RIAA says digital radio is bad

Not internet radio stations, but digital over-the-airwaves radio.

RIAA Moves In on Digital Radio

Interesting snippets:

Without copy protections, music fans could cherry-pick songs off the air and redistribute them over the Internet, further deepening the copyright woes of record labels, the Recording Industry Association of America said.

and

XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, which broadcast digital signals by satellite, do not pose the same risk because those companies would be hurt by song copying and thus have an incentive to limit it, RIAA officials said.

I'm going to interpret that last piece as "Sirius and XM are already in our pocket, paying our extorted fees, so we don't care about them."

You wanna know what's worse than that? I just saw a snippet on television saying that there's new evidence that certain terrorist groups are funding their activities by selling pirated CDs and DVDs.

In other words, the RIAA and MPAA are going to start saying that ripping CDs or movies is not just illegal, but funds terrorism. Sigh.

Only if you sell em, not give em away freely.

The more you give away, the harder it is for the terrorists to make money off of bootlegs.

wasn't the entire point of downloading and burning your own cds to make things free?

free = money for terrorism
woot!

I was just being a little tongue in cheek about that.

The reason that XM and Sirius are harder for pirates is that they're proprietary standards. I don't think you can just go buy the parts and build yourself an XM receiver. I imagine they do some kind of crypto, like the satellite TV folks, to make sure that you don't get your content if you don't pay, but I have no idea if they got it right. I'm confident, at least, that they convinced the RIAA that they got it right.

Digital radio, on the other hand, would be a standard. It (presumably) wouldn't be encrypted, and somebody would quickly make a tuner with a digital S/PDIF output. Still, unless it's being broadcast in MP3 format, then it would need to be transcoded to be useful to file traders. It's easier to just rip high-quality MP3s from a CD.

In reply to:

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Digital radio, on the other hand, would be a standard. It (presumably) wouldn't be encrypted, and somebody would quickly make a tuner with a digital S/PDIF output. Still, unless it's being broadcast in MP3 format, then it would need to be transcoded to be useful to file traders. It's easier to just rip high-quality MP3s from a CD.

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You're right, digital radio is standardised, and some (but not all) DAB receivers have digital outputs. My home set has TOSlink, though I haven't connected it, as I'm happy with the analogue co-ax connections, TBH.

I think DAB uses MP2 or MP3, but possibly I'm wrong and it's some other MPEG audio standard. Stations here vary from 80kbps or less (mostly speech channels) to about 160 or so for music channels. So not competition for CDs, but much better than analogue broadcast. I'd say no more appealing to record off the radio than the introduction of cassette tapes - and the presenters still talk over the music. The record companies probably pay them to do that....

DAB uses Musicam/MP2

Because listening to the same crappy songs every hour on the hour isn't enough, I want to copy it, complete with DJ voice over and/or other songs faded into the head and tail? Riiiiiiight.