protected from myself
Today I went out and purchased the score to the "Two Towers" film in order to amuse myself while driving, and because I think Howard Shore is a fine composer. This was good, and the score is wonderful, emotive - full of epic heroism and stark treachery - the kind of thing that you expect to hear and see when you go to the movies.
What was not wonderful, and what was not expected was what appears to be some form of copy protection imposed by Reprise Records and Warner Music Group.
While the disc plays perfectly in my car's disc player, and just fine in my home stereo system - all sounds will cease should I attempt to listen to it in my computer's disc player and then read or write any sort of data from the hard drive at the same time. Writing this article and attempting to absorb Mr. Shore's work has become a tortuous exercise in sado-masochism.
God forbid that I try and play it on my XBox.
Should I attempt that particular foolhardy venture, then I can expect tracks three, five, nine, eleven and fifteen skip or jump so frequently as to be unplayable. Track sixteen will abruptly self-terminate at one minute and five seconds, and tracks seventeen through nineteen simply will not play. I'm not certain about the rest of the tracks - as my listening became an increasingly frustrating experience, my patience in recording all of this for posterity decreased in a directly inverse proportion.
Perhaps I am making an assumption about what may be causing the flaws in my listening experience. My computer is well over seven years old, and perhaps the XBox has been confused by the fact that this is an 'enhanced CD', with special CD-ROM features, such as a short Quicktime film of Gollum, some JPEG images, and a web-link to the Lord of the Rings film web-site.
Then again, so is an old CD I received as part of a course packet for an anthropology class - and its audio and video portions work just fine. Then again, I only face difficulties in moments when I engage in activities that could potentially indicate an attempt at piracy - copying or recording data on my PC, and as the XBox's reading frame scans ahead and potentially saves snippets of the material to its hard disk.
Corporations must measure their life's blood from a bottom line firmly marked in red ink. Personal moral standpoints aside: from their practical point of view, should the status-quo business model be maintained, then piracy will be bad for their business. It probably does cut into their sales today - and if they remain inactive, it will only cut farther into the bottom line in the future. Unfortunately, current copyright protection technologies have proven wanting in preventing piracy in the digital age because circumvention need only occur once. An expensive lock may be designed, but once the proper lock-pick has been found, that tool can be shared immediately and massively throughout a network. Published media does not come in perishable form, and the lock on these records will not change. Once the code is cracked, your media has been made insecure for so long as that disc may last. The lock does not change.
Individual corporations may be able to outcompete the individual cracker on a single basis, but over time what they are attempting could be compared to fighting a swarm of bacteria who specialize in cell-to-cell signaling with a static immune system. The investment capital pushed into building locks is far more expensive to corporations as individuals when compared to the individual man-hours put in by each of millions of crackers around the world. Eventually those millions of individual man-hours build up, and while the effort may be inefficient, with work duplicated time and time again and many wrong and wasteful attempts followed - it will all be at minimal cost to the pathogenic individual, and eventually one of those bacteria will succeed in infecting the host, and its mimetically adaptive comrades and digitally bourne offspring will exploit the advantage.
The only reason our immune system works as well as it does is because it is a dynamic system - in effect, it is constantly changing the locks and defenses that pathogens must face and survive in order to infect our system. Today's exploit will not work tomorrow. Corporations that produce a static product should expect to stand stunned on the shore beside King Canute and Ozymandias as their mighty sand-castles are thrown down by the waves. Evolution is security - an endless arms race between opponents who can only measure their victory by living one more day.
Static defenses are therefore cost-inefficient for the relative insecurity they provide - and if those defenses irritate their legitimate customers using their product in a legitimate manner as I have been irritated... then they are biting off fingers to try and save the hand that feeds them.