Copying CDs will no longer be free, Sony announces

Either the CD is in normal CD format, in which case nothing stops you making multiple rips, or copies of the ripped music file.

Or the CD contains music already in some kind of file format (not Mp3) which has DRM controls built in; and therefore needs special software on your computer to play; and won't play on a normal CD player.

It must be the second, but who'd buy 'em? How many players are there that can actually play them?

Noooooooooooooo! Don't even consider this! Once you get this thing in the door, then they'll push for more; we've had this for a while now on blank tapes and blank CD media (I think), but now the government is pushing for MORE, including a higher levy on CDs and a new levy on things that were previously untouched, like hard disks, removable media for digital cameras, and MP3 players, whether they use a hard disk, removable storage, or internal flash memory. It's threatening to turn normal people into bootleggers up here, as it will add a substantial extra cost to many items that will consequently be much cheaper in the U.S.

Of course, this poses practical problems for dual use storage media (such as, indeed, flash cards/removable harddrives), but surely there are ways around that? The current situation isn't legally sustainable either, something has to be done and at the moment, crude as they are, levies actually are able to strike a fairly decent balance between the two parties. Whereas with all the DRM initiatives, the consumer clearly gets shafted on all fronts.

Then again, does this make downloading any copyrighted MP3 legal if you put them on the said storage media?

Also if you burn them as audio (because you still have audio only players) then it's down to around 15 - 17 MP3s per CD-R, which brings it up to 0,36/15 = 0,02 euro per mp3 ...

My biggest issue with this levy, and always has been, WHO GETS THE MONEY? Up until this point, none of the money that's been collected has been redistributed, and you can bet your damn boots that when it does get distributed (as they claim to be starting to, but probably only because the coalition I linked to above started raising bloody murder about the fairness of doing this at ALL), it's not going to be going to the people that actually are affected by copying. People go searching for MP3s of songs they don't already know, and the popular songs people tend to KNOW in greater numbers. Yet when the money is distributed it will go to the people who already sell the most. This is why I've called it the Celine Dion tax. If you make an MP3 of the Rheostatics, chances are Celine will get the money. She doesn't need any more damn money. If this is really what they're going to do, I'd much prefer that they take the money and donate it to a grant program to get younger struggling artists off the ground, instead of giving it to the established artists that already have the money. At the very least, the Sony plan at least seems to be putting the money directly into the hands of the artists being copied.

I'm not sure of Canadian law, but under current European law, the levy makes it legal for individuals to copy music for personal use. Owning the original is NOT needed (so this goes well beyond the "backup copy" case which, as far as I know, is the only legal way for copying copyrighted material in the US and other countries). If I borrow a CD from my neighbour and copy it onto CDR, it's perfectly legal. On the other hand, if I sell the said CDR or play it in public, it's not for personal use anymore, and it's illegal. This decriminalizes the home copier (which can only be a good thing I guess), and narrows the illegality down to the industry of commercial bootlegging/priracy.

But you're right in the observation that the levy system leaves a lot to desire for in terms of principle. If my CD burner fails at burning, I've paid money for nothing. If I use a CDR for data, ditto. If I already own the original, ditto. If I use a CDR for non-copyrighted material, ditto. A practical solution is to apply a correction factor to the levy reflecting how much this happens on average in practice (that can't be too difficult to find out). Like any tax/insurance/redistribution system, the idea behind such a levy is that it is never completely fair on a person-by-person case (I pay medical insurance but I've never been hospitalized, I pay taxes for lots of roads I'll never drive on, I pay for a welfare system I'm not using), but on average it is, and it's a fairly easy and efficient way to collect small amounts of money per song (I can't really see how a direct payment 0,0036 euro per song is feasible with any current payment system). The devil is indeed in the details: how the industry, once it gets the money, redistributes it (but that is something the industry has to sort out for themselves IMO), and the question of how high the levy should be. I think the argument that if a CD-quality track costs an X amount of money per hour, an MP3 with degraded quality of a tenth that size costs a tenth of X is pretty reasonable. Then it's all about negotiating/arguing about how high X should be, and considering that the proposed Canadian rate for CDR stands at about 0,30 euro per hour, that sounds quite reasonable.

