Anatomy of Cactus Data Shield

meehawl writes: "This is a good analysis by CDRInfo on the current version of Midbar's Cactus Data Shield. This is the format Universal will use to protect its new audio CDs. It's been reported here already that some DVDs effectively bypass this protection, but this article addresses the specific concerns of how best to backup these protected CDs, and how to extract the music data at high quality for download to a personal MP3 listening device."

Comments

Hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

...isn't this ILLEGAL ???

Re:Hey...

[October_30th]

Yes, it probably is.

And if it isn't yet, a new law will be purchased shortly by the greedy RIAA bastards.

You're not supposed to backup the media you bought. You're supposed to buy a new copy! That's how our economy won't go the Argentine way, you communists.

Re:Hey...

[digitalunity]

Prominent cases and relavent information:

SONY CORPORATION OF AMERICA ET AL.
v.
UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC., ET AL.


The Audio Home Recording Act
of 1992

RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
v.
DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS INC.

The outcome:
All district court judges firmly believe in 'fair use' of copyrighted works. What we need now is a massive collision between companies. One that is willing to stand up and fight the DMCA. I don't disagree with copy controls, I disagree with the penalties for distributing technology which bypasses them. I urge everyone to become educated and at the very least; read the Court Opinions from these cases.

Whats the Point?

[sargon666777]

This is really getting old it seems to be a constant battle. They come up with some new means of protection, and we devise a way around it (we as a collective of consumers). They discontinue it, and release a new one, and we work around it again. Besides no matter what they do you can always play it and pipe the sound back in and record it *shrug*. They should just give up and allow people to buy and play the music normally. In the end although there will be some theft they will increase profits becuase I can't imagine anyone will buy these once the word gets out to the general public a bit more. After all who wants a CD you have to fight to play or use in a manner which you have been accustomed when you can jsut buy a good old normal CD. When will they ever learn :-)

Re:Whats the Point?

[October_30th]

After all who wants a CD you have to fight to play

You're forgetting that most people will never have any problems with playing these CDs.

They use dedicated CD players not CD-ROMs.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really getting old it seems to be a constant battle. They come up with some new means of protection, and we devise a way around it (we as a collective of consumers). They discontinue it, and release a new one, and we work around it again.

Of course this ignores the fact that doing this is actually illegal. Not many people seem to know this. You aren't supposed to "devise a way around it". I hope you know that.

Besides no matter what they do you can always play it and pipe the sound back in and record it *shrug*.

OK but then you lose frequencies on an already lossy audio file format (ever heard of XMT??). How much is that worth?.

They should just give up and allow people to buy and play the music normally.

You can but now you dont pirate it. Big woop!

In the end although there will be some theft they will increase profits becuase I can't imagine anyone will buy these once the word gets out to the general public a bit more.

I will. Gladly. Your logic is sooooo flawed. Most people dont even care about it cuz most people obey the law and dn't go around pirating this stuff. It's not your's. Just becuase you bought it doesn't mean you own it.

After all who wants a CD you have to fight to play or use in a manner which you have been accustomed when you can jsut buy a good old normal CD.

Something we all seem to forge t is that most record companies do this to protect the consumer from people tryign to rip their CD's without consent. Most of us apprecaite this kind of design and built in protection against theft. I wonder how long it will be until people stop whining and wake up to the fact that the music biz isn't the enemy. People stealing the music is the enemy. It's pretty simple to me. Whatever! I guess in my opinion or me don't matter.

Re:Whats the Point?

[tomstdenis]

Just remember when you go out and spend 50$ on a single cd for your kids, you can be thankful you are supporting the losers of MidBar technologies....

:-)

Re:Whats the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, yes, I agree with you that most people use dedicated CD players. But with the continuing introduction of "convgergence" devices like Sony's PS2, Microsoft's X-Box (and followon products), combined with the ever-increasing number of consumer devices that allow MP3 playback (Aiwa, Phillips, Sony, Pioneer, Yamana, Denon, not to mention scores of lesser-known brands), more and more people are going to have problems enjoying music THAT THEY ARE TRYING TO LISTEN TO IN A LEGITIMATE FASHION!

