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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.
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
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
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...
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?