Macrovision CD Protection Bypassed

LoPan writes: "The defective CDs that have recently arrived on the market have already had their copy protection broken according to The Register. What I'd like to know is if the discs do not conform to the Red Book standard, and if so, can they actually be sold as audio CD's, with the logo? Are they marked, warning consumers that they're buying a defective product?" The cdfreaks article referenced by the Register article tells you all you need to know. It's Windows-centric, but give it a few weeks and I bet cross-platform answers will show up.

Comments

DMCA dosent seem all that bad..just misused

[Nihilanth]

I was originally going to post this as a response-to-a-response, but i got enough replies with similar content to reply outside the thread.

I think my big problem here is that I don't fully understand what the DMCA actually -says-... so i looked up some key passages, let's read along:

"Contracting parties shall provide adaquate legal protectiona nd effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this treaty or the Berna convention and that restricts acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law."

Now, since the electronic reproduction of digital media for archival purposes is legal, how can the creation of a tool that enables this practice be illegal (i apologize for posting this sentiment twice, but im going somewhere different with it)?

Also an interesting little gem:

[paragraph pointing out that circumventing copyright controls to -accessing- information is illegal, but not copying it. and then...]

"This distinction was employed to assure that the public will have the continued ability to make fair use of copyrighted works. Since copying of a work may be a fair use under appropriate circumstanses, section 1201 does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological measure that prevents copying. by contrast, since the fair use doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorised access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited."

Sounds pretty clear-cut to me. By those guidelines, the DeCSS boys should have been clean as a whistle, same with the CDFreaks crew.

Oh, and check out the footnote to that page:

"'Copying' is used in this context as a short-hand for the exersise of any of the exclusive rights of an author ... a technological measure that prevents unauthorized distribution or public performance of a work would fall into this second category"

Further down is a list of exceptions, section 1201(f), very interesting:

"Reverse engineering. This exception permits circumvention and the development of technological means for such circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing elements of the program neccessary to achieve interoperability with other programs, to the extend that such acts are permitted under copyright law."

"Encryption research (section 1201(g). An exception for encryption research permits the circumvention of access control measures, and the development of the technological means to do so, in order to identify flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies."

Now, it was mentioned earlier that CDfreaks could still be presented with a civil suit, but lets take a look at "remedies".

"Any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in Federal court..." Since, according to said sections, no injury took place, no civil suit can be brought to court.

Also interesting was the mention that nonprofit orginizations, archives, and educational institutions are excempt from liability.

If you check out the new section in table two, section 512, "System Caching" is also excempt from liability. Since the CDFreaks software caches the audio track into RAM, wouldnt it be excempt?

For all the DMCA bashing that goes on, actually reading it, it looks pretty fair and reasonable.

The only possability then, is that the Powers that Be are all either unintelligent or receiving large bribes from the media industry.

Beatles One

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the protected CDs...I bought this CD and wanted to rip it to play on my MP3 player.

CDDA paranoia ripped this CD fine...here's how... You can't turn on the "accept no less than perfect" option...you will see errors during the read (V), but the end result is fine. You can only rip at 1x...I belive this is the key...most CD-Rippers will try to read at the fastest drive speed. I belive there are some portable CD players that read at faster than 1x (to fill their anti-skip buffers faster?)...obviously these CDs won't play correctly in these drives. And yes, there is no apparent CD-Audio icon on this disk.

The new *Nsync CD

[Anonymous Coward]

The new *Nsync CD my daughter purchased had that SafeAudio protection. My Mac read the CD and told me the CD was "corrupted" but I was able to continue using it. I ripped an MP3 from it amd it worked fine. I guess SafeAudio doesn't work on Macs.

Re:RedBook conformity

[_xeno_]

As for a couple of posts i've read about CDFreak being in danger of legal repercussions, their case is different from Dmitry's in that (please correct me if i'm mistaken) they're giving the software away for free, not selling it to make money, so they're not breaking any laws, even under the DMCA.