Independent analysis of the recording industry have failed to indicate even a single instance of them not turning a profit in any fiscal or calendar year. The RIAA (and some independent analysts) claim lower profits for last year. Hey, guess what, the economy is in the dumper right now! 99% of the companies out there are showing reduced revenue, and many of those have gone from having a profit to showing a loss.

The RIAA claims piracy is a major problem right now, yet they have never provided a single independent analysis to back up their point. I can understand them wanting to be proactive in protecting their market, but these manipulations do absolutely nothing to prevent the kind of large-scale piracy that impacts their business. The real 'pirates' have equipment that does a bit-level extraction and is used to create new pressing masters that contain all of this wonderful content-control technology. The people inconvenienced by technologies like CDS are the consumers who only want to exercise the same rights, privilidges, and convenience they have had for decades.

Re:Whats the Point?

[jaavaaguru]

not to mention being totally ripped off!

Re:Whats the Point?

[Nicolas MONNET]

That's just not true, most students I know have a have a computer, and use it to play CDs. Why buy an additional CD player?

Re:Whats the Point?

[October_30th]

Most people are not students.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Kalabajoui]

Nice Troll.

Re:Whats the Point?

[arkanes]

Car CD players are also (often) affected by this, because of the skip protection they use.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Bedouin X]

True but I'll bet that more students are in the demographic group that buy the most music. Look at the top 20 Albums out right now and tell me if students aaren't the main ones supporting these groups.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they've decided to limit their market to

1. people who don't own computers
2. people who still use a CD player rather than a computer with their entire collection on "shuffle" or an 8-track

People who can't afford CDs, and idiots, in other words. An ... interesting strategy.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Doug Neal]

Why does anyone need anyone's "consent" to rip their own CDs?

Re:Whats the Point?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nice Troll."

I like the way on Slashdot dissenting words so often get tagged as a "troll." Puzzling.

Re:Whats the Point?

[Kalabajoui]

There's a difference between dissent and intentionally spewing misinformation. Such as calling copyright infringement 'theft' and 'piracy', and implying that fair use and reverse engineering are illegal. Sorry, I call them how I see them, and I see a troll. The subtlety of this particular troll obviously went over your head and the crackhead who modded me down as well.

scratch those cd's!

[Restil]

Although this doesn't really do justice to the situation.. does anyone think that crippling cds in this matter is similiarly effective to irradiating mail to kill the anthrax? Sure.. I might be safe from the evil of the world afterwards, but I'll end up with something thats charred and melted.

-Restil

Re:scratch those cd's!

[eclectro]

You can read the mail after it's been irradiated - but forget listening to these CDs in your computer unless you happen to have the right CD ROM in your computer.

I suspect that computer CDROM players will become "smart" and eventually this copy protection will be thwarted. Expect to see some DMCA lawsuits against the manufacturers that make them though.

Meanwhile, all computer users who want to play music on their computer get burned.

One can only hope that there is enough backlash from consumers that raises awarenes to the issues at stake here. The thing that we have to worry about most is consumer apathy.

If consuners don't take a stand on this crap before long their going to have deposit quarters into their computer every time they want to listen to a song.

Re:scratch those cd's!

[psamuels]

You can read the mail after it's been irradiated

Assuming what you get in the mail is on a paper medium. What if it was a floppy disk, or a flash memory stick?

I suspect that computer CDROM players will become "smart" and eventually this copy protection will be thwarted.

I suppose this is (-1, Redundant), but of course the thing the music industry either hasn't noticed yet or keeps ignoring is that not every player has to circumvent the protection; it's enough for one electrical engineer to get something through a S/PDIF cable and an mp3 encoder ... and then game over. People already illegally download music, all the time, so what is to stop people from downloading something they already own on CD (which in my book is absolutely permissible - morally, if not legally)?

Re:scratch those cd's!

[stripes]

You can read the mail after it's been irradiated - but forget listening to these CDs in your computer unless you happen to have the right CD ROM in your computer.

Depends on what the mail was, if it use to be unprocessed negatives you sent to A&I because they do a better job then your local photofinisher, well, let's just say you aren't getting your pictures back. Or if it was Kodachrome you sent to Kodak because you don't live close to the few places that still process it you won't get back nice subtle tones, but blank frames.

