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

Retroactive "circumvention device" status?

[Jeremi]

According to the CDFreaks article,

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?

Re:Ahh, Macrovision

[cnaumann]

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.

Re:People don't care about the Copy Protection

[nanojath]

What it boils down to is that there are an order of magnitude more consumer audio CD players out there than consumer CD-ROMS, CD Burners, and CD-RW drives hooked up computers combined - and a LOT of people who have a CD drive in their computer don't have a clue what it is capable of. It's easy to think the range of techknowledge you get on Slashdot is the norm, when 45K people will respond to a stupid joke survey about the SirCam virus and weak servers are instantly shut down by the volume of traffic when Slashdot links to a story - but the reality is quite the opposite: even the relatively technostupid like myself stand head and shoulders above the average consumer, who is only vaguely aware that stuff like this even exists.

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.

Question about the DMCA

[Fat Rat Bastard]

This article has gotten me thinking again about the DMCA's "no circumvention device" clause again. How does one define a copyright protecting system? (I know this is a rhetorical question, something the courts will have to decide). At first glance I thought "Oh no, these guys are going to get a nasty lawyergram from Macrovision, RIAA, etc." But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this could be a quagmire. For instance, if I found a way to rip a Macrovision'ed disc that de-mungs the munged error correcting data I could see how that might run afoul of the DMCA. But what if someone simply pipes the music through the analog inputs of a soundcard, or rips the CD from a cd player with a digital audio out? Since no "circumvention" took place in these cases we now have a situation where, while the destination is the same, one "journey" is legal and the other is illegal.

Yet another reason the law should punish "conduct" and not code.

RedBook conformity

[Nihilanth]

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.

Re:People don't care about the Copy Protection

[sith]

I think the reason their return rate is so low is that most stores won't accept cds for returns.

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 ... a whole can of worms ... opened...

Re:Titles please?

[sdo1]

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.

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 /. 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.

Has anyone considered the possibility that these news stories are just being floated to gauge public response?

-S