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CD Copy "Protection" in California
Tabercil writes "According to this New Scientist article, the SafeAudio system has been employed here in North America in an unidentified CD which has already sold 100,000 copies." It'll be interesting to see what CD it is. My biggest concern is the car CD players that actually are computers not being able to play these discs. Presumably the copy protection will be broken soon enough, so thats not really an issue.
If a CD contains pops, hisses, or is otherwise unsuitable use it should be returned. Here is an interesting question, when I buy an Audio CD, isn't it implied that it will be to the Orange(?) Book standard? Obviously, this scheme violates the standard. Can they still call this a CD and use all the Philips logos? Since an Orange Book CD can be ripped, it is reasonable to expect that a CD can be ripped, and therefore, the inability to rip a CD should be grounds enough for returning it. Of course, I do seem to remember that a players up to Orange Book standards are not supposed to allow access to the raw digital data if the copy protection bit is set. Sounds to me like SafeAudio is tooting its own horn. I cannot believe that such a system would be even moderately difficult to defeat. It really bothers me when there is a good, established standard (like Audio CD) and it is deliberately screwed up for no real gain. This is going to set off an arms race of copy protection/ anti-copy protection schemes, and Audio CDs will eventually be in the shape that copy-protected computer CDs are in right now, with incompatibilities between CD and equipment. Lastly, as far as the quality of a 'poor' analog copy goes, I doubt many people could tell the difference between a direct digital copy and a copy that went through an analog stage. The weakness in analog has always been the media (lp, tape), not the electrical signal. The big problem is that the first copy would need to be made in real time, which means that it would probably be faster to obtain a digital copy from the internet than it would be to make your own. Kind of ironic...
I should have charged the company for breaking their multimillion dollar encryption.
good quality PCI alternatives? you mean like the $40 zoltrix nightingale that i mentioned in the previous post?
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Even if they make something that my cd-rom drive doesn't like, I can still just connect the digital out on my cd player to the spdif in on my sound card. WHOOPS, did I just get a perfect digital copy? MY BAD!
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My MOTU 2408 has a perfectly functional, non-resampling s/pdif input, and my MOTU 308 has 8 of them. If you're on a budget, i think you can hack a zoltrix nightingale for $50 to have non-resampling S/PDIF.
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it's sorta like saying "okay, you can LOOK AT this bag of dog shit, but you CAN NOT make more bags of dog shit and give them to your friends."
oh darn.
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"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If the article's speculation is correct, the copy protection simply consists of inserting bogus samples in the digital recording. A regular CD player interprets the samples as errors and interpolates over them, while a ripper copies the errors and hence leaves nasty noise in the ripped audio file.
:-).
If memory serves me correctly, programs like CDParanoia already interpolate across unreadable samples when ripping a CD. It seems simple enough to check for "obviously" bogus samples and weed them out. Viola - end of copy protection.
OK, now someone who knows what the real deal is can explain to me why this argument is complete hogwash
When *I* was in college, around 1975, a high-priced LP was in the $9 range. Using the Cost of Living Calculator at http://www.newsengin.com/neFreeTools.nsf/CPIcalc?O penView we find that $9 in 1975 is the equivalent of $29.44 today. In other words, if a CD today costs $15, then its about HALF the cost of a music recording in 1975.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The SP/DIF in on most soundcards converts the audio data from 48.0 to 44.1 kHz. The quality of this conversion varies. I've heard that the SBLive conversion algorithms are fairly crude
Recording CDs in the anlog domain is no job for a computer. I had a great deal of trouble with analog noise until I ripped the analogue cable from my CD and soundcard, and replaced it with a digital cable. Now, I use an external DAC.
DAE provides a staic free copy-- the best possible staringpoint for a Vorbis or MP3 encoder.
Well back when *I* was in college, around 1987 or so I purchased my first CD player.
CD's cost me $15-17 at the time.
Today I buy them for $13-15.
I don't know about cost of living, but that isn't a price increase in my book.
Like most CS labs, many people brought in CDs and listened to them on their headphones using the CD-ROM drive on the machines.
But then you must find another place to leave your beverages.
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Nope, it's actually "Yoko Ono: The Polyester Years".
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So long as I can buy CDs with cash, I don't exactly see this as being a problem. Although a mark-of-the-beast style purchasing scheme would kind of make sense, what with Hillary Rosen being the antichrist and all.
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME
There will be ways around that and hardware makers will upgrade their firmware to adapt. Remember old Atari and Apple games in the 80s and how they used bad sectors to prevent floppy copies? They got around that. Sometimes with bad data (e.g., the bootleg copy of Zork III for Atari was missing a paragraph of text), but most often things were just fine.
