News Pirating

[Davkaus]

...and I am struggling to think of a reason why one would these days ? There must be reasons for some people though.

My CD player is designed for one task, my computer is designed to do lots of things.

The CD player should sound better, and it does.

It depends on your specific kit though. If you've got a decent cd player, but your computer is using a standard on-board sound, the CD player will win.

Stick a decent sound card in your PC and it'll compete with the best CD players out there, though.

[Xann]

Stick a decent sound card in your PC and it'll compete with the best CD players out there, though.

True enough, posh sound cards can produce sonic resolution way beyond CD standards - though there's not a very big catalogue of tunes at greater than CD quality.

Friends have PCs built for audio. Very impressive they are too, but you'd actually have to spend quite a bit of cash to make a machine/soundcard combo that sounds better playing CDs than a £300 CD player from let's say Marantz or Cambridge Audio.

This household prefers the Hi Fi, laptop and TV to be separate entities too.

:winkold:

[LondonLax]

The important part is the label stuck onto the plastic. That's where the data is stored and if that gets scratched or degraded there is nothing you can do to repair it.

Eh??? :shock:

Find an old CD you don't want any more and pull it apart, the plastic is just a round piece of clear plastic designed to protect the data which is encoded on the back of the label.

If you scratch the plastic it might mess up the CD but that is just because the laser traveling through it to reach the underside of the label is being refracted in the scratch. If you smooth it out again it's perfectly fine. The only reason the plastic is there is to protect the label and make it stiff so the laser can read it whilst it spins.

[leviramsey]

The underside isn't the label though. The label is screenprinted onto the plastic.

wiki"]

A thin layer of aluminium or, more rarely, gold is applied to the surface making it reflective. The metal is protected by a film of lacquer normally spin coated directly on the reflective layer. The label is printed on the lacquer layer, usually by screen printing or offset printing.

It goes (from the top, label side up)

Label

Plastic

[optionally, aluminum or gold]

Polycarbonate (pits encoded on the underside)

Aluminum or gold coating

Plastic

^

|

laser

[mjmooney]

The underside isn't the label though. The label is screenprinted onto the plastic.

wiki"]

A thin layer of aluminium or, more rarely, gold is applied to the surface making it reflective. The metal is protected by a film of lacquer normally spin coated directly on the reflective layer. The label is printed on the lacquer layer, usually by screen printing or offset printing.

It goes (from the top, label side up)

Label

Plastic

[optionally, aluminum or gold]

Polycarbonate (pits encoded on the underside)

Aluminum or gold coating

Plastic

^

|

laser

Now THAT, I believe. Data on the label indeed. Pish and piffle!

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Stuff that, it's magic.

[mykeyb]

Where do bootlegs fit in to the piracy debate

[limpid]

As with all copyright, it depends what the rights holder says. Some bands encourage it, some don't. Some bands recognize they make so little money from record sales that the free advertising for the gigs is worth more to them.

[tarjei]

Torrent sites go offline as police raid alleged copyright infringers

Pirate Bay goes offline too, but attributes that outage to power problems.

by Jon Brodkin - Oct 2 2012, 0:45am -200

Swedish police raided the hosting company PRQ today, taking four servers and possibly dozens of file-sharing sites offline. According to a report by TorrentFreak, sites taken offline include torrent sites torrenthound.com, linkomanija.net, and tankafetast.nu, several sports streaming sites, and at least two private BitTorrent sites.

PRQ was founded by two Swedes who also went on to found The Pirate Bay. PRQ was also the target of a 2006 raid that took the Pirate Bay website offline due to copyright infringement allegations. Coincidentally, the Pirate Bay also went offline today. But this was apparently unrelated to the PRQ raid, as Pirate Bay no longer relies on PRQ for hosting. The Pirate Bay said on Facebook that it is suffering through a power outage. "We have not been raided. We are not shutting down. We like turtles, waffles, and you," the Pirate Bay said.

