More Copy Protected CDs?

Mahonrimoriancumer writes "There are a lot of CDs that have been released recently which can't be played on the computer or *laugh* ripped. Apparently only a few markets have the 'copy protected' CDs while the rest don't. Here is a list of some that are 'protected.' Does anyone know of other CDs with this problem?" I own at least one CD on that list and it ripped just fine, so perhaps that are different versions of the CDs on the market

Comments

CD rips

[Anarchos]

The System of a Down cd ripped fine for me, although I have Jimmy Eat World: Bleed American and I can't rip it. Musicmatch Jukebox gives an error of "buffer too large, switch to analog mode" when using DAE and in analog mode it just crashes.

Interesting article

[Burritos]

Here is an interesting article about Copy Protected CDs..

I remember reading somewhere that there was a copy protected cd released, that you could play on your computer, it had propeitary software and 128 kbps mp3s.

How to copy a MediaCloq protected CD

[unformed]

[This is directly copied from: http://cdprot.cjb.net/ ... I'm copying it here so it doesn't get /.'ed]

Let me start off by saying that I don't even know for sure if the protection I am talking about is indeed MediaCloQ(TM)....... The symptoms look like it, but I read that MediaCloQ(TM) protected CD's would transfer you to the MediaCloQ(TM) website automatically (as soon as you insert the CD into a CD-ROM drive) where you can download music files.

I recently wanted to make a personal backup of my own CD called "The Loveparade Compilation 2001". CD2 copied fine, but CD1 could not be read by any CD-ROM player or CD burner. It would however play in any normal audio CD player. Now as a decent reverser you must understand my frustration ;-) A friend tried copying this CD with a custom audio CD copier (Philips CDR 765) which actually worked. But if you haven't patched yours to be able to write low-cost non-copyrighted CD-R's with it this is quite expensive. This copy will be able to be grabbed on a normal way.

So, next evenings I spend trying to understand what was going on here. I found out that after insertion the laser first goes to the center of the CD (the TOC or Table Of Contents where the index of the CD is stored). After this the laser went to somewhere on the outer side of the disc and started to try to read there. This is where the reader would never stop doing this and some players will hang forever in this phase.....

So what idea could be easier than to prevent the reader from reading this outer part? I made 3 paper stickers of about 25 x 20 mm and placed them on the outer side of the CD. Now the reader would read the inner TOC, then go to the outside again and after not being able to read anything there because of the stickers, the reader would be 'smart' enough to decide to stick with the inner TOC, go back to the center and read this TOC as the one and only TOC :-)

I am certainly not an expert on CD readers but I think this is what is going on here. If anyone has better ideas, let me know. This protected CD has a so called Multi Session TOC. This is the same when you burn a CD-R and set it to MODE2 / Multi Session when you burn an empty CD-R for the first time. After this a MODE2 CD-R can have multi sessions appended afterwards. For every new session a new TOC is written (with the old data about the files already on the CD-R included). My theory is that this protected CD has also a MODE2 / Multi Session TOC which makes a CD-ROM player and burner decide to search for the latest TOC from the outside to the inner side. With the placed stickers it will not be able to and most CD-ROM players will decide to stick with the center TOC.

So now the CD-ROM player will read the CD but unfortunately it will not be able to read the last tracks because my stickers are placed there. So now a second trick is needed. I used a paperclip to push into the little hole on the front of my CD-ROM player to open the door manually. The reader has no idea at all I was doing this so it came out spinning :-) Then I removed the stickers and pushed the CD back in. The last part I had to push a bit harder to make sure the CD would be totally inserted and fit on the spindle again.

Guess what? I could now play and grab all tracks as I would do with any non-protected CD! I must say that on one CD-ROM player (TEAC) I had to skip the first block (or 0.01 seconds) in Easy CD-DA Extractor for the first track only (still have no clue why). My Plextor 16/10/40A burner and another CD-ROM player had no problem with this first track.

I did try to move the stickers to the outside of the CD until my audio CD player would just be able to play the last track until the last second but the CD-ROM player would not read it anymore. In fact, I would have to move the stickers a whole lot more to the center of the CD before it would be able to read it again. It might be possible that there is no TOC at all on the outside; the inner TOC just points to some music track which will of course not be understood by the CD-ROM player as a valid MODE2 TOC...... The reason why this CD does not automatically transfer you to the MediaCloQ(TM) website like a MediaCloQ(TM) protected CD would do could be that the protection I discuss here isn't MediaCloQ(TM) at all. But it could also be due to the fact that this CD was almost full and that there was simply no space left for a real TOC and a valid data section where an autorun.inf file could be stored which transfers you to their website.

Now to summarize this little trick:

Place 3 (or maybe more on better CD-ROM players / burners) non-transparent stickers of about 25 x 20 mm on the outside of your CD along the edge. Make sure that they wont stick outside of the CD and press them well, otherwise your CD-ROM player will start making funny noises ;-)

Insert the CD into your CD-ROM player and see if the CD-ROM player accepts it (you can see the tracks in your Explorer). If not you can try to move the stickers a bit to the center or place more stickers. Note that my laptop CD-ROM player and one burner I've seen would not be able to read it at all so no guarantees are given here......

