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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.
What I do think will make a difference is when the record companies come up with (1) an easy way to obtain and pay for music online, and (2) methods of making piracy so difficult that people would rather just fork over the cash. Obviously, we're not going to like it if/when that happens, but that's what they're shooting for.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
... a technological measure that prevents unauthorized distribution or public performance of a work would fall into this second category"
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
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.
Current systems CD-ROM data paths usually return an audio sector that has been verified correct, one that has been corrected, or the raw correct-or-not sector data. They don't usually return the error correction bits so that software can analyze the sectors and fix them.
If I'm way off and most CD-ROM drives out there provide a simple way to read the data with correction bits, then you are right. The software will be able to do the same interpolation the player hardware does.
You can still rip at 1x using your CD-ROM's audio path. And, as you said in your post, mp3 is lossy so the loss of quality caused by going D to A then A to D may not bother people as much. They're just upping your CD rip time from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. Once ripped, the file can float among all the others in the great P2P file sharing netherworld.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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
I suppose in a while they'll make voting with your feet illegal too. It's a logical next step.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
but on the other hand, if you're exposing yourself to new music using mp3s, you're also subverting the economics that the record companies expect. they expect that if they force you to listen to something on the radio or mtv, then you'll go out and buy it. that's why n'sync and all the other shit like that is popular. nobody likes it because they normally would find it appealing. people like it because they're trained to like it.
if you start liking music on your own and ignore the schlock that you're force-fed, then you're adding unknowns to the system, and the record companies can't consolidate their catalogs to accomodate a universal taste, a goal to which they've been aspiring recently. During the merger-mania the record companies were going through last year, a lot of bands were dropped to slim down the rosters to a small pile of the most profitable "musicians." They WANT to produce as little variety of product as possible to reduce costs, and still sell enough to keep a nice fat income. finding new music on your own gets in the way of that goal.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
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.
Hmmm... the DMCA states, "...`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls...".
So, that means that anything that's purpose is not circumvention, but use, should be legal. IANAL, but I speak English, and that is what those words mean.
If that's the case, then why are we losing the DeCSS case? DeCSS is only a part of what was supposed to be used for playing DVDs, so why is it illegal?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think for most people, the delibrate defects won't hit until it's too late. By delibrately munging the error correction, it seems that the CDs won't fail for the non-CD-ripping public until after the CD has been used and abused for awhile. At that point, your only options are to suffer with a broken CD or buy another copy. Smells like a bit of a scam to me.
..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
Time to bring up the quote about law and sausage.
One can just imagine the hollywood lobbyist chatting up the Senator over a drink -- "Did you that under current law, it's perfectly legal for people to modify our cable boxes and disc players and make perfect digital copies of our content? And using the Internet, tney can take our content and give it away for free to anyone who wants it?"
To the Senator, that wouldn't sound right, and hense the DMCA was born out of good intentions. Sure, at some point someone considered the implications of this, and a a bunch of pro-fair use language was tacked on to the bill, but the core bit of allowing content providers to have legal 'access control' rises above all of that. It would have been a pointless law otherwise.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Maybe I'm a total ninny, but it seems like SafeDisc was doomed from the start.
Think about it... they rely upon the data-correction system within RedBook CD Players to cancel out their intentional twiddling with the data. They're counting on computer players in raw data mode to send these errors, without correction, onto the software.
Problem is, 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. Thus, you end up with the corrected data stream.
Am I missing something here? Seems like MacroVision was really grasping at straws with this.
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
Well, I just can't afford NEW CD's, copy-protected or not. Especially now that I can't "preview" them on Napster. I spend $10 and buy second-hand at the used music store or even pawn shop. It's not like there isn't a vast back-catalogue of music to pick from, and with enough patience, you can find almost anything semi-mainstream... And I don't mind paying $17 to Righteous Babe or some other smaller label for truly innovative, fresh music - once in a while as a treat.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Sorry, you asked for it (literally), but you are mistaken. From the DMCA (as reproduced by the EFF):
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
You wouldn't happen to have the names of these tools, and perhaps some links to them would you? I would love to do the same.
Free Mac Mini
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!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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:
I don't care about how this makes you feel, or what your friend told you. Thanks.
Odds on they're in for a suprise. I suspect the Digital Playback uses the same mechanism used to 'rip' tracks from the CD.
> By that rationale, no one can sell a CD player without the permission of the copyright holder.
That's pretty much how it works for DVD players. Expect them to try their damndest to phase out CD's for audio DVD's.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
"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.
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.
Well, they'll have to decide exactly what it means, but the DMCA itself (from the EFF) says in Section 1201, subsection (a)(3):
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
That's about as innovative as MS Windows. Filesystems that treat the audio tracks on CDs as files, have been around for many years. I think I played with one on my Amiga, oh, about 4 or 5 years ago (and it was old then)?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
(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.