Oh, and if you send Compact Flash not only do you get no data, you may never be able to use those cards again...(this may also hit normal FLASH, so don't let 'em anthrax process your next motherboard!)

Is not a CD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phillips - why have not placed an injunction on people devaluing and harming your interests, with huge red warning stickers, and an injunction against cactus restraining and preventing them from using the word 'CD' in any dealings they have?.

Actually its a good idea for the EEC - no need to pay VAT and media taxes, as it is not a CD, and the royalties, channel through tax havens.. the british tax commissioner does not know what he is missing - see us export subsidies.

DMCA?

[stere0]

Aren't these guys going to get into trouble?

You've got three choices:

[seanadams.com]

• Buy more CDs
  
• Steal music online
  
• Enjoy the albums you already own
  

I'm sticking with #3 until the RIAA gets a fucking clue.

How can they be so stupid as to think that ANY kind of copy protection will ever prevent their music from getting onto the net? Clearly, they think that someone is sitting there repeatedly dubbing a CD again and again every time something is downloaded. Don't they realize that no matter how difficult they make the initial ripping, it only has to be done ONCE to make a billion copies?

The only people they're inconveniencing with these tactics are guys like me who would otherwise have paid for the material. It doesn't make it any harder to download the file off gnutella.

Re:You've got three choices:

[DgWatters0]

Clearly, they think that someone is sitting there repeatedly dubbing a CD again and again every time something is downloaded.

And you know what we have to blame for that... Futurama. In the kidnapster episode they showed how the only way for people to download celebrities was to keep the celebrities' heads imprisoned so they can copy from the original each time. Luckily someone came up with this copy protection for CDs so instead of hurting the poor CDs everytime someone downloads off you, the CDs are protected with cactus like spikes which hurt the evil pirates trying to download music. Phew.

Re:You've got three choices:

[Lumpy]

you're wrong....

They are making their own customers mad and pissed. If I buy a CD and cant rip it's contents to mp3, I n longer can use it with most of my audio systems.. my car has a empeg, and i have a portable mp3 player, and my audiotrons in he house... at the rate the mp3 player hardware is selling, they are pissing off a large number of customers that are not happily sharing the mp3 files on the internet.

It just proves that record company executives are and always have been dumb as a box of rocks.

Re:You've got three choices:

[captaineo]

I agree... The content companies need to realize that it is now impossible to regulate access to copyrighted works. No matter how hard they try, they will not be able to prevent people from giving unauthorized access to others.

But here is the key - access is only part of the value the content companies provide - there are also things like convenience (how easy is it to download one particular song or episode of a TV show?), quality (how good is the download bandwidth?), and atmosphere (you can't download the experience of watching a movie in a theatre, or attending a live concert!). Unlike access, these things can't be transmitted across a P2P network...

Only once companies wake up to the fact that preventing unlicensed access is a lost game, and start focusing on non-replicable sources of value, will they be able to accept and profit from the internet.

Re:You've got three choices:

[Dave_bsr]

You've gotta love any place where:

"I'm sticking with #3 [enjoy the albums I already own] until the RIAA gets a fucking clue."

gets modded up to 5, insightful. You gotta love it.

Re:You've got three choices:

[Anonymous Coward]

Futurama. In the kidnapster episode they showed how the only way for people to download celebrities was to keep the celebrities' heads imprisoned so they can copy from the original each time.

What about Voyager? The Doctor's program gets "downloaded" to another computer (or his portable emitter), and it's erased from the ships' computer!

Re:You've got three choices:

[dysjunct]

Actually, you have a fourth choice: buy CDs from independent labels. Many labels don't belong to the RIAA and aren't owned by the Big Five. Yes, it takes more effort to find out about bands but IMO the rewards justify it -- you actually find stuff that sounds different than the generic flavor-of-the-month that dominates pop radio, MTV, etc.

http://www.fatchucks.com

http://www.newpages.com

thinking ahead

[athagon]

One would wonder if the record industries/other persons responsible for greater "security" on CDs/DVDs had thought of this:

With the current system, the following can be done:

Person A buys CD1. Person A rips CD1 to disk, and distributes MP3s to Person B. Person B likes said MP3s, and buys CD1 for his/herself.

