The recording industry has begun selling music CDs designed to make it impossible for people to copy music to their computers, trade songs over the Internet, or transfer them to portable MP3 players.
Until now, the protected discs have been distributed mostly in Europe, with little publicity. But the strategy has already begun to set off some backlash there, as well as among American music lovers who fear they will be unable to use the increasingly popular portable MP3 devices or burn their own CDs of music that they have legally purchased.
The practice is also drawing the ire of several consumer electronics manufacturers, including Sony Electronics, which says it cannot guarantee the audio quality of these CDs on its players, and Apple Computer and Sonic Blue, whose popular portable music players might suffer if copy-protected CDs became the norm.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
But the record companies, which largely blame piracy by computer and Internet for the 10 percent decline in US music sales last year, are defending the practice and laying plans to bring more protected CDs to the US market.
The individual labels are being secretive about their market tests. But Macrovision, one of the companies supplying the industry with the technology, said several CDs bearing its copy protection scheme have been released by major labels in the US and are being sold in record stores across the country.
A side effect of several of the anti-copying technologies is that they prevent CDs from being played at all on some computer CD-ROM drives and DVD players designed to play standard CDs.
More Music from the Fast and Furious, which Universal released in December, sometimes will not play correctly on Macintosh computers, and people who listen to the CD on a PC hear the music at lower quality than they would on a CD player.
A label on the back of the CD container warns in small type that the disc is copy protected and says: "Playback problems may be experienced. If you experience playback problems, return this disc for a refund."
But even if the technology evolves to work with more machines, it will continue to thwart what many consumers have come to regard as a fundamental right: the ability to copy music they have legally purchased for their personal use.
Music fans whose parents once copied LPs to cassette tape now take for granted the ability to copy the contents of their CDs onto a hard drive. They can then make custom mixes of their music, or transfer songs to a portable MP3 player for their personal use. They can also burn CDs to sell illegally, or log on to Internet services that let millions of strangers share unauthorized copies of their music.
What bothers some consumers is that the technology does not discriminate between legal and illegal behavior.
"Being treated like a criminal makes me want to act like one," said Ron Arnold, 39, of Royal Oak, Michigan, who has 1,137 songs on his portable iPod, all of which he said he has paid for.
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
WASHINGTON POLICY: Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs are tipped to hit shipments of small parcels, cutting export growth by 1.3 percentage points The decision by US President Donald Trump to ban Chinese companies from using a US tariff loophole would hit tens of billions of dollars of trade and reduce China’s economic growth this year, according to new estimates by economists at Nomura Holdings Inc. According to Nomura’s estimates, last year companies such as Shein (希音) and PDD Holdings Inc’s (拼多多控股) Temu shipped US$46 billion of small parcels to the US to take advantage of the rule that allows items with a declared value under US$800 to enter the US tariff-free. Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs would slash such