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You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
No, but it WOULD be a violation of trademark if they included Sony's "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on the disc packaging anywhere. If it isn't compliant, it probably doesn't have the rights to use Sony's logo. Similarly, "cheaper" DVD players out there that can't play cdrs also don't display the sony logo, since cdrs normally follow the standard (Abiet as loosely as they can get away with).
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You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
My vote is definitely for John Tesh (I got a good laugh out of the ad he did for that new show on Comedy Central).
Back in college I worked as a consultant in the undergrad computer science lab (only CS students had accounts). Like most CS labs, many people brought in CDs and listened to them on their headphones using the CD-ROM drive on the machines. Ocassionally someone would forget their CD when they left, but we'd just put them next to the machine and they'd be back for them. One time someone forgot their John Tesh CD. We put that one up next to the blackboard with a big arrow and something like "Whoever forgot their John Tesh CD it's right here->".
Nobody would claim it.
It sat up there for the next month until the semester was over and the CD was, presumeably, discarded. Hence my vote is for John Tesh all the way!
-"Zow"
Funny, but I came to the LP game later, in 1983 or so. And at that point, most albums were $$8 with, yes, the premium titles with gatefold sleeves and booklets and holograms and crap at $9. Double albums were $11.
Were were you buying records? Sam Goody? Mall chains? (Where, incidentally, most CDs sell for $17 in-store today, not $15. They're $15 online, where the difference is mde up in handling fees.)
By my calculations, an album that ran $8 in 1983 is $14 and change in today's dollars. Which is about right at most of the places I shop--independent record stores.
However, inflation has just gotten us there. By my reckoning using the same calculator, CDs should have been selling for $10-$12 ten years ago if they were priced to mirror vinyl pricing. And since the early '90s, CDs have been much cheaper to produce and distribute than LPs, and are less vulnerable to heat and water damage or breakage while in transit.
Why should we be upset? This, my friends, appears to be the perfect copy protection scheme. It is, in fact, so perfect that it cannot be detected.
Prehaps the CDs we're been buying all along have had this protection.
With 100,000 CDs sold and no large scale complaints, it may be the case that this new form of copy protection is exactly the same as having no copy proection at all.
Score one for the RIAA!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
What's Louisiana's basis for a legal system and how does it difffer from common law?
If I remember correctly, Louisiana law was originally based on the Napoleonic Code, owing to its status as formerly French territory. The only notable differences that I know of are in the areas of estates and inheritances and stuff like that...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Apparently you have forgotten the golden rule of car audio: All cassette car stereos shall eat 50% of all cassettes placed into them, without fail. It's funny we talk about this because one of the benefits of the CD revolution is pollution wise (well...apart from the fact that billions of cassettes were dumped in the garbage, cast off as obsolete): I remember being younger and quite frequently you would see several hundreds yards of tape floating down the street, or a case smashed into a million pieces, etc. Because of the "stereo must eat cassette" cardinal rule people were often quite frustrated and hurled the result out the window.
I have to admit that I have never dropped a CD in the car, and I haven't had a CD that was so scratched that it was unplayable since the sunrise of the CD revolution (when I was a little less careful).
Cost-wise I don't know if I agree with your assertion: You're talking about a dupe, so given that we should compare a CD-R to a good blank cassette - Here in Canada I'd say that a 100% quality CD-R is about $0.70 CDN each, whereas a good quality cassette (it's been a long time since I bought one) is about $2.50.
Yup, you're right. :-)
In a humorous coincidence I was actually just coming on here to post a follow-up correction: My memory was spurred when I pulled up IMDB to check if the consensus opinion on 13 Days was as bad as I found it to be.
They state that it doesn't prevent analog copying, so yes you could copy the analog signal.
Copy protection is not what most "everything for free" Slashdotters think it is: It is not black and white, and just because a techie with a lot of free time can "break" it doesn't mean that the protection is a failure. It doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective.
All copy protection has to achieve to commercially protect a product is that it makes the process more inconvenient for the average Joe/Jane than simply going to the store and picking up the CD: Whether it degrades the quality enough that they are willing to just buy a copy, or it makes the process inconvenient enough (i.e. The deCSS process in the early days was ridiculously inconvenient for the average Joe, which is why they sought to squash it in the early days before it becomes a Windows "wizard" to rip a DVD to a MPG), or it takes too much of their time: For the $15 level that we're talking about it's a very small "nuisance factor" that will lead most average citizens to just go buy the product rather than waste their time. I've ripped MP3s just because I can go in and select a track (and through IMDB instantly it's even titled correctly and everything), and it automatically pulls an MP3 copy. If, on the other hand, I had to sit here pressing record and stop at the right moment, and prune off the ends, and live with a degraded copy (all audio-in channels on the major soundcards are garbage), and manually identify each track: There's no way I'd do that, and while there's lots of little kids with nothing better to do who are willing to, a large majority of the consumers would rather part with $15 than deal with the hassle.