Now we have to wait until we are sure that the CD is not spinning anymore. After the CD-ROM player accepted the CD it can still be spinning for a few minutes (my TEAC stopped after more than 3 minutes). I guess to be sure, wait about 5 minutes. If you are impatient here you risk to eject it while it is still spinning and this could damage your CD and who knows the laser of your CD-ROM player, so be warned!

Now using a fine screw driver or a paper clip push into the little hole in the door of your CD-ROM player. The trays of some CD-ROM players can be opened totally without the CD-ROM player noticing but I saw one that would re-read the CD after closing the tray again so I would have to open it until halfway, until I was just able to get the CD out. Push your paper clip into the hole until the tray opens. Then pull it out manually (be careful and do it slowly!).

Now remove the CD, remove the stickers and place it back.

Now push the tray to close it again. Do it carefully. At the end you have to push a little faster to make sure the CD will be inserted entirely. If not, take it out again and try again.

Now you can play it and grab it like you would normally do :-) If the first track will play but not grab skip the first 0.01 seconds or the first block. I use Easy CD-DA Extractor which offers this option (at the bottom of the extract window).

Enjoy and be happy !

Class Action Suit

[CMiYC]

So I am starting to wonder. If it hasn't begun to occur already, what has to be done to bring a class action suit to the offending record companies? There are three things I see as a defense on our side.

1. It seems to me that someone would be able to find equipment that the CDs actually sound worse in.

2. Prove the lost ability to make a backup copy.

3. Show how you are suddenly limited to where you can play the $20 cd at.

Without a warning, I just can't believe its possible for them to do this. However, at the same time, I'm uncertain what law says "this cd must play in all cd players." I understand it isn't our right to play the cd anywhere, but at the same time, it is also our consumer right to know what we are buying can and can not do.

Hmm...

[Greyfox]

Lets see... when was the last time I bought a CD... can't recall...

I seem to be getting less and less tolerant to commercials too. The radio in my car is tuned to NPR, which is commercial free 50 weeks out of the year. Even if it is the all Afghanistan all the time network these days. I'm about 99% RIAA free these days, I think. They'll probably get that declared an act of treason soon... feh... bastards.

Speaking of which, how much did they give your guys this year? We should get a petition going for a constitutional ammendment forbiding any incorporated entity from giving money to any politician.

This will only mobilize people

[YouAreFatMan]

This seems like a foolish move to do. It seems safe to say that it has been established that it is legal to rip CDs. Also, MP3s are more widespread than, say, DVDs ripped to DivX. Therefore it will be much harder to demonize people who break the copy prevention measures (or make tools to do so) on these CDs. With DVDs, it requires that I assert a new right never granted me by the MPAA (not that I really need them to grant me that right). However, with CDs, the RIAA is taking away a right I have been enjoying. A much harder thing to do.

I have a feeling this will backfire in one of two ways: 1) they will drop the copy prevention after a public outcry, or 2) there will be new drivers or tools published that make it possible to rip/play these CDs, and they become common enough to make the copy prevention irrelevant. This will mean that the only people truly affected will be innocent people with limited technical expertise (mom goes and buys a PC, puts her new CD in the tray, and it doesn't play; mom gets mad and calls you). This will only further giving a black eye to the RIAA.

A third possibility is the nightmare of DeCSS -- that someone publishes a method to defeat this copy prevention, gets sued, goes to court, etc. But as we've seen with DeCSS, it's pretty hard to stop it once it's out.

A question

[famazza]

I question follows me everytime I hear anything about copy protected CDs.:

• Are these CDs compatible with Compact Disc Digital Audio? (that small trade marked logo that must appear in all CD players and Audio CDs

Does the owner of this technology (AFAIK Philips owns the patent) have any kind of official opinion about this? Is it allowed to modify the technology and keep using the compatible logo?

Can anybody help me with this question? (thanks in advance)

Re:A question

[Biedermann]

According to this recent comment (by me), the answer is no. The logo is owned by Sony and Philips (inventors/promotors of CD audio). According to a recent article in German c't magazine, Philips is looking into the violation of the Red Book / IEC 908 standard.

Re:I heard of Sting

[rosewood]

I dont think it really matters. The radio station I work at gets the CDs weeks (if not months) before the release date. We also receive a single of what we are forced to play, of course. The CDs we normally get (with some exceptions) are not the same you buy in the store. The ones we get to give away are, but not the first sample we get in. Since we may need to copy all of the tracks for an album show (every saturday at 1am we play through a new cd) to our system, if it was copy-protected, we couldn't do dick with it. That also means that I get a copy for myself, and then soon so does the world.

What about a canary trap?

[issachar]

Interesting thought, but what would stop the RIAA from putting some sort of canary trap in place on randomly selected discs?

If you don't know, the paper version of the canary trap is the idea of altering the punctuation, but not the text of a document in a certain way uniquely for each copy of the document you give out, and keeping track of who gets what. Then, if a copy of your document is leaked to the media, and they show text from the document, you can find the snitch in your organisation.

