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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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...
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?
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
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?