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BMG Backs Down Over Copy-Protected CD
An anonymous submitter sends in: "As reported by The Register, on the 5th of November, BMG released the UK's first copy-protected CD (more information on Eurorights and Fat Chuck's). It uses Cactus Data Shield by Midbar Tech, which aims to prevent CD to CD or digital CD to Minidisc copying, along with converting to MP3, but may have other bad side effects."
The submitter continues: "There were complaints from fans and many took their CDs back or wrote to the record company and record shops. Their hard work seems to have paid off since Virgin Megastores has responded to a complaint from one of their customers and said that BMG has set up a helpline to allow people who bought the corrupt version, to exchange it for a real one. Virgin and HMV will also be bringing in new stock of uncorrupted CDs. The message was originally posted to the Official Natalie Imbruglia Bulletin Board (free registration required) in the "White Lies" and "Lillies vs Cactus" threads, but several threads containing complaints against Cactus Data Shield have been deleted so the email has been mirrored on the Free-sklyarov-uk mailing list. This is very good news, but more work needs to be done. Hopefully with pressure from the public other retailers will follow Virgin's example. Also record companies need to be made clear that selling copy protected CDs, that infringe on the public's rights, is not acceptable. The battle isn't over until no new CDs are shipped in these formats so if you find a CD that is copy-protected then report it on Eurorights for the UK, or Fat Chucks for elsewhere, take it back to the shop, and let them, and the record company know your feelings on the issue."
It is not so much whether they actually believe uncrackable formats are possible, it is much more whether they believe if it is possible to deter Joe Sixpack from casually copying their stuff.
The professional, so-called pirates, will get around anyway, but Joe Sixpack doesn't generally buy many bootlegs. The proverbial geek in the basement and the hardcore fans do not add up to enough marketshare to count.
Most readers here forget that having a flawed protection is perfectly rational as long as it keeps the masses buying your stuff. It is the difference between a managerial and an engineering mindset, the difference between good enough and technical perfection.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
- Plato
Copyright protection will never really work out, because those who want to break it, will break it.. and those who follow the law anyways, won't bother with breaking it.
I have some pirated mp3's on my computer, but they are of bands whos cd's I would NEVER purchase. Generally, if I like even two songs off of the same CD, I go out and buy it.. and most other people out there are similar in nature. The RIAA is just shooting itself in the foot with all their crappy attempts at copyright protection.
I mean, the arguements against copyright protection have been posted here so many times, I think we all know the reasons that it will never work out.. I guess all we can really do is crack all of the crappy little attempts RIAA members make, and then laugh at them for dumb things like this.
Stolen from http://www.uk.eurorights.org/issues/cd/overview.sh tml:
The most recent format that's come to light is the Cactus Data Shield from Midbar. The earlier German tests also came under the name of Cactus, but it appears that Midbar's protection technology has developed since then. Like SafeAudio, this new method corrupts the audio signal on the CD. However, the method used is different. In this case blocks of audio are replaced with blocks of control data. A normal CD player ignores the control data and fabricates the sound of that block using its error recovery circuitry. Once again, the blocks must have been carefully chosen so that the sound is not disrupted significantly. Again, reliability of the CD will be affected. When the CD is copied using a computer or CD-to-CD copier, the control blocks are interpreted as audio, which means that the manufacturer can insert whatever sounds they wish into a copied recording, even sounds designed to damage speakers.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
With the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive), that is starting the process of getting incorporated into national laws, BMG would have the law on it's side and copying CDs with this kind of protection would be a crime, even if it was under a "fair use" clause. This is the main problem with this law, for the first time any company can restrict how you use its products. Until now copyright law only affected copying, distributing and modifying the product.
In the USA the won't probably do a recall because all this is legal under the DMCA. Providing "fair use" became optional.
My opinion about the piracy-stages in music & movie protection:
:)
:)
1. some nifty guy cracks the protection
2. it gets rumour on the net the protection has been cracked
3. the hardcore crackers start using it
4. the advanced PC user uses it
5. some company releases a software package that allows even my grandmother to avoid the protection...
I think about this because yesterday I saw an advertising for a budget sotwarebox which allows everybody to rip DVD's to DivX and burn it on CD with an easy point&click interface for less than $20... It just remembered me about the early DVD-rip days when you were almost a hero if you could rip a DVD
In the early days of MP3, you had to use non-UF commandline tools to rip a CD, nowadays even Windows has it's own ripping tool
It's only a matter of months before these "ripping4everybody" tools implement the latest protection-bypassers.
I guess these new protections only help small software companies sell the newest version of their copy-tools...
Of particular interest is the section:
During duplication the CD encoding circuitry merely sets the P-channel=0 while recording to the data are, and therefore the P-channel setting of portion 60 is ignored. Thus, during playback, the substituted audio data portion 58 is provided to the digital-to-analog converter as normal data, resulting in audio distortion and potentially damaging the output circuitry. (emphasis mine).
They also don't seem to be as confident about audio quality as I would have hoped:
Thus, the substitute audio data portion 58 of FIG. 4B is ignored, and instead an interpolation, substantially equivalent to the original portion 50 of FIG. 4A, is output, thus resulting in little or no net difference in audio quality between the corresponding track port 44 and 52 of FIGS. 4A and 4B (again empahasis mine).
If I buy music, I want the CD to be as close as possible to the real thing, not with any noise added.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
Er, I think you missed the point. They don't need to be concerned about rights; they just need to be concerned about covering their ass against liability. If there's $10 of profit in selling each CD, but 1 in 10 CDs sold results in a $1200 damage claim, then they lose money since $100 is less than $1200. You don't have to be sensitive to rights to be able to compare numbers.
What a lot of people are missing, I suspect, is that audio CDs are a real standard, and because of that, there is a very wide variation in implementations. When you violate the standard, there's no telling what some of those implementations will do. What I'm getting at, is that if copies of these CDs could damage equipment, then it is very likely that the originals could damage equipment as well!
If you willfully corrupt a CD and then sell it, you're taking a big risk. Up to now, the risk has been that your customer won't be able to listen to the music they bought, generating bad will and returns. But this scheme ventures into the realm of physical damages. I guess BMG is having second thoughts about getting into the losing money business. Smarter than your typical dot-com, eh? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For that reason, the name 'Cactus Data Shield' is very appropriate: when ripped it is full of 'spikes' ruining the music, when perfectly interpolated it may possibly be sample-for-sample identical (assuming the substituted samples are ONLY those where surrounding samples interpolated will return the exact, precise amount- I'm not at all sure this is a safe assumption), but when imperfectly interpolated the _best_ output still has traces of the 'cactus spines'- like stubs :)
On a CD player with inferior interpolation it is probably slightly more sonic degradation than you get from DVD-A watermarking because watermarking is bandlimited to avoid the more sensitive areas of hearing, and this 'residual cactus spikes' effect will reach into the highs and spit out artifacts on steep wave slopes.
I know that in debugging azumith-correction algorithms I could hear high-frequency artifacts of just one sample duration when they were of this nature- a departure from the even slope of a waveform. I would respectfully suggest that the dangers of inadequate error correction are more severe and audible than the CDS guys are ready to admit, and that on many CD players traces of high frequency crackling and grunge will still be audible even after 'interpolation'...
As an indie music maven and audio tool coder I have to say I am just tickled by all this. How nice of the music industry cartel to ruin the quality of their products FOR me, thus making it easier for people in basements and dorm rooms to produce music that's actually better than the cartel makes. A few more years of that and they'll have done serious damage to the former popular opinion that industry music is more professional than unsigned music :)