It's similar to the software market: There are warez channels on IRC, and to most people that is the downfall of the software industry...then after a couple of 1GB+ downloads which were corrupt you give up and never touch warez again. Even if you duped the CD off a friend, often you need a crack and most people are extremely wary of cracks (trojans, viruses, etc.), so they'd rather just buy the product that endure the risk.
there is no law that states what is and is not fair use. moreover, there is no law that requires companies to give consumers those rights.
There is case law. The Betamax case is the most famous, but there's also some that relate to video games (maybe modchips) I think. Actually, now that I think about it, the Audio Home Recording Act is a "fair use" law.
however, it is completely legal for companies to use technical measures (but not legal measures) to try to prevent you from doing those things. this btw, is precisely why dmca is so dangerous: it turns any technical protection measure into a legal one as well.
You sound confused. If DMCA turns a technical protection measure into a legal one, then by your previous sentence this means that companies can't do it. That would actually make DMCA a good thing.
You've stuffed up somewhere in your logic, but I'm not sure where. I think it's where you draw a distinction between technical measures and legal measures. I don't think there's any such distinction, and the laws apply to any measures (legal or technical) which restrict fair use rights. The more interesting question is has fair use been restricted if technical measures prevent lossless duplication, but allow lossy duplication?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
The newest driver in CVS from opensource.creative.com (CVS tag v0_15) have support (as of a couple days ago) to do PCM passthrough at 48KHz instead of downsampling to 44.1. (Yeah AC3 passthrough has also been supported for a long time too) Actually, the Linux drivers at this point rock the windows ones as far as control over the hardware goes. (Let's see if the windows driver lets you download DSP microcode!) The only feature missing at this point is support for the software synth, which IMHO isn't as big a deal as a lot of people think. Anyone who is seriously using MIDI is probably using external synths anyway. Plus, it's planned...just last on the list
~GoRK
Oh frigging great, So my Cd player with the SPDIF out will start streaming crap instead of higher quality audio.... This HAS to be the case, otheriwse I can make a perfect digital copy of this "protected" CD with my computer (SBLIVE platinum) and my CD player by using SPDIF.
If they added crap to the audio stream, they really slit their own throats with every audiophile.... but then they might just be doing this to rap and grunge.. then noone will notice that anything was done to the audio.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First, they aren't mucking with the TOC, but putting delibrate errors in the data, and mucking with the ECC
However, they are still selling CDs which aren't standards compliant. This leads to a rather interesting question: If you sell a "CD" that purposely doesn't conform to the standard, is it fraudulent to sell it as a CD? It could be possible to claim that as their CDs don't have the proper ECC, they are lacking a standard feature present in all other functional and non-damaged CD's, and the manufacturers are knowingly selling a defective product.
I doubt that they could be hit under fair-use laws, but if the packaging of the CDs claim that they are normal CDs, without mentioning the copy protection, they might be liable under consumer protection laws.
I have a Delta Dio 2496. It works perfectly, plus is has a digital channel mixer which can move sound into any i/o port on the board (including loopback.. ehh hehehe)
There's linux sound drivers on the site as well.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Read the article. It's a different company and a different technology.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
No. Read the article. Different company, different technology.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The article is talking about SafeAudio from Macrovision. The Charley Pride CD is using Mediacloq by Suncomm.
Q.
(I don't usually respond to trolls. But this is an insidious meme that must be fought.)
The reason for your lack of power is that you are apathetic. You say that other people do not have the power to change the world, but that is not true. You can not deny that change happens. And it must always start with an individual.
But you attempt to discourage others from working for change, so that they will become impotent like you. You are using what little power you have to try to make this negative change occur. That's not a very nice thing to do.
-=Ivan
Maybe I'll go into his house, copy all the source code behind a company he's starting up, and spread it all over the net.
Tan.
BilldaCat
Yes, but the BIG point is that while it is legal for you to excersise your right to fair use, the makers have no legal obligations to allow you to exercise such right. Now if the government started getting directly involved with helping corporations invade your right THEN a law is broken. For example if the government created a law that said you cannot break a copy pertection, then that would go against the fair use law. OPPS they already did. Nevermind.