With "rip proof" technology (at least, until its cracked), however:

Person A buys CD1. Person A tries to rip CD1, and fails. Person A tells Person B that CD1 sucks because you can't rip it. OR: Person B can't hear MP3s from CD1, so Person B doesn't know whether or not (s)he should buy it, and possibly decides not to.

With the current system, yes, the industries stand a greater chance of losing money: but they also stand a greater chance (and, as some statistics have shown, this is the case) of gaining more money; given that the majority of Napster users (apparently, and as I did) used Napster to download a few random MP3s to decide whether (s)he should/should not buy CD1. With rip-proof CDs, however, Person A, B, C... won't be able to listen to MP3s from CD1, and thusly won't know whether or not they want to buy it.

Synopsis:

It would not seem wise, at least to me, for the industries to err on the side of greater control, and away from the potential for greater sales. Penny wise and dollar foolish, they say...

Re:thinking ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

*points at the previous comment* Yah, right there.

~Jacel

Re:thinking ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what I did. I used Napster to look for MP3's of artists I knew little or nothing about other than one song. If I liked the rest of their music, I would buy the disc. If not, I'd trash the MP3's since I hated them anyway, or they'd get tucked away for further listening (maybe I'd change my mind?).

At any rate, during the Napster rush from early 2000 to early 2001, I must have bought about four or five CDs per month based on this trial method. Since they took Napster away from me, my CD purchased have dropped to about one every three months. I simply am not willing to waste my money buying possible industry cruft music from bands that have only a single good tune.

Last week I learned of a techno artist on DishCD (Dish Network's satellite music channel), the song was good... a little bit of loungecore and drum and bass. Not too bad. I saw the aritst, found the MP3 of the song, listened. I thought about buying the disc, so I looked for more of their music. It turns out the rest of it was all absolute crap. So an MP3 saved me some money.

About two months ago, I bought a movie soundtrack. I was not familiar with the majority of the artists so I checked out some MP3's of their other work. Sure enough, most of them were worthless. But there were three or four artists that had genuinely good other work, so the MP3's (I had to fight to find music from just one of them, thanks to the RIAA) led me to buy their disc.

So, you see, the RIAA has helped me stop buying music. In some ways, I appreciate it because all those CD's were getting expensive.

Re:thinking ahead

[swb]

It would not seem wise, at least to me, for the industries to err on the side of greater control, and away from the potential for greater sales. Penny wise and dollar foolish, they say...

You're right in suggesting that they want enhanced control. But remember, when you listen to your friend's MP3, decide you like and go out and buy it you're making a purchasing decision about whether or not you like the music based upon your friend's opinion and your personal preferences.

You're not making it based upon the music industry's marketing campaign. The industry pushes select artists that they have an investment in and want to succeed, and they would rather that you made your decisions on what to buy based upon they're selling, not upon what your friends like or what you find appealing.

The record companies, as subsidieries of media conglomerates, already have influence over TV, magazines, record stores, and radio stations (through direct ownership or payola). What they don't control is whether your friend tells you about a new disc he got and the music on it.

I'd agree that it may hurt sales, since a lot of records that have become popular have become popular because of word-of-mouth but I think more and more people are such slaves of the media anyway (radio in shower, in the car, in the office, MTV at home, etc) that many people by and large have lost their ability to generate an opinion of their own anyway.

Re:thinking ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, lets be honest. Do you REALLY go and buy a CD after having the MP3's in your hand ?
Thats almost like having sex with your girlfriend, then going out and paying a hooker for it. If you want the CD, just decompress the tracks back into wave and make your own CD.
Don't like the quality of the convertaed waves ? Download higher quality MP3's.

Re:thinking ahead

[matrix29]

Come on, lets be honest. Do you REALLY go and buy a CD after having the MP3's in your hand ?
Thats almost like having sex with your girlfriend, then going out and paying a hooker for it. If you want the CD, just decompress the tracks back into wave and make your own CD.
Don't like the quality of the convertaed waves ? Download higher quality MP3's.