My biggest objection against DRM/paying-by-song/paying-each-time-you-play-the-song is that it is the opposite: it might seen just for the individual case, but it's inefficient (how the hell are you going to pay for just 1 song? and surely small record labels are much more vulnerable in this game than the big ones), upsets the power balance (it sets the record company directly against the single consumer instead of bargaining collectively with consumers as a group), restricts freedom to copy stuff around and it raises some pretty serious privacy issues.

(sorry for my somewhat mangled English)

By the time Sony had announced this new technology, an Asian company had already begun experimenting with a technology for making copies. While they would not go into detail, a spokesperson for the company leaked that the technology incorporated a configurable pattern of magnetic material, stored on a reel of thin mylar."

The price difference between bulk 'for audio' CD-Rs and plain CD-Rs has fallen to a negligible amount in the last couple of years anyway, but whether this means that the levy has been quietly done away with, or just extended to all CD-R media, I dunno.

Yes, the UK is the only EU country that hasn't implemented it yet. In the other EU counties, the levy is about 0,52 euro for audio CDR's and 0,18 euro for data CDR's (reflecting the thought of the "correction factor" for media that are not exclusively used for audio).

The problem with the levy system is that while it might broadly be the most just solution, neither party thinks it's getting a fair deal: record companies dislike the freedom the consumers still have and the (in their eyes) low sum they're getting, and consumers are still enjoying their free lunch through the thwarting of all the record companies' fancy new anti-piracy technologies.

For data CDR's, it has been decided that for practical reasons it isn't possible to get a "refund" - the 3x lower levy on data CDR's is already meant to discount the ratio of personal/professional use.

So if you're a musician looking for a way to distribute your music, the idea is to buy audio CDR's without the levy. A quick glance at the prices of my CDR supplier reveals that his (5 pack) audio CDR's sell for 1,23 - 1,77 euro ex VAT apiece, so that would be around 0,71 - 1,25 euro without the levy. His data CDR's sell for around 0,40-0,80 cents (ex VAT inc levy) so it probably makes more sense to buy data CDR's regardless...

I'd say that refunds of such small amounts of money is cool in principle but in the end pretty useless - for everything over 500 copies you're better off going to a CD pressing plant, and for 500 data CDR's you're only going to get 90 euro's back. As a band, you're probably spending more than that on drumsticks alone.

i gots a question, so i'm reviving this 8-year-old-plus thread.

how do i copy a CD to a CDR without first reencoding the audio files? i want to keep the same level of compressing and not turn them into MP3s or whatever first. i actually rarely do this but i'd like to... anyone have any advice? i've got a macbook pro FWIW.

i guess the easiest way with a mac is to convert it to apple lossless in itunes, then burn to cd.

open the disc in finder. double click the cd icon on your desktop. copy those AIFF files into a folder. if you have burning software other than itunes, burn from there. if not, add the aiff files to itunes and burn there.

Use a program like XLD to extract the audio, and then use XLD to burn it onto a new disc. XLD might let you do a disc copy in one action, I've never tried it.

Most accurate way? I think you might be able to use Disk Utility to create an image, then burn that image. Not positive it works for audio cds, just a sec... (hunting down an audio cd)

I stand corrected, you can't do a disk image of an audio cd. The xld route is reasonable, but you want to make sure you do the version that will create .bin/.cue-style files to get track pregaps and such

haven't heard of XLD but that sounds good, if you really wanna get picky you should probably be running Exact Audio Copy in VirtualPC, but even I don't do that. AIFF to desktop to burner program should be fine, if you use iTunes for burning then just import them into iTunes as AIFF files and skip the desktop.

Bah, xld uses the same or comparable libraries.

what.cd accepts XLD so I figure it's as good as EAC

burning programs used to have a thing where you could right click and a 'copy cd' option would come up - it'd copy the CD to scratch space, eject it, then prompt you to enter the blank CD and burn it back onto the CD. dunno if iTunes does that