First of all, a correction to the previous entry: In that entry, I said that LightScribe was a silk screening technology. Steve Loughran, who worked on the technology, points out that
It has been likened silk screening, but it is definitely not: it is laser printing at v. high resolution onto discs.
This is an important distinction that I missed out on.
Another alert reader pointed out to me that LightScribe now has its own site. From there, one can learn more about the technology and licensing information.
More details:
- At the current time, LightScribe will work with Windows 2000 and Windows XP but support for additional operating systems will come in the future.
- The new technology will not have much of an impact on prices, adding only a few pennies to the price of disc media and a few dollars to the price of a computer.
- LightScribe-enabled disc drives will also be available as peripherals
- Basic printing will take about a minute to complete but more complex images can take up to 15 minutes to print.
I do believe that LightScribe has the potential of being a very disruptive technology for the media industry and, unfortunately, a boon to piracy, as it will lower the bar on creating professional looking CDs and DVDs. For example, what happens when someone downloads a whole album in MP3 format from a peer to peer network, copies those tracks to a disk, and then prints the disk’s label with LightScribe. How will one then know the difference between the original and a counterfeit?