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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.
I should have charged the company for breaking their multimillion dollar encryption.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
The article is talking about SafeAudio from Macrovision. The Charley Pride CD is using Mediacloq by Suncomm.
Q.
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
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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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"?
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Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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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.
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
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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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.
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
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?
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.....
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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
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Garett
DAMMIT! Why didn't they tell us that back in January?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
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
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.
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 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.
It's the "RIAA's greatest hits CD!"
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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
> 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