Slashdot Mirror
Coming Soon: Burn-Proof CDs
An Anonymous Coward writes: "This article on MSNBC opens the door to the "Copyright protected CD's". Apparently the very first copyright protected cd is set to burn this April for some country star's album. Copyright protected cd's do not allow you to replicate them in a cd burner nor do they allow you to rip the audio tracks "digitally" (although can still be done through analog)." I wonder how long before someone finds a way around this. Actually the article is well-written, covering all the bases, although it neglects to say how we're all expected to bend over while our fair use of stuff we paid for is taken away from us.
Oddly, this will really, really increase sales of this particular CD, and the music industry will say it's because people can't pirate it. But they'll have it backwards.
Tons of us will race out and buy a Charlie Pride CD (even though we abhor country music) simply because we want to try to break it. We want to see whether or not it's really burnproof, and whether we can be the first to figure out the easy way around it.
The industry will hail the huge sales of this CD as demonstrable proof that non-copyable CD's enjoy higher revenues because us nasty mean hackers can't make copies of Charlie Pride's wonderful stuff, and thus we have to buy several copies for our car, our office, etc. They'll show this fact to other recording artists and say, "See, you too could be enjoying this kind of royalty," and the artists will lick their chops in anticipation. I guarantee they'll be a long line of artists willing to be the second burn-proof CD.
What's your damage, Heather?
I'm sure this is just coincidence, but when I clicked on the poll on the left margin ("Do you support copy-proctected CDs?") to vote "NO", their site took me to a blank page. When I tried to go back to the article, still nothing... blank page. Shortly after that, Netscape crashed. By now they have no doubt logged my IP address and sent a complaint to my ISP that I'm a potential pirate, and asking that my account be revoked.
On the other hand, maybe I've been watching too much X-Files. And it's early... yeah, that's the ticket... early... brain not function... must... get... caffiene...
Why is it when schemes like this come out they always use terms like "It will be far too dificult for the average user". Is every person on the internet expected to crack the protection personally. Dont these companies realise all it takes is for one person to write the crack, then the "average user" can just run the program for himself.
It just seems to me at times that large businesses seem unable to comprehend the basic concept of a programmable machine. The ability to store a list of instructions and repeat. Given the manufacturers reluctance to cripple dvd-rom drives, purposely making them easy to mod to multi-region. I bet they start advertising cd-roms that can read these so called protected disks fairly soon after release.
Hence, the technology, as it now stands, only frustrates the casual pirate, not the hardcore fair use maven. Also, N.B., the same article can be found on Salon, and in point of fact actually comes from Inside.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
If they could only limit the use of these disks to Country CDs, then its a blessing in disguise that they prevent duplicates being made of them ;)
RTFA (read the fine article. In brief, they introduce errors in the table of contents and the data sectors that a typical audio CD player will just skip over, but most CD-ROM driver software will hang up on. So you can't use your computer to listen to or to copy the CD. The music industry seems to believe that no one is smart enough to hack the CD-ROM drivers and change the fault handling. I give it 3 days. Of course, distributing any such hack for the purpose of defeating the security is a violation of the CDMA.
On the other hand, I really would appreciate a premium CD driver that would recover as much data as possible from scratched CD-ROM's. And if that just happens to make it read copy protected CD's...
When I read "Burn Proof CDs" I thought the article had something to do with CDRs that were somehow impossible to burn. That didn't make too much sense, believe it or not, so perhaps a better title would be:
Coming Soon: Rip Proof CDs
Unless you're a big fan of, you know, blank CDRs that can't be burned. Sounds like a RIAA concept to me, if there ever was one.
1) Write to your state Attorney General, consumer fraud protection. Computers are commonly used to listen to CD's, so selling CD's that are known to not play on them might be considered fraud, at least unless they are very clearly marked.
2) Take the record store to small claims court. Get 99 friends to do the same. Watch them ship the damned things back and refuse to stock any more...