Sorry, DMCA doesn't even remotely apply.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Most people will install anything they can get their hands on. I am talking about most computer users, not most Slashdot nerds.
Website/Friend/Enemy/Hacker/CDinmail: Look cool new program
User: Clicks setup and installs it.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Yeah, I get that, but that's not the truth.
The _REAL PURPOSE_ of DeCSS is to allow the playing of DVDs, the _METHOD_ is the circumvention of CSS.
I understand that the DMCA isn't interpreted to allow that, but that's what the real meaning is, in English.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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.
/. folks are so familiar with.
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
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.
Information wants Coq
In Windows 9x/2000, when you view the properties of a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, there's usually a "Digital Playback" option that bypasses the CD-audio cable connected to your soundcard and grabs the data direct from the CD-- I wonder if SafeAudio works with this, or if people who enabled this 'feature' are in for a surprise when they bring home a SafeAudio "protected" CD...
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
By that rationale, no one can sell a CD player without the permission of the copyright holder. No, the only way the DMCA is going to apply is if they stop the backward compatibility. The key phrase here is "with the authority of the copyright owner". CD player manufacturers do not have this, so neither must software CD player manufacturers.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Use this alternate CDFS.VXD cd driver on Win9x to show Audio CD's as WAV files IN THE FILE SYSTEM! This replacement driver shows WAV files in a variety of qualities. It works on any CD drive that Windows can support.
Then you can use your favorite Wave Editor program to read directly from the CD.
Put it in your \Windows\System\IOSubSys directory, and reboot. You can rename the old CDFS.VXD to CDFS.old for archive purposes.
The workaround is simple, just replace the file cdfs.vxd on your Win9x machine, then when you go into explorer and open up a music CD, you will see a list of WAV files in various formats. Simply drag them onto your HD, then use whatever software you want to convert from WAV to MP3.
The author's site isn't responding, but you can download the file from Dave Central fairly reliably.
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
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?
(How many people ever got around sending money to the artists after Naptering/etc. the music? Not many.)
Many.
Remember, the studies show that Napster users buy more CDs.
Resampling digital audio always has detrimental effects. Doing it twice (44.1 to 48 and back) makes these issues worse. Three times (44.1 to 48 to 44.1 and 48 again on playback through an SBLive!) is obviously quite a bit of comb-filtering bit-munging.
Better to just buy a card with a non-resampling assortment of SP/DIF I/O, such as the plethora of "pro" cards from Lexicon, M-Audio and the like.
Or, a $30 Zoltrix Nightingale (or about any other card [including some motherboards] based on the CMI8738 chip) will do the trick nicely with coax or toslink. Also works well as a hardware format converter, and an SCMS stripper.
While I'm on the subject, the error correction of a CD player takes place well before the bits reach the digital output.
While I'm on the subject, it occurs to me that such things as SafeAudio lend a hand toward legitimizing filesharing services. "Well, your Honour, I didn't have any way to utilize Fair Use and use this CD in the MP3 player that came with my new Mazda, so I downloaded the files from someone else who was able to figure it out."
Kid-proof tablet..
You could try BlindWrite
Blurb from the page: What's all this, then?
The BlindWrite suite is a tool designed to perfectly reproduce most CD.
To be or not to be (RAW mode compatible) ?
RAW mode is needed to produce perfect backups of some protected CDs !
DAO mode is even better. Almost all protected CD can be perfectly backed up using with DAO.
Blindread / Blindwrite are perfect tools to produce backups in RAW and DAO mode.
Don't know if that's what you mean?
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
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.
There is an essay on kuro5hin about a similar thing today.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
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.
The vast majority of people don't care that artists don't make any money. A lot of people use that as an excuse, but in reality they just want the free music. (How many people ever got around sending money to the artists after Naptering/etc. the music? Not many.) Most people don't feel any responsibility towards someone that they don't know personally, and so they don't see anything wrong with taking the music for free.
Sounds like you really are serious about getting money to the artists. Good for you. But even if the distribution of money changes, piracy isn't going to slow down much.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
How I wish that were true. How about looking at this April press release about the EU's latest directive on the subject, which member states now have 15-odd months to implement?
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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)
This news item came out a week ago:t ections_safeaudio.shtml
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_pro
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
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...
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Any and all encryption / security device is just a deterrent. Someone who wants it bad enough will go out and get it.
Now, most people value their time, and there is a certain threshold where they'll just fess up and stop trying to crack something.
RIAA knows this, Microsoft knows this, and even the people who wrote the DMCA know this. (The DMCA just raises that bar for everyone... it's meant to make copying happen less often, not try and make it more difficult.)
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....
