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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.
Speaking of defective, as I understand it, these 'protected' CD's deliberately introduce imperfections that the CD player's built in error correction will be able to deal with. The article mentions that this is the same way that the CD player deals with scratches and smudges on the CD and laser misreads. (I know, elementary, but bear with me). These 'protected' CD's may play fine when they are brand new, but what about after a couple of months when the CD player has to deal with scratches, smudges AND slightly corrupt data. I'd be willing to bet that this protection method will significantly reduce the playlife of the CD's. But do these jerks care? No - they just push the consequences of their actions into the future, and somebody else will have to deal with it later. These kind of 'fire and forget' tactics really tick me off. It's kind of like selling snake oil in my opinion. I hope these guys get it right in the ass.
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
Reported is that all software that is able to rip at Burst Copy Mode .... is able to rip SafeAudio protected CD's.
So does this mean that these Burst Copy Mode programs, while previously legal, are now "circumvention devices" under the DMCA?
If so, can I make a "protected" file format that Microsoft Office just happens to be able to read, and get Bill Gates arrested?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
..Yeah, its about as suprising as Sony selling hardware to rip CD's on one hand and releasing CD's protected against ripping on the other hand..
I'm sorry, I forgot.. Who's ripping who off?
air and light and time and space
"Try to return an opened cd to best buy and see how far you get. They'll happily exchange it for another copy of the same disc, but exchanging defective for defective is still defective."
Oh I have no problem returning CDs as many times as necessary to get my money back. Best Buy is right across the street and I'm there all the time. I just say "Hey this is the 3rd time I've returned this CD. I can't read it and there's something wrong with it" and show a couple of receipts with their return clerk's initials on it. After that I usually get my money back.
After damaging some hard to find CDs, I immediately make a backup and stick the original in the closet. If I can't, back to the store it goes.
Well, maybe - but the thing is, the 1-2% of people who have the knowledge to do this can distribute ripped mp3's to the world via "File Sharing Protocol of the Month." Joe Citizen doesn't have to be able to rip SafeCD's - he just needs a net connection.
In its twisted way, it is an anti-deterrent. Suppose they come up with a 100% fool-proof way to stop CD ripping. What would happen if someone wanted an MP3 from that album? They would turn to one of the many file sharing applications of course! Somewhere out there, there will be a digital copy. Eliminating 95% of the ripping does not mean that the MP3 would be 95% less avialable. The logic of need for CD protection is flawed beyond comprehension. The record companies should be doing the oposite, putting good MP3s on the CD with the regular stuff, making CDs that are easier to read on computers. They are trying to protect themselves from the people who are actually buying the CDs. By locking up the CD, they are giving people even less insentive to buy them. Most manufacturers make an effort to make their products easier to use, but for some very odd reasons, the record companies have decided to the way to increased sales is by making their product more difficult to use. Unfortunately, cracking the copy protection is the wrong solution to this non-sense. The correct solution would be for consumers to reject the CDs like Divx.
At best, Napster had a couple million users on simultaneously at any given moment - whereas CBS managed to get some 30 million to watch Survivor at the same time. If Macrovision were to round their return percentage figures off to the nearest tenth it would probably be sufficient to make all those returning due to unrippability dissapear. They also probably picked a CD that was unlikely to go over with techies very well, the better to slow down discovery. After all, they want to put the best possible spin on a fairly trivial protection scheme - remember, they could give a rats ass about end-users, their real targets, their consumers, are record companies.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
When the whole issue of copy-protected audio CDs first came out, I called Philips and spoke with one of their attorneys. I urged him to get Philips to refuse to license the CD logo to these non-compliant discs. I argued that the return rates and subsequent problems would cause consumers to lose faith in the CD standard and could eventually cost Philips business as consumers embraced other, non-Philips standards for recorded audio. As you see, my 45 minute long phone call apparently did little to sway Philips' opinions about this matter.
Yet another reason the law should punish "conduct" and not code.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
I would imagine the "secure" audio CDs would still conform to the Redbook Standard, since the CDs are only "secure" because the fidelity of the recording is garbled ("corrupts the data", said The Register) in a way that a Hi-Fidelity playback device would be able to deal with, but would cause A CD-ROM drive to error out. Since the redbook standard seems to focus primarily on the physical composition of the compact disc (and the leadin track and "stuff") and not the format of the data on the disk, I would imagine they're still "redbook kosher", they just have intentionally error-riffic data imprinted on them.
CDFreak's software is really neat, from what i've read about it. It reads in the audio track into RAM and mounts it as a volume, and involved creating a custom VXD, sounds pretty innovative.
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.
This reminds me of copy protection schemes for floppy disks that worked by deliberate corruption. Changing the checksum for a particular sector of the disk, or something, so it would appear that any read had failed. It wasn't done at the filesystem level because even a 'raw backup' would fail.
I remember thinking at the time, I wish this machine would stop trying to be helpful and check the validity of what it's reading, and instead just give me the data with no questions asked.