If you read the article, basically the cd is designed to be unreadable by a CD-ROM but readable by a regular cdplayer. Depending upon how they did it, one method recording errors, a bit by bit copy would be playable in a cdplayer but not a CD-ROM, another method mentioned by another poster, would be to have pits that are half-depth. Which would be read as a regular pit by a CD-ROM thinking they were burned by a CD-R, and not read by a cdplayer, these half pits would be reburned as being all the same depth, and then you have a completly errored disc that won't read on either type of player. Either way it will take reengenering of the CD-ROM to be able to rip these disk. Of course you can always line-in the disk.
...country music singer Charley Pride's "A Tribute to Jim Reeves" cd.
According to this, someone's already posted mp3's of the tracks, but the label denies that the copy protection was truly circumvented.
And, incidentally, this looks like old news--the press releases I saw were dated in May.
Funny thing for me is that I only have two CDs that are badly trashed and that I would have liked to have had backed up. One is Prince (1999, I believe) and the other is Metallica (black album). Guess which one I likely won't replace?
(FWIW, I've been collecting CDs since 1985 or 1986 when my father got his first CD player. Single disc JVC. ~$400, marked down from $700.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
To the end user (plaintiff) the individual suit is usually better. But it's a tangled web:
If I sue Sony in small claims court and win, great. But there is an up and a down. Up is, I win, and it wasn't too expensive. Down is that there really isn't any precedent that is applicable to you (unless you live in Charles Co. MD, USA)
But, it probably won't happen. From what I heard somewhere (and not only am INAL, I'm Not a Good Listener:) Sony will likely try to get the case moved to some larger court.
Okay, let's say that it goes to a larger court. I need a lawyer to make my $15 claim. He doesn't want to do work for a contingency fee of $5, so he says "how 'bout a class action?" So we get a bazillion people to sue Sony. Sony says no, but really means yes (to the class action, that is). We're going to pay the same amount of lawyers (companies like that don't have small court cases) and take care of a bazillion cases. So immediately, they have saved a bazillion*(number of cases-1) dollars.
So, I win my $10. I may or may not have to pay my attorney's fees. And my attorney gets fees + bazillion*$5 (he's getting a contingency on all members of the class).
So, 'my' attorney wins, Sony wins, and everyone else loses.
Pretty shitty system, huh?
(Of course, there are many other ways that this can happen, but Sony knows that the real costs are attorneys, not plaintiffs. If they want class action, or a quick settlement, it should automatically mean that that is not in your favor as a plaintiff.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No, you were right the first time. You bought the CD. Last time I checked, you didn't sign some B$ license saying you only bought the right to use the data on the disc in some proscribed manner.
Don't expect this to last, though. Sooner or later, Congress (and/or the courts) of the US will change this to saying that you did NOT buy the tangible property, you merely licensed the data on it for specific uses.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
LOL. Hahahaha! Man, that is the funniest shit I've heard in a long time.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Didn't think of this earlier:
/., eh?) but I don't think this tech should preclude doing that.
You ripped a perfect copy. If you burn the copy, warts and all, wouldn't it still play identically to the copy that you bought? I haven't read the article (unusual on
It's like some of the old copy-protection schemes for computer games: if you copy the disc, warts and all, you were successful (Yes, I remember that sometimes that only worked on REALLY good floppy drives, and under some other circumstances, but the last ditch effort in copying a game was just to do a damned good bit-by-bit copy)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Well for one thing, steganographic signatures can be overlayed on the music which, while not discernable by the human ear, can be detected by analysis, even after a sample has been "degraded" by the analog conversion. Expect steganographic signatures to become very widespread on music distribution media soon. MP3's would be traceable to the source they were copied from.
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I'm tired of hearing the same old tired argument of "so what if they implement stuff like this, somebody will just crack it anyway". The implicit message is that it is acceptable behaviour for companies to implement any level of copy "protection" that they want. It isn't - the message that consumers should be sending is "it is not acceptable IN THE FIRST PLACE", not "it is acceptable, go ahead, somebody will crack it". The former approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "good" and the crackers' behaviour "bad". The latter approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "bad". This is a very important distinction. Whether or not someone will crack it, "somebody" shouldn't have to crack it in the first place.
And I don't disagree that recording companies should be allowed to protect their IP - those who push this argument are missing the real motives of the recording companies, which is not just to protect their IP, but to monopolize content creation and distribution channels, as well as to eventually implement pay-per-view ubiquitously (with elimination of fair rights use being a side-effect).
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The catch is that an audio player reads bits off a disk and dumps them into a DAC. No attempt is made to correct any of the data under the premise that if a couple bits are wrong, no one will ever be able to tell.