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
Of course, the software industry went through a copy protection phase too. They ultimately decided that it was too much of a pain in the ass. A lot of customers simply avoided the copy protected software because it was such a pain to deal with the protection. Others copied it anyway because cracks always came about. The problem with "losses" is they don't reflect on the sales sheet. If you tell investors "We implemted foo copy protection and our sales dropped off" because the people pirating weren't going to buy your software anyway, the copy protection goes away pretty quick.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How does this "technology" affect BeOS users? BeOS has the ability to mount CDs and read the WAV files right off them.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
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
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Oh, and first post
Question: Is there any loss of quality in converting from the CD native ".cda" files to the ".wav" format?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Normal playback, where the volume can be controlled by the "CD" slider on your mixer, should be unaffected. Only DAE extraction, typically when ripping the CD, is affected.
Someone just needs to write a program and distribute it.
Then quite possibly all the user needs to do is point and click.
As for the DMCA, there may be legal reasons why the copy protection method does not make such a tool illegal. There may be legal reasons that it does make it illegal. Even if legal, Judge Kaplan might still rule against you.
RIAA know they can't only win with technology, since any program can make a hard operation easy.
So they fight back with (unconstitutional) laws.
I am afraid, that if this hack is legal, that the DMCA will be tightened to outlaw it and anything similar.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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.
Not relavent. Linking is possibly liable as it is trafficking the breaker. However, the issue here is that the protection does not prevent access to the media, it is just designed to make it unplesent. That may be enough to consider it legal....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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?
You can demand that the store manager deliver Hillary Rosen's head on a platter, that doesn't mean that it's going to happen. You may have to go to small claims court to get a refund.
Doesn't that make an audio CD player a device for copyright protection circumvention? If it won't play in a computer CDROM when reading the raw data, it would seem that using an audio cd player to make a copy is circumventing the copy protection!
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.
This has always been true. It's pretty much a waste of time for RIAA and its ilk to attack duplicating, since we all have that capability, or could get it fairly easily if we don't already.
They go on about the "quality" of the recording, but in the end it all comes down to how much the intermediaries make off the artists. I was recently at WOMAD, where I bought a whole bunch of CDs for $16 and was glad to do so, since they get a major cut of the money (many dollars), not the usual 4 to 16 cents per CD that most recording artists get. Which is why I also buy my music from touring bands - more money to the artist.
Until someone does something about that basic equation, I doubt piracy will ever be impacted.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Hmm. Remember back around the time of the first DeCSS case, when DMCA supporters made a big deal about how "computer code isn't really speech" and that enforcement of the circumvention clauses would never be extended to limit [real] speech?
Don't hear that line much anymore. Actually, it's probably a good thing. Let them push their way deep into First Amendment territory before it hits the SC.
All I have to say is HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
It seems that every bit of protection they [RIAA] come up with (SDMI, SafeAudio), it gets cracked. The article summed it up in one line: "of course most of the CD Freaks visitors are able to bypass the protections, but the average home user will not". Once again, this just proves that they're not preventing people from copying music, but just pissing off the regular buyers/listeners.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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
The problem with many of the copy-protections systems is that they only make it difficult for the your average listener to copy the data. Commercial pirates will always look at all possible ways to break the protection, as they see an incentive to make money. This means that while fair use is stamped out, nothing is realistically done about the people the record industry should really be worrying about.
The truth is what-ever copy protection system exists, it will only be a matter of time before it is broken, since on the one hand people want their rights back and on the other you have some people wanting to make money whatever the costs.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's very annoying to have paid $100usd yet the program doesn't even pop-up an error message that could give any hints why it's not happy. Did I mention that I'm annoyed?
Maybe a generic fix for this nonsense will end up in Wine? That would be nice...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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?
/. 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.
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
It won't work that way. It will instead be the wedge that allows worse laws to get passed. "Your Honor, if it is legal to reasonably restrict criminal speech designed to allow pirates to steam content, is it not also reasonable to restrict the discussion of creating weapons?"
A few years from now you won't be able to print a picture of a gun ina book, or talk about the chemistry of explosives. This "circumvention" stuff is just the beginning.
I was waiting to get my hands on one of those CDs with copy interference and see if I could hack a CD player to supply raw digital data to some kind of aquisition board or something connected to the computer. I know some electronics but very little about CD players so I thought it would be a fun project. Maybe an EE could do it as a digital design project sometime.
Anybody know where I could find specs or schematics or service manuals for old Sony Discmans (Discmen?)...? Or any other info useful for such a project?
Actually, you no longer need any key at all, since the second generation rippers have found a way to crack the key using a hash method. The older rippers (DeCss, etc.) used the Xing Player key to authenticate the movie key. Newer movies no longer contain this player key, but it no longer matters. CSS is completely cracked now.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
There is NOTHING int he Macrovision spec that prevents copying. Absolutely NOTHING. You can still stick them in your Unix box and copy those AIF's right off it. You can still do an EXACT copy of the CD with any off the shelf CD burner. Don't call it copy protection. Call it what it is, "Conversion Protection".
If anyone callsit "copy protection" stupid Joe Reporter will pick up on it, and use it as a buzzword.
Burn Hollywood Burn
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
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
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.
...
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.
...
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 ?
...
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)