PRQ confirmed today's raid. The outlet has a long list of controversial clients including WikiLeaks and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, according to a Forbes article. But the websites taken offline by the raid seem to be restricted to file sharing and streaming sites, plus PRQ's own site.

PRQ owner Mikael Viborg described the raid in an interview with Swedish news site Nyheter24, saying the police seized four servers, and that the raid was the first on the company since 2010.

article-link

[legov]

How many of the youth today go to a store and buy a CD, it all downloaded from Itunes or Amazon.

Not many towns have stores that sell tunes beyond the supermarket selection any more.

Saying that, there is a trophy element involved still.

The K-Pop scene sells a lot of boutique presentation 'mini albums' for £20+ and the kids don't bat an eye.

K-pop?

In Britain?!

It really is the end of the world.

[Stevo985]

How many of the youth today go to a store and buy a CD, it all downloaded from Itunes or Amazon.

Not many towns have stores that sell tunes beyond the supermarket selection any more.

Saying that, there is a trophy element involved still.

The K-Pop scene sells a lot of boutique presentation 'mini albums' for £20+ and the kids don't bat an eye.

Yeah, once HMV succumb to the inevitable and go under, there won't be anywhere on the highstreet that I can think of to buy CDs.

Or games and DVDs for that matter (there are a few game places left I suppose. But not DVDs).

It's all supermarkets now.

[leviramsey]

Microsoft files DMCA request for Google to remove links to pages with the number 45

Over the last year Microsoft asked Google to censor nearly 5 million webpages because they allegedly link to copyright infringing content. While these automated requests are often legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. In a recent DMCA notice Microsoft asked Google to censor BBC, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, Wikipedia and many more sites. In another request the software giant seeks the removal of a URL on Spotify.com.

In recent months the number of DMCA takedown requests sent out by copyright holders has increased dramatically, and it’s starting to turn the Internet into a big mess.

One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other sites of infringements.

That these automated tools aren’t always spot on is nicely illustrated by a recent DMCA notice sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft.

Claiming to prevent the unauthorized distribution of Windows 8 Beta the software company listed 65 “infringing” web pages. However, nearly half of the URLs that Google was asked to remove from its search results have nothing to do with Windows 8.

This apparent screw up in the automated filter mistakenly attempts to censor AMC Theatres, BBC, Buzzfeed, CNN, HuffPo, TechCrunch, RealClearPolitics, Rotten Tomatoes, ScienceDirect, Washington Post, Wikipedia and even the U.S. Government.

Judging from the page titles and content the websites in question were targeted because they reference the number “45″.

Unfortunately this notice is not an isolated incident. In another DMCA notice Microsoft asked Google to remove a Spotify.com URL and on several occasions they even asked Google to censor their own search engine Bing.

The good news is that Google appears to have white-listed a few domains, as the BBC and Wikipedia articles mentioned in the DMCA notice above were not censored. However, less prominent sites are not so lucky and the AMC Theatres and RealClearPolitics pages are still unavailable through Google search today.

As we have mentioned before, the DMCA avalanche is becoming a bigger problem day after day.

Microsoft and other rightsholders are censoring large parts of the Internet, often completely unfounded, and there is absolutely no one to hold them responsible. Websites can’t possibly verify every DMCA claim and the problem will only increase as more takedown notices are sent week after week.

Right now rightsholders and the anti-piracy outfits they employ have absolutely no incentive to improve the accuracy of their automated takedown systems, so perhaps it’s time for them to be punished?

Just a thought.

At least there's little chance of a thread on this site about Villa's point total this season getting claimed as infringing.

[CVByrne]

Pirating is only big because it's the easiest medium to get media. People have no need to pirate music since a great service like Spotify has come along. It's fairly priced and is an excellent service.

But take tv shows, is there a way to freely choose what tv shows you can get? Take Breaking Bad or Homeland for example, what tv channels are they on? TV is an outdated medium and will go through similar transition as the music industry does.

On demand media is what is required. Subscribe to what you want to see.