When the drives switches to data mode, a single bit can kill a program. In this case, heavy ECC is called for. CD rippers work by reading an audio CD in data mode. The 'burst of sound' are designed to confuse the ECC algorithms. The answer is new firmware or a driver that will disable the ECC routines of the drive.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I'm not familiar enough with this audio-mangling technique to know for sure (and possibly not interested enough to hunt down the answer myself) so I'll just ask the question:
Is this technique only effective when a disk is encoded as an MP3 or other lower bitrate format, or does it corrupt the actual raw CDA audio stream?
The difference is important, because with storage becoming so much cheaper over the next few years, I expect more and more people will simply either copy the CDA files, or "rip" to WAV format anyway, eliminating the MP3/vorbis/whatever encoding step entirely. Would that buy you anything in this circumstance?
Any insights?
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I thought there were costs built into blank CDs to offset some of thus. Does this mean the prices of blanks will decrease?
Also, since this wonderful copy protection prevents piracy, will the cost of a CD go down because of the increase in revenue on more sales of "originals"?
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In all cases, there's exactly one D/A conversion--either at the CD-ROM drive, at the sound card, or at the speakers.
Oops, my bad. It just means the conversion occurs closer to the speakers, so you (theoretically) get better sound. The inside of your computer is electrically noisy, so it's best to keep things digital while they're in there.
I'm not too sure about the details here, but I knowApple switched CD playback mechanisms with a fairly recent OS release (either 8.6, 9.0, or 9.1), and I know it went from analog-out from the CD drive to digital-out. Why did they do it? I'm not entirely sure--I can only guess. At least it doesn't suck much CPU time (1.5%).
It's because the audio is already analog by the time it hits your sound card - your system never sees the bits. The cd-rom drive contains the hardware to act as a player, and outputs analog audio on a separate wire to the sound card, which plays the analog audio directly.
Ever since MacOS 9 (I think), the MacOS has handled CD audio digitally. The digital data goes into memory (DMA, I hope), and is converted into analog by the sound chip as with any other digital sound signal. The advantage is that, if you have digital speakers, there's no unnecessary D-to-A conversion.
Macs will either be able to rip these CDs, or they won't be able to play them. Seeing as Mac users are a particularly rabid bunch (perhaps even more rabid than Linux users), it will be funny to see what happens when they Mac-attack the big recording studios.
--
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This is the link to the SEC filing mentioning the CD...
http://www.secinfo.com/d1157k.43b.htm
And, of course, here's a link to buy it at Amazon.
Does it matter with this? The "digital" quality of the sound has already largely disappeared via the "copy protection" scheme - you're hearing mosly interpolated bits, so nobody can even claim to produce a purely digital rip of this stuff...
Not really.
If they were smart, they'd only replace samples where the typical interpolation done by CD players would hit the original sample value on-the-nose, or close enough as not to matter. There should be PLENTY of those.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I thought there were costs built into blank CDs to offset some of thus. Does this mean the prices of blanks will decrease?
It might be interesting to institute a suit to block any company producing copy-protected CDs from receiving their share of the "tax" money. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Heh, Macrovision says it's not discernible.
Funny that Macrovision's video "protection" is quite discernible...
In Canada we have the same thing, what Quebec being under the Napoleonic Code, and the rest of the country under English Common Law. So now what happens is that of the I 9 (I think? or is it 7?) members of the Supreme Court, 3 have to be from Quebec to deal with the different system.
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
How does this indiscernable change in the bits compare to digital--> analog --> digital? Basically, to a trained ear which sounds worse? Ripping from a CD to a wave at 44K 16 stereo sounds a lot better than ripping to a 128K MP3, so what's to prevent me from ripping from CD to wave to MP3? Sure, I lose some of the quality going from digital to analog but wouldn't that be masked by the MP3 compression? IOW, does the option to rip a CD in analog in Musicmatch already defeat this copy protection since MP3s are lower quality anyway?
I'm not a pro by any means, but I can hear most little inconsistancies in my music. I wish I knew which album they encoded so I could try to find it and try this myself.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The filters in the soundcard's DAC should remove the ultrasonic frequencies. So there's no need to build a filter, just use a loopback cable.
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It looks like this scheme will only stop you ripping the CD to a WAV file (eg for MP3 encoding). It will still be possible to make 'perfect' (errors intact) copies of the CD.
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I don't go making copies of CD's for friends, but if I want to make copies so I don't scratch the heck out of my originals isn't that something I should be allowed to do?
I can't think of the copyright provisions that grant me this right off the top of my head, someone help me out here.
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Interesting. I would how a digital console would react to such an incoming digital signal. The desk might balk and not recognize it at all.
