AfterDawn: News

A new batch of compact discs designed to defeat Napster-style piracy is coming soon to record-industry insiders. BMG, one of the world's five major labels, said on Monday it would start issuing promotional CDs -- the free discs distributed to critics, retailers and other insiders weeks before the official release -- with technological countermeasures to prevent copying.

The major labels, which include Vivendi Universal, Sony Music, EMI Group, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music and Bertelsmann AG's BMG, hope that copy protection measures will prevent users from "ripping," or copying the music into the easily traded MP3 format.



"The first benefit of doing promos and advances is to get feedback on the technology," said Kevin Clement, BMG's senior director of new media. "And we would hope this technology will stop the records from leaking early to the public."

BMG says that they ship the protected CDs to industry insiders in order to get feedback. At the same time they talk about releases which have leaked to the Internet before the official release. Where are these pre-release MP3s coming from? You guessed right – they must originate from the insiders. Perhaps BMG is tryig to block their leaks rather than get feedback.

Yahoo! News


Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 9 Apr 2002 10:28