Copy-protected CDs are not CDs, says Philips
Written by roxeteer on January 21, 2002 to Music Business.
Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, a co-creator of the CD format, is not playing along as major record labels unveil their copy-protection technology for CDs. Philips owns the “Compact Disc” trademark and the CD logo that has been on every disc since Philips and Sony jointly developed the technology in 1978. Now Philips says that as the copy-protected CDs can’t be played on some CD players, such as CD-ROM drives and even some standard stereo systems, the protected discs do not qualify as “compact discs” and thus can’t use the CD logo.
The copy protection has been introduced by the five major record labels: BMG Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music and Warner Music Group. The controversial technology introduces minute errors to the CDs or changes the location of data on the discs to prevent them from being played back on computers.
So far, only a couple of discs have been copy-protected with this technology. Natalie Imbruglia’s album “White Lilies Island” from BMG prompted numerous returns in the United Kingdom as record buyers thought their discs were broken.
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9 comments
johmi said on November 15, 2002 10:48:
I have tried this CD in my player, a Marantz DR6000, which is a dedicated audio-CD-player. This player is not capable of playing it, it just tells me that the disc is “NO AUDIO - PLEASE INSERT A NEW DISC”. This has convinced (spelling?) me that I will NEVER buy and MUSIC PRODUCT (observe not CD) containing COPY PROTECTION since they DON´T FOLLOW Philips RED BOOK (cannot be played in all CD-players directly) and can´t therefore be said to be Compact Disc.
Best regards Mikael
Mfan28179-Jason said on January 22, 2002 19:56:
Looks like I’ll be buying fewer albums now. If they want to pull this kind of game with me, then I simply will quit buying and start downloading. This will prevent me from making my own compilation CDs for my own personal use, giving less reason to buy albums that are copyright protected. I do believe they will see this backfire in many ways.