It would be interesting to try this.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
If this new protection scheme doesn't work in car radios, can I "protect" a few of the cd's owned by the little thug-wannabes in my neighborhood?
No Michael J. Fox is the anti Elvis, and Elvis is in Joan Rivers but he's trying to get out. -- Mojo Nixon paraphrased
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
That's not true at all. CD-ROM drives are different hardware than cd sudio players. They are two different specifications. There are ways to stop a cdrom from playing a disc that will play in a normal audio device. It's not just a matter of software. While it may be possible to write a driver to try and get around it, this may not be possible on all drives.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Which is why they won't say what the cd is. They're trying to stop people (us) from intentionally buying a cd we wouldn't otherwise buy just to return it to prove a point. This way they have the ability (or the hope that they will be able) to in the future say see "we didn't have any more returns on this cd than any other, this copy protection does not affect the consumer". It's likely, given this premise that the cd is one that would be used by very few geeks, who would, hopefully, figure out why their cd was different, but by a demographic group that is the least likely to play in in equipment that will cause problems and least likely to return it if it did. (I.e. hillbilly's, just kidding). In this way they will try to ensure that they can point to return and complaint numbers and have them be no higher than usual. And allow them to ignore later complaints when cd's are released, and there is foreknowledge of the protection. So it's actually kind of important to find out what the cd is and complain.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
No I doubt it, see my post above for more detail, but I believe that this is a plan by the industry to try and ensure demonstrable success of the scheme. If they were concerned about someone cracking it they would want that done as early as possible, to minimize the money invested. Besides, don't you lnow that it's illegal to circumvent copy protections schemes, according to the DMCA (grin).
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
No you are wrong, even without a typo. Not all cd audio players implement those features. Those features are not required by the audio standard. You've proven my point, many car stereos do include those features so they won't be able to play the protected cd's. You're acting as if the data tech came out and instantly all cd players use it. This is patently untrue. That's why this particular form of copy protection works. It exploits those differences.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Uh don't forget to figure in the cost of production. A vinyl lp cost ALOT more to manufacture than a cd. You need to weigh all of the factors... not just the ones that make your point.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Actually, I don't think that would work. Disabling the error correction would allow you to copy the songs but there would be breaks in the audio (as discussed in the article) which ECC would've corrected in a normal CD player.
"Even if it is (forgive me) Kenny G..."
Yes, but if it is it isn't like anyone would notice. Kenny G is, of course, the Anti Elvis...
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
This has happened previously. One of Brad Mehldau's CDs released last year I believe (One of his Art of the Trio CDs) had the SafeAudio protection on it. I wasn't able to play it on my Plextor CD-R drive but my five-year old 6x drive was able to play it in Windows (it can't extract the audio digitally though). For those of you who don't know, Brad Mehldau is a jazz pianist.
Sounds like we will need to start using analog rips. Not a huge deal, sound cards are pretty good at the recording, it will just go slower.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Well, you could always rip and reburn the CD.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Look at the article. All they did was put virtual scratches into the CD and make sure they screwed up the ECC as well.
If anything, I think it's time we put some effort into the scratch-removal parts of MP3 rippers, and that such effort would have the secondary benefit of clearing this little mess up as well.
I wonder, however - what effect would this have on the durability of CD's? If it's already got a virtual defect in it, would it be more susceptible to skipping due to a physical media defect?
Let's assume there won't be a price drop. We already shoulder the cost of piracy in CD's, or so they claim. Therefore, not dropping the price is an admission of one of two things:
1. The copy protection scheme is ineffective.
2. They've been lying about the costs of piracy to extract more money out of us.
Or, easier still would be to just use a standard CD player with a digital output (SPDIF with either toslink or coaxial) and record it with a sound card with a digital input.
:)
Yes, it means that you'll be "ripping" at 1x, but 1x is infnitely faster than 0x.
Ian
That situation was underscored last year in a failed attempt by BMG Germany to push secure CDs using technology from Israeli security company Midbar. After shipping 130,000 copy-protected CDs, BMG was forced to abandon the project in January as complaints piled up from customers, who said the discs wouldn't work on their players. ---
Doesn't this new tech come from an Israeli security company?The article says that CD-player error correction overcomes the introduced garbage, wouldn't a CD-ripper's error correction ability be able to overcome this as well? Even if current software rippers can't, it doesn't sound all that hard to deal with...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
My DVD-ROM drive has a digital CD output. I haven't listened to a CD though its analog out in two years. How would SafeAudio get around this?
A question I have is, what if the CD gets scratched? If the error correction is already strained by having to interpolate between their deliberately induced data corruption, will audible distortion occur sooner when the medium is actually damaged? And since you now have no way to make a backup copy.....