[bickster]

People have no need to pirate music since a great service like Spotify has come along. It's fairly priced and is an excellent service.

Clearly you aren't a musician. Spotify is the devil's work if you actually create music, the paybacks per play are so poor, it's obvious it will kill participating music within a generation. Spotify is evil.

[PompeyVillan]

Spotify isn't the answer for the artist or for the consumer. For the artist, as Bicks states, they get paid peanuts, and for the consumer you never get to 'own' your music.

It has it's advantages though.

[Tegis]

Spotify isn't the answer for the artist or for the consumer. For the artist, as Bicks states, they get paid peanuts, and for the consumer you never get to 'own' your music.

It has it's advantages though.

I see it as a good and positive start. It's not perfect by any means but I think the pricing is pretty spot on at 10 quid a month. It's enough to keep most off the pirate-path. Next is the issue of getting that money to the artist and step one would be to cut out the vermin leeches that is the record-labels.

[Chindie]

Spotify also suffers from a slightly wanting library. I haven't used it since their free service basically became a joke, but even before that I was completely unable to listento two of my favourite bands. And even when I found songs I liked, they regularly got pulled.

Isn't the answer for me. I'm not sure any streaming service is, in truth. I like to own my media, it gives me a reassurance that any 'service' doesn't.

[Qwpzxjor1]

Buying stuff on iTunes (or equivalent sites/programmes) is the way forward, they just need to look at their pricing.

The most attractive thing about pirating is the ease of it. No going out to the shops to buy a DVD, you can download, slot it straight into your library's and then have it easily accessed by a range of products like Apple TV, Boxee Box, Smart TV's..

However, pirating stuff is still an element of frustration.. to download it and realise it's poor quality, or the sound is missing in places, plus the illegal aspect.. If you could log onto iTunes and download a series for a reasonable price (if the industry thinks that £14.99 is a reasonable price then they're deluded) then they'd get a good chunk of the market currently doing illegal downloads. They should be looking at the quantity of sales, not what they value the media at.

(I'm going to use an Apple products example now - apologies, but it's the system I use and know..)

If you could quickly log into iTunes store, download a series for a few quid and put it straight into your iTunes library, then your Apple TV can see those straight away and already categorised for you and slotted nicely into your digital library. This system is in place now and works brilliantly - the stumbling block is that the media is still priced he same as high street shops! It's much preferable to download legally and be guaranteed a good quality file (and no legal repercussions) than download a torrent, convert it to mp4, check all the meta data has transferred okay, check the quality that it was a) good enough source and the conversion settings were good enough..

However, at £15-18 for a basic series, theres a huge chunk of the population would rather have that headache.

Companies should be looking to embrace the digital age rather than try to fight it. There's a certain amount of acceptance that their profit per sale is going to be substancially less, but then if they worked on the systems then the costs would greatly decrease too.

For every download of a series at £15 you've got 14 people downloading it illegally (these are made up numbers but I bet in some cases they're not that far off). If all 15 people downloaded that at £2, you've doubled your profits for no extra costs, providing the systems, servers and bandwidths have been invested in. And they wouldn't have to spend millions of pounds a year fighting against illegal downloads.

[coda]

Companies should be looking to embrace the digital age rather than try to fight it.

I think they will eventually. The demise of 3D will force them in to action. Maybe eventually every film will be released online and in the cinemas simultaneously. A film I want to see, Holy Motors, is being shown only at selected cinemas. The Guardian website is screening it in HD at a cost of £10 which is too much.

[Qwpzxjor1]

iTunes has good 'rental' options. Again though, too expensive. If you could do that with latest TV programmes, so you could watch the latest version of [your favourite american show] once, but not want to actually store it for future.. Not something I do, but I know alot of people who want to see the episode which was shown in America last night but won't be shown in the UK for ages. If they could watch it online for 50p, I'm sure they would.

Obviously be a bit more with films, but rental, or watch once, or a play license which expires in 24 hours or something, would encourage many more to avoid piracy, IMO.