On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Mark I. Ross wrote:
> have problems with playing audio CD-R's - so I obviously never thought to
> check that particular factoid about my Sony DVD player before buying it.
> And I mean, really, who gives a crap if it requires engineering effort -
> it's not like it hasn't been done before. It's not exactly rocket science
> ('specially for someone like Sony). I personally think it's because Sony
> thinks CD-R's are all recorded by people pirating tunez, which is not the
> case here - i just made some mix CD-R's from my CD's and now they're
> basically useless, unless I play them in my 'puter. sheesh how dumb....
As someone else mentioned, there are technical reasons why early first-
generation DVD players had trouble reading CD-R's. Those should have been
fixed by now, though. However, you're 100% right about the industry being
paranoid about CD-R's, and in fact there *is* a conspiracy of sorts going
on with CD-R's and consumer equipment as we speak! I read an interesting
Slashdot discussion today about Canada taxing CD-R's.. it turns out that
CD-R's sold as "Audio CD-Rs" have a couple of bits burned into the
read-only section that a recorder or player can use to distinguish them
from the regular "data CD-R's". This is apparently so that countries like
Canada (and I'm sure the RIAA and others would *love* to see this happen
in the U.S. and everywhere else) can charge a higher "piracy tax" for the
audio variety than the data variety (60 cents vs. 5.2 cents).
>From the playback side, computer CD-ROM drives and older CD players don't
care about the difference, but apparently the newer players coming out (as
part of the SCMS and other copy protection shite) will *refuse* to play
data CD-R's, thus forcing you to buy the special (and higher taxed, at
least in Canada) audio CD-R's. So far I haven't seen this on any of my
hardware (including my Sony MXD-D3). Or maybe the plan is that the new
audio CD-R decks will refuse to *write* to data CD-R's, or maybe *both*,
but the point is that the technology exists for Sony and others, under
pressure from the recording industry, to collect a "piracy tax" from
everyone who wants to burn their own audio CD's, regardless of whether or
not they're actually pirating anything!
For more info, read the article and comments here:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/17/1243229&mode=thread
Or if you're Canadian and want to speak out against this, sign the
petition here: http://www.sycorp.com/petition.htm
-Jake
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