--
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
It doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective.
Tell that to the Napster Judge.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Well, if I ever end up with one of these, it's back to the store with it.
If they won't take it back because "it's been opened", a phone call from one of my lawyers should do the trick.
wishus
---
What about windows media player playing CD's by ripping the digital audio right from the CD and playing the music through the soundcard instead of using the internal analog/digital lines from the CDROM to the soundcard?
Is this going to play in that situation? I think not.
I have a shinny apple for the first to identify the CD.
Don't like apples? Ok, I'll give you a beer.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
It's like slashing paintings in a gallery to stop someone stealing them.
So if someone were to, say, slash the tires on various RIAA figureheads, you could then argue that you were doing them a favor (beyond the obvious speed-hole benefit) in making it so no one will steal their tires. They won't notice the difference anyways (at least our test group didn't notice).
So, anyways, we want to be able to have a backup copy of our media because we all love Kenny G/John Tesh so much that their joint CD gets played 24/7 and gets too scratched to be useful (or is that just the copyright protection kicking in after too many uses?).
Why don't we just copy some US currency and then we can buy as many copies of KG/JT as we want. That's fair use, right? I'm just backing up my money in my wallet. Really!
--
Garett
Do this enough, and they'll complain to their supplier. Tell me which CD it is - I'd gladly buy, return, buy, return, lather, rinse, repeat.
sulli
RTFJ.
and read the Amazon link. People are already commenting on Amazon that it's copy-protected! Bet that slows sales down a bit...
sulli
RTFJ.
What this looks like it does is throw off the error correction used by cd-rom drives but not mess up the error correction used by a regular cd player. So couldn't you just get a digital dump of hte raw data, then doapasover it using whatever error correction a cd player would have used?
Well, your certainly welcome to take a copy of all my wealth if you want. :)
The music I buy is about $20 as well, but that usually gets me a double-CD set,thus netting about $10 per disc, which is more in line with the cost of music when tapes were around. Of course, this only applies to the music _I_ buy. ;-)
really...come on...all it would take...(and there are many really easy ways around this but here is one)...is some one with a digital mixer to dump its tracks over and then cut a new cd....and that would even be a lot more effort than needed.
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
Is it one of these schemes where an ultrasonic component is added to the sound that confuses MP3 encoders and generates low-level lound beat frequencies when played back ? Well, whether it's that or not, here's what's going to happen : people who have an ear for musical quality (such as music professionals) won't like this at all, and may actually be able to hear distortions in the masters.
As for the rest of us who can't really distinguish between a 128kbps MP3 and the original on CD and really want to create an MP3 version of they CD to play on their MP3 player, they'll just bypass the protection by playing the original, filter it with a low-pass analog filter of some sort, re-digitize it and MP3-encode it (the hardware to do this is a PC with a full-duplex sound card, and 50c worth of electronic components anybody with two hands can solder together). Most likely, most people won't hear much of a difference in terms of quality if the process is done right, kind of like a watermarked JPEG that's blurred, sized down a little, then resized up, to remove the watermark : sure, the photo isn't as good as the original, but it's good enough if you're not a professional photographer.
All in all, a hassle for everybody courtesy of the copyrighted music mafia.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Its going to be very difficult to break "protection" on a CD that won't even be recognized by your CDROM drive as a real CD.
It was nothing to do with MP3 vs WMA vs Ogg or anything like that. It will do the same thing under Windows or Linux.
When it's broken can we have another go'round with 2600 and wear it on our shirts and say Freedom of Speech? Just need to know this so I can figure out how many shirts I'll need to print up. (c=
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The article claims that it prevents ripping by introducing "wildly erroneous" data and also munging the ECCs. So what; if you leave ECC off (an option in MusicMatch) or rip in Analog mode (also an option in MusicMatch), I would assume these things would not really be a big deal. The quality would still be good enough for most people. Then if you need a copy you can use on another computer, you simply burn one from THAT rip, not the original. What's the big deal?
(Aside from the completely ODIOUS idea of deliberately introducing distortion, of course...)
--Brandon
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Of course the record labels don't care about killing the CD. They want it to exit stage left because:
1) People are catching onto the fact that the CD only costs ~$0.80 to make, and they have been raping us in higher costs, and
2) because CDs and MP3s get along so nice, they are a menace to profits, and finally,
3) they want everyone to replace their entire CD collection with the new DVD-audio, which has built-in encryption.