Couldn't something similar be done with music? Not that it wouldn't be possible to undo, but if you don't know exactly what's been done, it's difficult to be 100% sure that you've undone the trap. Then the RIAA couldn't threaten very serious penalties. First off, you'd be certain to lose your job, but they couldn't also conceivably go after you for lost revenue for every copy of the song derived from the copy you originally made. And they'd have a method to prove that they came from your copy too. That'd be enough to bankrupt anyone.

Re:What about a canary trap?

[innocent_white_lamb]

the paper version of the canary trap is the idea of altering the punctuation, but not the text of a document in a certain way uniquely for each copy of the document you give out, and keeping track of who gets what. Then, if a copy of your document is leaked to the media, and they show text from the document, you can find the snitch in your organisation.

As a point of interest, it is my understanding that film studios already do this with movies. Each theatrical print (35mm film) has an individual serial number and each print is somehow slightly different than any of the others. Therefore, when a print gets hijacked and pirated, the studio can tell which print serial number it is, and can then trace that print back through all of the theatres where it has been played, theoretically being able to isolate the "culprit" who leaked that print.

On the other hand, prints have been flat-out STOLEN from theatres or from shipping depots (bus stations, airports, warehouses) on occasion. Some prints of high-profile movies are even deliberately mis-labelled on the outside of the shipping cans. For example, Godzilla was "The Big One" according to the sticker on the can as I recall.

Re:What about a canary trap?

[Sentry21]

Interesting thought, but what would stop the RIAA from putting some sort of canary trap in place on randomly selected discs?

It's an interesting idea, but the problem lies thusly:

CDs are pressed, not burned. The manufacturing plants get a master, press x thousand discs, and ship them all. Each unique copy of a disc would need a separate master, which would be a pain in the ass (I would imagine), considering how many copies they sell.

If they did two masters and sold 80,000 copies, then they would be able to limit the search to 40,000 of those users.

Now, if they, say, did this in two ways - one for radio stations, music videos (with the advent of MTV being broadcast digitally in Canada, we can record CD-quality audio from MTV now), etc, and one for 'the rest of us', they'd be able to find out if it was ripped by end-listeners or radio stations.

Of course, lots of people rip CDs as soon as they get home - I know I do, iTunes makes my life easier, since I have one playlist with all Garbage songs (even the B-Sides! mwaha!) - and the majority of people who use napter/aimster/gnutella/wangshare/whatever share the dir they rip their MP3s to, so the point becomes moot as the signal-to-noise ratio goes all to hell as soon as the CD is released.

Oh well. Still, a neat idea.

--Dan

CD "Protection" possibly a felony in Germany

[parabyte]

According to the german magazine telepolis a music fan charged Bertelsmann with fraud and intentationally causing malfunction of a data processing device, which is a felony under German law.

From the artical (my Translation:)

"Possibly soon German judges will have to deal with the question whether intentional violation of the Red Book Standard by manipulating the TOC is a criminal use of 'incorrect or incomplete data'. It will be also important wether digitally reading an Audio CD into computer memory is considered as data processing."

The German Criminal Law has in the section "fraud" a the special Paragraph 263a about "computer fraud", which I translate as follows(IANAL, but I am married to one):

263a StGB Computer fraud

(1) Who damages the assets of another person with the intention of providing himself or a third person an illegal pecuniary advantage by the fact that he affects the result of a data processing procedure by incorrect design of the program, by use of incorrect or incomplete data, by unauthorized use of data or otherwise by unauthorized interference with the process is punished with imprisonment up to five years or with fine.

This paragraph is usually used against people tampering with ATMs or a company's computer systems, but I see no reason why my personal computer should not be protected by this law, and for me it is unquestionable that all these CD copy prevention systems are feeding incomplete an incorrect data to my computer, and reading a CD into the memory of my computer is definitely a data processing procedure.

As I know the courts, proving damage is often the crucial point. I think that a clear label stating "This CD is intentionally damaged so that it does not play on most computers and some CD players." would probably save the publisher, but anything short of this IMO constitutes fraud.

In this case there was no warning sign on the CD, so when I buy such a CD I do not get what I pay for. If I bought the CD just to listen to it on my MP3 Player or use a duplicate in my car stereo (my CDs do not last very long when using them in the car), then the value of the CD is zero. And even if I get a refund, it probably takes more than an hour to manage it all, which is a significant amount that easily surmounts the value of the CD: I am tricked, my assets are damaged. This is even simple fraud under 263 StGB, and even a particularly serious case under subsection 3 (repeatedly defrauding a large number of people), which is punished with imprisonement up to ten years.

I am very curious about the outcome of this case, but I would be happy if courts would stop greedy corporations trying to screw me with intentionally damaged products.

If not, I will react like many people: I will stop to buy any music at all; I will fill up a terabyte disk with enough music for the rest of my life in one afternoon, and those record companies can fuck themself.

p.

Re:More importantly...

[Lysander Luddite]

So what do you do when the only option is to receive another copy of the CD in question? That's the return policy in 99% of the stores I have bought CDs from.

One example of ripped at the source

[xixax]

A concrete example of ths, where the artist doesn't even have a CD yet (let alone Joe Public) and you can download it.

Xix.