Subject: Music Industry Unveils New Piracy-Proof Format:
A Black Plastic Disc With Grooves.
Music bosses have unveiled a revolutionary new recording format that
they hope will help win the war on illegal file sharing which is
thought to be costing the industry billions of dollars in lost
revenue. Nicknamed the 'Record', the new format takes the form of a
black, vinyl disc measuring 12 inches in diameter, which must be
played on a specially designed thing called a turntable'.
"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can access the data on this disc," said spokesman Don Brett Campbell. "We are
also confident hat no-one is going to be able to produce pirate copies
in this format without going to a hell of a lot of trouble. This is
without doubt the best anti-piracy invention th music industry has
ever seen." As part of the invention's rigorous testing process, the
designers gave some discs to a group of teenage computer nerd experts
who regularly use file swapping software such as Limewire, Winmx and
gnutella and who admit to pirating music CDs.
Despite several days of trying, none of them were able to hack into
the disc's code or access any of the music files contained within it.
"It's like, really big and new stuff," said Doug Rothstein, one of
the testers. "I couldn't fit it into any of my drives. I mean, what
format is it? Is it, like, from France or something?" Teenage computer
hackers struggled to access the new disc. In the new 12" format, raw
audio data in the form of music is encoded by physically etching
grooves onto the vinyl disc. The sound is thus translated into
variations on the disc's surface in a process that industry insiders
are describing as 'completely revolutionary' and 'stunningly clever.'
To decode the data stored on the disc, the listener must use a special
player which contains a 'needle' that runs along the grooves on the
record surface, reading the indentations and transforming the
movements back into audio that can be fed through loudspeakers. Even
Shawn Fanning, the man who invented Napster, admits the new format
will make file swapping much more difficult. "I've never seen anything
like this," he told reporters. "How does it work?" As rumors that a
Taiwanese company has been secretly developing a 12 inch wide,
turntable -driven, needle-based, firewire drive remain unconfirmed, it
would appear that the music industry may, at last, have found the
pirate-proof format it has long been searching for.
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