Copying music unstoppable
BY JON FORTT
Mercury NewsPosted at 6:49 p.m. PST Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2001
The recording industry's attempts to prevent people from copying music CDs will fail.
The only way to keep people from copying is to keep them from listening, and people tend not to buy CDs they can't hear. As long as there are good microphones in the world, people will be able to copy music.
The music copying controversy began with the rise of Napster, the free online service where college students and tech geeks began swapping compressed music files in the late 1990s. Once the record labels figured out what was going on, they sued to shut down Napster.
Now that Napster is essentially dead, the labels have decided to take their campaign a step further: They want to limit the number of times you can copy songs from the CDs you buy.
It is not that simple, though.
Ironically, the record labels seem to be forgetting about the world's microphones. Anything played through a speaker can be recorded with a microphone.
And you can do a pretty good job of copying music, even without a good microphone. Consider the Archos Jukebox HD-MP3 Recorder, a device released earlier this year that provides a way around almost every conceivable copy protection scheme, and that should scare the pants off the music bigwigs down in L.A.
The Archos Jukebox HD-MP3 Recorder is a high-capacity digital audio player that plays songs off a built-in hard drive, and it costs just over $300. The unit also has an ``analog in'' microphone port, that allows you to record audio as an MP3 file. This ``analog in'' port is the scary part I mentioned.
The recording industry is not yet scared of analog. It is far too focused on preventing consumers from making perfect digital copies of music. That is what a PC with a CD-RW drive allows you to do today -- copy the music data file from a CD and onto your hard drive, the same way you would copy a Word document or a photograph.
Most people who copy music, however, are not interested in making perfect digital copies. They are interested in making mediocre digital copies. When they copy or ``rip'' songs off a music CD, most people translate the original AIFF file into an MP3 file that sounds almost the same but takes up about one-tenth the space. The smaller MP3 music files are easier to store on portable music players, and to swap on the Internet.
The recording industry has the power to block people from making digital-to-digital copies, or ``ripping'' CDs. The recording industry has far less power to stop people from making digital-to-analog-to-digital copies. Let me explain.
Recording and re-recording analog is messier than digital. While digital formats store music information as data files in the form of orderly ones and zeros, analog formats record a wider range of audio information. As analog sound files get recorded and re-recorded, they lose quality. Remember dubbing cassettes in the '80s? That's a perfect example.
No one listens to digital music, however. The digital signals must be converted to analog before we can hear them, so speakers and headphones are analog devices by definition.
As soon as sound heads out of a music player's speaker or headphone jack, it enters the analog realm and all bets are off. Anyone within earshot can record it. In fact, people make analog-to-digital recordings all the time, when they make a bootleg CD from a concert or a bootleg video from a movie theater. (Many such bootleg songs and movies are floating around the Net even now.)
That is, in essence, how the Archos Jukebox HD-MP3 Recorder works. Take a cord, and plug it into the ``analog out'' headphone jack of a CD player, and plug it into the ``analog in'' microphone port of the jukebox recorder, and you can capture a pretty nice sound file -- and skirt any copy protections in the process. Better yet, the Archos player automatically converts the song back into a digital MP3 file, for burning onto CDs or swapping over the Internet.
This, of course, sends the record labels back to the drawing board.
There are a few complications to this digital-analog-digital scheme. When you convert a song to analog, you lose all the artist/song/track information that came with the digital format. You must take care to start and end the recording at the right moment, the way you do with audio tapes.
But these annoyances are small potatoes. Consider the fact that Norwegian programmers while away long winters hacking the recording industry's encryption schemes. Do you really think they'll let a little analog conversion stop them?