I know that CDs use some kind of Gray code or other ECC to encode 16-bit sample values into 20-bit words or something similar. Then there are other error-correction measures, checksums and so on. That's why a CD holds only 650Mbyte (or a bit more) although the physical capacity in terms of raw bits is much higher.
Is there any software or hardware to give a genuinely 'raw' CD image, before any of the error correction has been performed? Such an image would probably be around a gigabyte in size.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They didn't actually write any software, just pointed to the location of a previously written driver. The driver itself isn't a violation of DMCA because it wasn't originally written to bypass the protection.
I still don't get how they think this is a deterrent... The most frequent use of ripping discs these days is to make MP3's of them.
Well, mp3 encoding is lossy (although unless you are foolishly stingy with the bitrate the loss is very slight). Since someone ripping mp3's is willing to accept a slight amount of degradation, they should also be perfectly happy with a nice digitally filtered copy of the song with all the Macrovision glitches removed.
Heck, if your CD player can do it, so can software---your CD player doesn't really do anything all that fancy with filtering anyways.
Then again, don't be surprised---it's not like Macrovisions stuff ever really stopped people from copying VHS tapes or dubbing DVD's onto VHS for their friends...
This crap happens all the time. "Let the courts hash it out." If constituents aren't happy with the law (as interpreted), the congress can claim they didn't mean for it to be interpreted the way it was... and then proceed to "fix" it.
I think the reason their return rate is so low is that most stores won't accept cds for returns.
... a whole can of worms ... opened...
Try to return an openned cd to best buy and see how far you get. They'll happily exchange it for another copy of the same disc, but exchanging defective for defective is still defective.
I have many cds that i've never actually listened to in non-mp3 form. I get a cd, rip it, then put the cd in my rack and listen to the mp3s.
It will be interesting to see how the various portable mp3 device makers react to SafeAudio, assuming it gets widely accepted.
The most interesting part is that most people will probably end up doing a straight pirate copy of a CD off morpheus or its kin if they can't rip the CD. IE, I'm not going to buy a cd that I can't rip to mp3, so I might as well pirate a copy off the net (assuming I dont want to do the cdfreaks workaround myself).
Let us just say
Troll? Oh, come on. First we read that they've released THOUSANDS of CDs with this Macrovision technology on them... yet still not one title documented.
/. I've asked if anyone has a title... just one. NO ONE HAS ANY IDEA what titles this was used on. The people here have an incredible ability to dig up bits of relevant data on a variety of subjects. But not this one. Not a single title verified. Without that data, I'm highly skeptical that the copy protection, if there is any, has been broken.
Then we read "Oh joy! The protection has been broken!" Broken on WHAT? Until someone can produce a title and say what was done, I don't believe that there's really any "protected" CDs out there, and I don't believe that there's any protection that has been broken. Is that so hard to figure out. I'll change my tune as soon as someone identifies a CD that this has been done to.
Every single time this has come up on
Has anyone considered the possibility that these news stories are just being floated to gauge public response?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Here is part of the article, since the site appears to be slashdotted.
-=-
SafeAudio, you probably already heard about it. It's the music industries latest technology to make sure they will get their money from the public.
I've never seen a industry that is so keen on money and tries in any way to protect it's products so desperately. Since they have stopped Napster they are disliked by more and more people, but they don't seem to care.
Altough SafeAudio is rather easy to bypass I think Macrovision can already market it as a success as it seems a lot of record companies have adopted the technology. Soon Macrovision will publish their results and I'm very curious how much they've made this year.
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SafeAudio protects a CD only from ripping. This means that converting your CD to MP3/WMA files should be impossible. Stupid of course, as there are MP3 players on the market, just like a walk/disc man that you can carry around and for those you NEED to convert your CD's.
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Macrovision and TTR (that started developing this technology) say that the error corrections that are done while you play a CD in your normal CD player/computer can not be heard, for now there is no reason to believe they are wrong.
The main questions rises, can we bypass it ?
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Software that is able to do that, and besides that is always very handy is a modified version of CDFS.vxd. (Download here) Before installing this new windows CD-ROM driver you should think about 2 things:
It does not work for Windows NT/2K/XP and with all CD-ROM players
Make sure you have a backup of your original CDFS.vxd file (or just rename the old one to CDFS.old)
You can find the CDFS.vxd file that has to be replaced in the folder:
C:\Windows\System\IOSubSys
If you have succesfully copied the file, you need to restart your computer so the file can be loaded in the OS.
If all went well you can now open your Windows Explorer, and when you have a Audio CD in your drive it will show you all kinds of maps with choices of wav files. You can now pick the file you want and drag it to a folder on your HD !
By dragging and dropping all the files to your HD you have a very easy to use way of making a backup of SafeAudio protected CD's, and damn what will those Macrovision guys feel bad
-=-
see the actual site later for more info.
Enjoy.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)