First of all: Visible gaps could be seen on the CD! (probably gaps between tracks)
The album had sticker saying "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PCs" and this seems to be true. The CD is not recognized as audio CD at all and cannot be played in PC.
Then I tried analyzing/grabbing the CD data using various applications such as CloneCD, CDRWin, Blind Read, NTI CD-Maker etc with various settings. All of this without any success. Not only did I get various contradictory and theoretically impossible error messages but several of the programs crashed spectacularly and/or produced scary noises through the CDROM drive! The best success I achieved was displaying some sort of Table of Contents which contained very strange numbers (negative data lengths, 99 sessions on the disk etc...)
Then I tried all of this with 3 different drives (AOpen CDRW, AOpen DVD ROM and Creative DVD ROM) and the results varied wildly. The best success I has was capturing 650 MB file which contained 2 seconds of the first track and then zeroes.
I tried playing the CD in two different CD players (Aiwa and Sony) and it worked without any problems. Track numbers and lenghts were ok, everything looked fine.
So, it seems that these CDs really cannot be ripped/copied using standard CD ROMs. Of course:
1) You can send the music from the CD player with digital output to PC soundcard with digital input and create perfect "deprotected" CD.
2) If this copyprotection gains any notoriety, CD drive makers will immediately update their firmware to allow "dumbing down" the drive and "really RAW" grabbing of the audio data.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Now you've hit the nail on the head. Obviously, "The Programmable Machine" must die. The first step is to key the BIOS and OS together, so it only boots the One True OS, Windows. Then come up with copy-protected and access-controlled media. Then how about Windows-only peripherals, network connections, etc. Once you've taken The Programmable Machine and made it fully Windows-bound, you've got a set of deep pockets available to sue, and Microsoft will make sure that machine won't be usable for illegal copying.
The Programmable Machine can be dead and gone within our lifetime.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Do not break the seal on this CD until you have read and agreed to this license. (We have placed this license underneath the seal, in order to protect our intellectual property.) If you do not agree to this license, please apply 1500 PSI to the entire package and kiss your fifteen bucks goodbye.
... tough.
... unless Screwed decides otherwise.
The party of the first part, known hereafter as the Screwed, agrees to the following provisions as stipulated by the party of the second part, known hereafter as the Screwer:
o The Screwed agree the that Screwer may employ any legal, technical, moral, or immoral means to protect the intellectual property of the creative artists who are so critical to the success of the industry. (By "creative artists," we refer not to the scribblers or performers, but the truly creative: the bookeepers and executives who serve the stockholders. You think that's not creative? You have no idea how long it took us to come up with just this license.)
o The Screwed will chose one (1) device, approved by the Screwer, to play the product recorded on this medium. (It's called a "medium" because it's neither well done nor rare. Yes, it's an old joke. We said we were creative; we didn't say we were original.) Screwer reserves the right to un-approve a device after it has been chosen. If the Screwed does not chose a device, the Screwer reserves the right to chose a player for the Screwed.
o The Screwed will chose one (1) person, approved by the Screwer, to listen to the product recorded on this medium. If any other person or persons listen to this product, Screwer will charge Screwed a performance fee to be determined after our next "business" trip to Las Vegas.
o This product is not guaranteed against manufacturing defects or any other flaws. We don't promise that there's even a medium in the package, that if there is, that it has anything but zero bits on it, or that any so-called "music" corresponds in any way to the label on the outside of the package. If our copy protection schemes make it impossible for you to listen to the so-called "music"
o Screwed has the right to listen to the product as many times as he or she likes
o We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. We control the treble, and all your bass are belong to us, too.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Here's why:
Usually, when I go to school each morning, I bring my collection of CDs with me. This numbers about 36 or 38 legit, purchased CDs, as well as 12 or 10 burned CDs .