Sorry, you asked for it (literally), but you are mistaken. From the DMCA (as reproduced by the EFF):

`(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--

`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

`(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Notice it does not say they have to "selling" the device, only "traffic" in it. Now while Sec 1201, subsection (a)(1)(E)(2)(C) (is that how you reference it?) says "is marketed," that has been interpretted in the past as meaning something along the lines of "offered" and not necessarily "offered for trade."

So it would seem that yet, they can still be tried criminally under the DMCA.

congratulations, you are now a criminal in the USA

[S. Allen]

tell cdfreaks to steer clear of the good old USA unless they want to end up in prison.

Re:Question about the DMCA

[_xeno_]

How does one define a copyright protecting system?

Well, they'll have to decide exactly what it means, but the DMCA itself (from the EFF) says in Section 1201, subsection (a)(3):

`(3) As used in this subsection--

`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

`(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

You'll notice that even "impairing" a technical measure is illegal - if you do anything to "avoid" the measure, that is still illegal. It would seem to me that this device would fall under this terms, as it "impares" or "avoids" the measure designed to protect copyright...

As for whether or not what Macrovision is doing is a "measure" to protect copyright, it would seem that it is, as a "process or treatment" (namely error correction) is required to "access" the work. Which means that most likely, those of us in the United States, the land of the Free*, cannot legally use this system.

* Does not include tax, title or license. Some restrictions may apply.

Re:Divx analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not movie keys. They are keys for players allowed to play the disks.

Crack one key and all the disks with that key on them are playable.

Mode 1 sectors vs. Red Book sectors

[yerricde]

when you read in raw mode, you also get the correction data. So it's a simple matter of taking the data you got and correcting it in software

CD-ROM stores 75 sectors per second. Red Book sectors contain 2,352 bytes, or (44100 samples/chn/sec) * (2 channels) * (2 bytes/sample) / (75 sectors/sec). CD-ROM sectors recorded in mode 1 (the vast majority of computer CD-ROMs) contain 2048 bytes of data and about 300 bytes of error correction data. For more information, read http://www.eaglevisiontv.com/General_Information/C DROM_Formats/body_cdrom_formats.html.

mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip ftp://ftp.braz.ru/pub/drivers/cdrom/cdfs.zip

Charlie Pride

[sdo1]

Yes, that was mentioned but it was using a different technology and not the macrovision technology. Apparently the experiment failed because lots of people returned the CDs because they often would fail to play on regular CD players.

The technology we're looking for is from macrovision and discussed in this article:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/19/007240 &mode=nested

-S

.cda file format and .wav file format

[yerricde]

Question: Is there any loss of quality in converting from the CD native ".cda" files to the ".wav" format?

.cda files are shortcuts to raw data stored in a Red Book track. This data is 16-bit stereo linear PCM at 44,100 samples per second. The most common version of the RIFF WAVE (.wav) format can encode (8*D)-bit C-channel linear PCM at F Hz, of which 16-bit stereo linear PCM at 44,100 Hz is a special case. (There are extensions to RIFF WAVE to handle MPEG layer 3 audio, but I'll skip those.) A Red Book extractor such as CDex or cdparanoia converts the raw data to the wav data by simply reading each 2,352-byte Red Book sector, changing the order of the bytes to fit RIFF WAVE's little-endian channel-interleaved data encoding, and writing the sector to a file.

What about CD players with digital output?

[Karpe]

It is very common now to buy CD players with digital outputs. How does this anti-copying mechanisms work with these outputs? Isn't it just the case to connect these outputs to a soundcard with a digital input? I know the SB Live! has such a connector, altough it "upsamples" every input to 48kHZ PCM. I know the Santa Cruz by Turtle Beach also has such an input, but am not sure if it also does this "upsample". Well, you wouldn' lose quality by transforming the 44.1 to 48 sampling rate, but if you would then downsample the 48 back to 44.1 I don't know what the algorithms would do. Would they just take the original 44.1k samples or get some of the "generated" samples?