It is actually a pretty good plan: screw up the CD, so the audiophiles move onto the DVD-audio, and the MP3 problem with everyone else dies off.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
If it can be played, it can be ripped. There is no such thing as copy protection that REQUIRES the thing be decoded to audio that will not be EASLILY bypassed.
The sooner the morons in the record industry realize this, the sooner they pocket the $millions they are wasting developing such crap.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
And this is old news, here's when I first submitted it:
2001-05-15 14:01:23 Copy Protected CDs Arrive (articles,news) (rejected)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
If they released this test CD just to check the system out, they should have done it out in the open. It seems somebodys scared of having their project cracked 2 seconds after releasing it (which will probably happen) and losing their funding.
Inserting "grossly erroneous values, adding bursts of hiss to the audio signal" sounds like a pretty shaky protection scheme anyway.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
D - M - C - A
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
if we can play it on a computer why can't we write a driver that captures the data going into the sound card, (like a screenshot or in this case a "SOUND SHOT")?
It's because the audio is already analog by the time it hits your sound card - your system never sees the bits. The cd-rom drive contains the hardware to act as a player, and outputs analog audio on a separate wire to the sound card, which plays the analog audio directly. Whatever cd-playing software you use merely acts as an interface to the cd-rom drive, and doesn't manipulate the signal at all.Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
You can still buy newer LPs and they aren't $29.44. Adeline Records sells some LPs and EPs, the average price there is $3.50 for EPs and $12 for LPs.
Also, cd now has vinyl copies of music for sale from some artists.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
It's the "RIAA's greatest hits CD!"
--
If for no other reason, this scheme is horrific for the fact that it intentionally degrades audio. From the article:
... the system deliberately gives some of the digital code on the CD "grossly erroneous values", adding bursts of hiss to the audio signal. In addition, the error-correction codes on the CD, which would normally correct such errors, are distorted. So error correction fails, leaving tiny gaps in the music.
The company claims that no one can notice the difference, but I think their test group was too limited. I have a friend whose wife will only use fresh VCR tapes because the distortion caused by reusing a tape is noticable to her. She also can tell the difference between CDs and analog sources, such as cassette tapes. Again from the article:
But this doesn't placate hi-fi buffs. "It's a dreadful, dreadful thing to contaminate the sound deliberately, says Martin Colloms, a British hi-fi expert whose columns are syndicated around the world. "We all hate piracy but the idea of mucking up the sound of a recording is reprehensible. It's like slashing paintings in a gallery to stop someone stealing them."
If it doesn't play right in your car, return it.
any senseable person would agree that the CD has a defect if it does not play as you expect it.
If enough people start doing this, The record companies will get the idea that this is unacceptable.
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
That would make the CD more susceptible to small scratches. Intentionally selling a damaged product (with a reduced lifetime, to ensure that the consumer must by another CD soon)?
I'm not a lawyer, but it could violate consumer protection laws.
For the particular case in question, it seems almost trivial; more like a minor repairing of the data rather than breaking a scheme.
-- MarkusQ
> Its going to be very difficult to break "protection" on a CD that won't even be recognized by your CDROM drive as a real CD.
I can see how computer CD software might not recognize it as being a "good" format, but I can't see how the hardware would fail to read it, since the essentially same drive hardware is being used in both cases (the consumer black-box audio device and the computer). So breaking it would just be a matter of writing some software.
Now, this may be a problem since only major corporations can write software and none of them would be motiva--oh wait, I forgot, some scattered individuals write software too. So yeah, I suspect it will be broken.
-- MarkusQ
This may be an obvious question, but what about regular old CD copy feature of my burner's software? Will the duplicate CD still work in my walkman? Or will the duplicate be all scratchy like a mp3 ripped from one of these protected CDs?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
This is how software equalizers work (they extract the digital data, modify it, and send it to your sound card in digital form), which is why many audio CD players use digital data extraction.
Who here actually gives a shit about fair use? The question in my eyes is whether we'll be able to illegally duplicate this copyrighted property so we can enjoy it for free with our friends and family. And of course WE (the geeks) will, because we're priveledged with the skills and support network to make it happen, but the problem here is that the people who really can't afford it (and just about everyone reading this CAN afford to pay) are going to have to revert back to paying for it, just as we were getting close to making the technology accessible to these people. It's now very aparrent that this and other information technologies that might make for a more upwardly mobile lower class will just continue to be snuffed in the name of conserving our intellectual property rights. And the real pisser is that WE(the middle class and myself) are the ones inducing this sort of reaction from the system by ripping IP in the first place. The thought of under-priveledged people having to pay for their information (Its hard enough for them to take an interest in information in the first place) is pretty shitty. ---FuntshotIV "...I could explain it but no one would care."