue. Love them used records!

In all seriousness, the record business really does have a problem on its hands which is different in absolute terms from previous episodes. It actually doesn't seem as if they forsaw, when they made the move to digital all those years ago, that one day copies with zero degradation could be dubbed at home - and certainly not that free (if imperfect) copies could be mass-distributed by something called the internet without a physical disk changing hands. Not that I give a hot damn about the majority of the recording industry, but I do worry for the future viability of making a living as a recording artist (and about those good but smaller labels who aren't busy fouling the market with their crap product and reactionary thickheadedness). Although the industry is surely going about it the wrong way, digital copyright protection is a legitimate and very thorny issue to solve, if that even proves possible at all. I would love to see the day when artists can bypass labels entirely if they so choose, making money by distributing their own content over the Web in a high resolution format directly to consumers, but it's hard to see right now how they could protect their franchise against file-sharing schemes. Saying musicians will have to make their living off of performing is too limiting and discriminitory; a recording artist should be able, if they want, to be like the author of a book, attempting to make money from the sales of their original works in accordance with the works' popularity, without having to make a second career out of touring just to repay label advances and make up for unauthorized copying and distributing of their intellectual property, if they don't desire to. Ironically, it's the very digital technology that gives them the means of cheaply recording and distributing their music without the support of a label, that also makes them vulnerable to being ripped-off by their potential customers.

Unsound, I don't disagree with the substance of anything you have said, just some of your extrapolations.

1) "Zero degradation of what?" - Zero degradation of the bits on the disk when copied to another disk. I am not looking at this issue from an audiophile point of view that places more importance on those bits' ability or lack thereof to capture and transmit the performance. And I don't think that zero degradation disk copying is a bad thing in and of itself - on the contrary, I find it quite wonderful as far as it goes. But the fact is that it does remove one of the prime disincentives to relying on copied source material instead of purchasing it, and this will probably be true from here foward in the digital world, no matter how high-rez or how multi-channel the originals are made.

2) "I personally have no interest in making copies" - That's well and fine, but it doesn't make the problem go away. I only make copies in order to create personalized compilations, and though I will copy stuff to share with friends - as I used to do via cassettes - I do know people who routinely get music they're interested in for free off the Web rather than purchasing it, something I have no interest in. You and I are of an older school, and aren't necessarily indicative of the direction issues such as method of distribution and absolute fidelity are going in.

3) "Self-serving corporations may be hindering the advance of future technologies" and "The implication that all recording machines and software are only in existence to illegally copy" - These are some of the reasons why I say the industry is approaching the issure in the wrong way, and that it is a very thorny problem. Meaning, while I agree with the industry position that there is a real threat to intellectual property protection, there is no acceptable solution in the offing at present. There will likely never be one that works effectively for long either, nor perfectly transparently at that. If there was an easy, non-problematic answer, we wouldn't be where we are, with the software industry fighting the hardware industry, court cases, pissed-off audiophiles, etc.

4) "What's next, a flag for copy machines to protect publishers? Of course not, it's bothersome to copy" - Why do you think the idea of the digital book is dead in the water for the time being?

5)"Standard marketing of artists restricts choice and freedom of expression" - This is precisely why I say I would love to see the day when artists can make and distribute, and solely profit from, their own work. But digital technology is a double-edged sword in this respect.

6) "How many geniuses are we exempt from?" - How many more will we be exempt from, if the new paradigm becomes that there is no way to make money from trying to distribute and sell your recorded works?

Pooh-poohing the reality of the great difficulty in protecting intellectual property rights in the dawning digital age won't solve the situation, and if you think I am defending the status quo, you misunderstand me. Ultimately, is suspect that the whole concept will have to undergo a fundamental paradigm shift brought on by technology. In 20 years time, I wouldn't be surprised if the ideas of an "original" and a "copyright" are seen as archaic, but I don't know where that will leave artists.

Actually, I need to come a little bit cleaner about the "zero-degradation" concept. While a CD-R should, in theory, be a 'bit-perfect' copy of the CD, I in fact do find small listening differences between original CDs and copies I burn. I do not know how to explain this, as a dropped bit here or there shouldn't be audible as an overall change. I might attribute this to something having to do with the playback optics' ability to read a CD-R accurately compared to a real CD. When I auditioned the Marantz CDR-500 vs. the HHB CDR-830 (which I bought - see the archived article in my threads), I found the HHB to not only outperform the Marantz with analog sources, but also to my surprise on digital dubs, all using the same blank media and playback reference system, leading me to wonder whether the HHB had a superior burning laser (which might result in CD-Rs with better readability). Jitter isn't a factor until the bits are transduced by the DAC, and so shouldn't affect the digital dubs (and indeed, I haven't found that my otherwise effective jitter-reduction box has any influence on the finished product when inserted for digital dubbing). But in general, with revealing source material, I do hear very slight reductions in transparent clarity, HF extension, tonal color saturation, microdynamics, soundstage separation, image body, and background 'blackness', when A-B'ing a copied track against the original (or put another way, the copy sounds a little veiled, thin, flat, and lacking in life by comparision). Subtle differences, to be sure, but I believe real, though I haven't performed blind ABX tests or anything. But again, I do not know if these differences are to be found in the encoded data itself, or are an artifact resulting from transcription difficulties. Anyway, for now the upshot is that the original still sounds best by a small margin in the reference system, though it makes no difference in my car, and is not enough to dissuade me from playing my custom comp's at home either ('course, most of my source material tends to be analog, making this an oft-moot question).