Yes, I realize that bringing something of that much value to school, even my private school, is a bad idea. Unfortunately, I found that out the hard way, when, about 5 weeks ago, they were stolen. Poof, gone without a trace. Now I don't even have the originals still with me, because they were all taken.
Now what I'm going to have to do is to burn copies of all my CDs that I purchase in the future, so I can take the copies with me and still have the originals at home, so that they can be re-burned in case my CDs are stolen again. This is a perfectly acceptable example of fair use, since I (the purchaser) was the only one who used the albums and (as far as I know) fair use laws allow you, or at least USED to allow you, to keep extra copies for backup purposes.
Time used to be when you wouldn't have to rebuy CDs or other items such as video games if they were stolen, you could just rely on your backup copy. Not anymore.
Corporate greed has finally overridden any concern that the music industry might have once had for the consumer, because the average American consumer is either so dumb, or so lacking self control, that they go right on and buy from them anyway.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I don't think this exploits anti-skip; that's simply buffering. This exploits ecc. Computer CDROMS use ECC because they can't afford to drop a bit here and there in case it's data. Since it's music, I think they're intentionally telling ecc that the data has an error, and it's unrecoverable because the checksum is intentionally wrong.
I don't know if ecc is enableable at the driver level, it may be a firmware thing. Anybody up for hacking the firmware of their CD ROM to disable ecc? That would probably do it - but then data CD's would be unreliable.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Piracy (as opposed to theft; they are NOT exactly the same) hurts copyright owners not because they no longer have as many copies they can sell (that's how theft hurts the victim) but because they no longer sell as many copies because some people pirate rather than buying. This is why copy protection of software SOMETIMES works, especially protection that makes copying impossible but doesn't keep the software from working. But more importantly, most heavily protected software (like, say, Quark or Media100) is the way its users make a living, so they WILL accept limitations (such as needing a computer with certain free ports for a hardware dongle) to be able to use the software.
:)
On the other hand, nobody buying a CD is making a living from that CD (usually; I'm talking about consumers here). People who find that these new CDs don't work in their new $500 car player, or worse, their $2500 laptop, are NOT going to replace those devices. They're going to return the CD, and certainly not buy any more CDs with that copy protection. Thus, the goal of the copyright holders, namely, to sell more CDs by not having people pirate them, is not going to be accomplished. Instead, people are going to not buy CDs EVEN if they might have bought them without the copy protection. While some may now buy the CDs (if they work in their players) who might have pirated before, some other people are going to NOT buy the CD when they might have before. I, for example, often buy CDs and then rip them to mp3 so I can play them in my livingroom mp3 'jukebox' (headless computer) or my car mp3 player, not to give pirate copies to other people. However, if I could no longer do this form of fair use, I WOULD NOT buy the CDs.
Thus, rather than selling more CDs, the industry will sell fewer CDs.
This same thing will happen if the industry tries to push new secure formats like DataPlay. Some users will like the new players and thus buy the new format, but if the old format is still available, more people will stick with it. And if the old format is NOT available, many people will simply not buy the music.
A hardware manufacturer selling, say, shovels, will probably make more money (with their thin margins) with 1000 people buying shovels and nobody stealing them, than with 10,000 people buying shovels and 10,000 more stealing shovels. On the other hand, a music company will make MORE money with 10,000 copies being sold and 10,000 copies being made of those (50% piracy) than they would with 1000 copies being sold and NO piracy.
In other words, for a company that is selling something that's copyable, like music, the amount of money they make has NOTHING to do with piracy and EVERYTHING to do with how many copies they sell. Piracy only hurts them in so far as it is an alternative to purchasing. I am assuming that the number of actual physical CDs that get stolen via shoplifting is irrelevant here.
So it is not in the industry's interest to ensure that nobody pirates their music, if that means fewer people buy it. Stopping piracy without gaining new buyers will not benefit the industry; stopping piracy while at the same time losing would-be customers because of incompatibilities will destroy the industry.
Which I hope happens
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin