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

CD Freaks Got It Wrong.

[chefmonkey]

In reading the CD Freaks article, I'm fairly certain that they haven't figured out a way to rip the tracks; at least, not correctly.

The earlier article sited on /. (I can't seem to find the damn thing right now) didn't say that attempting to rip protected disks would result in an error; it said that you'd end up with bursts of static. This technology works by placing bursts of static in the audio stream and marking them with a wildly wrong checksum. Audio CD players will interpolate over these bursts. Data CD readers will read the static in and (except for some models running at 1x) ignore the checksum altogether.

The driver that CD Freaks points out is kind of cool; it means you don't need a dedicated ripper any more. The article, though doesn't indicate how it gets around the problem with the ECC codes being missing.

Given this, and given knowledge of the way that CD-ROM drives work, I'd bet anyone here dimes to dollars that the CD Freaks "solution" won't be any more effective at circumventing the copy protection than any other CD ripper.

Re:congratulations, you are now a criminal in the

[nanojath]

Interesting question - if you fail to label the CD in any way, how is one to say they have encountered an "encryption method" (for which the creation of a "circumvention device" is a violation of the DMCA) rather than a "stupidly fucked up CD," for which the creation of a "repair technology" is simply the perogative of the discerning consumer.

Gets into interesting territory: in general, I know, an ignorance of the law does not preclude one from being prosecuted for breaking it ("gee officer, that's a COCA bush?! And here I thought I was makin' SALT down in my basement" will not get you off the hook), although it may be considered in sentencing (as long as you're not facing a mandatory minimum, natch)... Yet this seems to be a case where ignorance could justifiably be grounds for questioning whether the law even applies. Are these CDs really "encrypted" in the first place? Bollocks, I say - they just have a bunch of junk on them. Teaching your computer to ignore bad data on a CD is hardly decryption.

I think Macrovision is well aware of all this. They were floating them to find out a)how long it takes the story to break b)how big of a public stink about it would occur and c)how long it would take for audiophiles and compunerds to come up with a fix for the problem.

Answers:

a: practically instantaneously

b: only among a sadly tiny cadre of the technological intelligentsia c: not long at all. Thank you for playing, better luck next time!

Re:Titles please?

[volsung]

I want to second this request. I'm seeing way to much ranting on this topic, and not enough hard data. How can anyone evaluate this system or claim to have broken it without a CD using SafeAudio to test it on? Therefore, identifying such a CD should be our first priority, not talking out our posterior.

And to all of you people who replied sarcastically to this poster: You're all idiots. If the only evidence for the earth's roundness or the Holocaust was press releases, fluffy news articles, and Slashdot posts, I'd have a hard time drawing any conclusions too.

So let me repeat my plea:

DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY FIRST-HAND INFORMATION ON THESE DISKS?

I don't care about how this makes you feel, or what your friend told you. Thanks.

Re:Familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

CD's are encoded at the physical level in 14 bit words. This was not for security, or error correction, but due to the physical properties. Let me explain. CD's are enconded with physical pits and lands. Lands and pits are not distinguishable by an ordinary CD reader, and both represent binary zero! (really, I'm not making this up). The CD reader can distinguish the transistion between lands and pits (thank you destructive interference), and these represent binary ones. Now, the reason for 14bit encoding is that the encoding rules require at least 3 zeroes between each one, and no more than 11 zeroes between each one. There happens to at least 256 14bit words that fit this criteria. The CD reader does the 14bit to 8bit conversion after it performs error correction. There are two level of error correction.

Titles please?

[sdo1]

I have yet to see any titles of these so-called protected CDs. Until I see a title, I don't believe any of it.

-S

I want to see some people get convicted for this

[Coq]

I know this may seem strange, but think about it. The only tech issue the public at large understands to any degree is napster. napster napster napster. Now there may be legal action against DeCSS stuff, and Sklyarov may be in jail, but no one seems to know about that. What most people do know, though, is that mp3s exist and have some sort of controversy associated with them.

So what happens if people get prosecuted for this particular violation of the DMCA? it makes the news. People hear about how they can't even rip their own cds and play them on that $200 rio they just bought. People might have wasted their money. Now of course, if people are prosecuted for violation of the DMCA, which incidently they did break, they will be convicted. The next thing to do is appeal up to the supreme court on the grounds that the law is unconstitutional for all the various reasons that we /. folks are so familiar with.

If the Court has any sense, they'll agree, and the DMCA will be out of our lives.

If the people prosecuted as violating the DMCA win it is possible that the law is never appealed and eventually we all get screwed when the US completes its deterioration into a corporate republic.

Here's what I'm trying to say and ask.

[AtariDatacenter]

I don't think my last post did an elegant job on it. We all know that the code that allows you to bypass the Macrovision CD copy protection is a DMCA violation. That should be obvious.

But isn't it just as much of a violation to bypass the Macrovision copy protection via sampling an audio stream, or recording the analog stream to another device?

By doing so, you are bypassing their mechanism to prevent the CD from being copied. And nothing in the DMCA says that it has to be 100% effective against all means of copying.

So does that make analog copying a violation because you are bypassing the digital protection?

Re:Familiar

[kstumpf]

I think you're referring to raw recording, in which you can read/write 2336 bytes per sector rather than 2048. Its used as a copyright measure pretty often, since very few drives now handle raw sectors as you'd expect. I remember reading that this ability was dropped in order to gain faster speeds for rewritable drives. Yeah yeah yeah...

I have a Ricoh MP6200S which I bought several years ago. It's 6X read, 2X write/rewrite, but I won't trade it for anything in the world. The only CD I havent been able to duplicate on it thus far was Black & White (not worth copying anyway).

Most new cd ripping software typically does not support this drive since its so old. I'm still using a dos-based copy of DAO (precursor to CDRWIN). I originally got this setup in order to copy my PSX disks (which require raw reads) so I had all my games at home and at college.

Anyhow, if you want a powerful (albeit slow) drive, look up older models on eBay.

reminds me....

[rixdaffy]

of the good old days when commercial pc games were "protected" by putting bad sectors on the diskettes (yes when they still fitted on a few disks and were twice as fun as modern games) ... to prevent regular diskcopy to work... of course it didn't take long before we had programs that were able to copy the bad sectors too :-)

Already announced at CD Media World

[Stavr0]

This news item came out a week ago:
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_prot ections_safeaudio.shtml

Copy protection is a sin.

[uigrad_2000]

In many countries (eg. Russia), releasing such an album would be against the law. Here, in the U.S., it isn't. However, I, as a Christian, would never let my record company release one of my albums with this scheme, because it is an attempt to take advantage of the customer.

Legal, but not moral by my book. I hope more artists will see it this way too.

If you're not a Christian, move on. Nothing to see here...

Be honest now....

[Rackemup]

How many people didn't see this coming? Don't be shy, raise your hand if you actually BELIEVED FOR A SECOND that this copy-protection scheme would work...

I think it's funny that they introduced these special CDs onto the market in the first place. People buy CDs for the high-quality music, and then they go and release this "copy-protection" scheme that purposly screws up the data so bad people can't copy the music to their computers.

Here's a little knowledge-nugget© for you record-producer-type people, some of us rip songs from CDs into MP3 format because it's WAY more convenient to listen to. That doesnt mean I'm going to share the data with the world just to spite the record companies... I know there are people who no longer buy CD's because the music is so easy to find online (and they should be punished for doing this), but I've actually bought MORE CD's in the past year or 2 because I had listened to the music online first.

Instead of trying to find a way to prevent people from using the CDs that they've bought at a normal store, how about figuring out a way to encourage online users to support the bands who actually make the music....

BeOS

[Gothmolly]

How does this "technology" affect BeOS users? BeOS has the ability to mount CDs and read the WAV files right off them.

Re:Fools hope

[Blue Aardvark House]

It is understood that these laws should not be broken, because they are laws. But isn't it funny that every time a protection comes out, it's hacked?

Just because something is law, it's not necessarily right. Perhaps eventually the "copyright industry" will learn that all this protection is nonsense, and the world will not end by loosening protection of IP.

Or perhaps I'm just another fool.

Re:People don't care about the Copy Protection

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree that using the computer to listen to music is something that most "tech-inclined" people do. Maybe most of the tech-inclined people who happen to be hearing impaired.

I don't understand how people can listen to music through the computer. First of all, there's all the extra background noise (HD, fans). Second, even the absolute best set of computer speakers pales in comparison to a relatively low end consumer quality amp & speakers. Third, if you're using an analog sound card, you're picking up lots of extra noise from the nasty RF environment in the case, and if you're using a digital card, the digital mixer is introducing distortion. Finally, unless you're encoding at a minimum of 192k, and preferably 256k, your mp3s are suffering an easily audible loss of fidelity.

What music do you listen to that you aren't bothered by this? Heck, even my car stereo sounds better than every computer I've ever heard. Besides, if you're worried about damaging the original disc, why not just copy the CD and use the copy in your stereo?

Re:Familiar

[gorilla]

Encoding by changing from one state to another instead of directly encoding the bits in the state is actually quite a common way to encode data, it's called 'zero crossing', and it's done because sometimes it's easier to detect a change in a state than tell exactly what the state is. T1 lines and X10 use it too.

So what?

[telemnar]

What has continued to surprise me is that no one seems to have caught on that this particular copy protection like this only affects DAE (digital audio extraction, isn't it?). Good ol' analog ripping - by way of the MPC/2/3 CD-Audio out from the CD-ROM drive, or even a 1/8" stereo mini plug, or better yet, a pair of composite RCA type plugs... into the line input of your sound card, or hell, any other recording device - would be a, perhaps inelegant, but still effective way to rip... and is that even circumventing anything? Is recording from a supposedly secure standalone CD player illegal yet?

I'm not bothered so much by purposefully garbled music as I am by the idea of authentication. Music that requires a certified legitimate player to show its papers, players that require music to do the same, all in the name of preserving the profit of record companies... Read this great article by Jaron Lanier over at Discover Magazine. (first saw it on a /. post some time ago, no I don't remember where/when) It's a great what-if about the possible future of secured music, and he makes a damn good point - all of the mechanisms for effecting complete control over what and how you listen are being slowly and for the most part quietly put into place... and that scares me.

Annoyance

[verbatim]

I would like them (RIAA, Macrovision, etc) to explain why I don't have the right to convert CD audio into another format. I have a Creative Nomad (MP3 player that uses smartcards) and it is 10x better than a CD player (IMHO) - never skips, great quality, lots of features, etc. Isn't it fair use of the CD to convert it into a format that my MP3 player can understand? It's not like I'm ripping the CD and giving it to someone else - it's all for my own use, just like copying it to tape which, afaik, is perfectly legal (now, I understand that tapes are lower quality and this lower quality is RIAA's main reason for not caring).

???

Good thing I'm in Canada and not subjigated to the DMCA... oh wait... dammit... they're bringing that over here.... arugh.

Even so, I buy very few CD's anyway. Most of my favourite artists either give away MP3's and/or sell unprotected CD's. I adore the old Amiga tracker scene and all those great songs... so I'm happy ;).