Well... some of us know that if we want more music from the talents we enjoy listening to, we have to buy the CD so they'll be encouraged to make more. Your example is better laid as "Why pay for a prostitute when there are plenty of barfly sluts to lay?" Hell we can still do things by hand and enjoy the results of that work. If we share, other people can enjoy what we do. If they really love it, they can keep it forever too.

Re:thinking ahead

[jonathan_ingram]

Do you REALLY go and buy a CD after having the MP3's in your hand ?
Yes.
Even if the MP3's have been ripped and encoded decently (which is rare), they are still not as good as the original CD.

Here are some albums I bought recently that I would not have bought had I not heard them on MP3/Ogg first:
Lamb - Fear Of Fours (I then bought their other two)
Autechre - Amber
Fridge - Happiness (and then Semaphore)
Aphex Twin - Classics (and then two more)
Plaid - Rest Proof Clockwork (and then Not For Threes)
Leftfield - Leftism
Dave Matthews Band - Under The Table And Dreaming.
4 Hero - Creating Patterns (and then Two Pages)

In every single one of these cases, I would never have bought their music if I hadn't listened to it first - and MP3 is my only way, as none of these people are particularly mainstream here in the UK.

Re:thinking ahead

[Ian Bicking]

You're not making it based upon the music industry's marketing campaign. The industry pushes select artists that they have an investment in and want to succeed, and they would rather that you made your decisions on what to buy based upon they're selling, not upon what your friends like or what you find appealing.

I also have a theory that there's a direct conflict there -- labels have a tremendous amount of power over the artist when they are unknown. However, once an artist becomes known the power shifts dramatically -- contracts help keep artists from reaping those benefits, but all contracts run out eventually.

I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.

Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own. You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs, someone has to play the instruments behind them, and in the case of so much boring music lately, there has to be a lot of marketing to get people to think they like the music at all.

As a result the Backstreet Boys are never going to assert their independance, or Christina Agilera, and I think a surprising number of the "Alternative" bands are in the same boat -- they are really so boring, their lyrics are so pat, their voices so cliche, that they'd go nowhere on their own. Metal is growing into a pretty boring field as well.

Given this, there's much more incentive for the labels to make sure that people don't buy according to their informed preference. If it was really just straight free market capitalism, and the labels just wanted to sell as much music as possible, then a well-informed listening audience would be great. But that well-informed listening audience would, I think, be very likely to buy from a lot of independent labels.

Re:thinking ahead

[swb]

I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast. Even three or four years ago it seemed considerably better than now.

I'd agree completely, but I wonder if its a function of the music industry per se or a function of the lack of a "new thing" generally in popular music. One of the last great upswings in popular music was "alternative"* and that phenomenon seems to have been completely played out -- there's nothing left there that doesn't feel like its been done before by someone else. There's still good bands, but the overall feeling is that they've been there, done that and they aren't charting new areas anymore.

It took the record companies *years* to realize that the "classic rock" trend of the late 60s and early 70s was dead and that "new" artists of the alternative vein should be picked up on. How long were radio stations in many places only playing 70s hard rock? Until the late 80s/early 90s?

I think we're at that same point with alternative -- the record companies don't have an idea what the next big thing is, and I don't think the new zeitgeist has been found yet. The question is, is it because the Media Machine, in coopting alternative scenes so quickly, has squelched them to the point they can incubate anything new? Or are we just in the end days of the alternative scenes and they have to die completely before we can find anything new?

(* Yes, I realize that anal-retentive music categorization goes far beyond that label, but for my purposes its a broad category.)

Re:thinking ahead

[Ian Bicking]

Well, one "new" trend might be metal. Really it's just another form of recycling -- but perhaps there's something new about it since it incorporates rap.

I suspect that most truly new music is now hip-hop inspired, which is a bit alien to me -- and probably many of us here :) So there is the chance that things have shifted enough that we just don't see what's really happening -- maybe we're like some guy in the 60's complaining that there's no good jazz anymore, there's barely any big bands left and they just play the same old songs.

And sure, even I can tell that a lot of mainstream hip-hop is just plain bad. But pop has always been saturated with bad music, which we later forget about. I think I need to go listen to something new before I feel too old... (and I'm not old, dammit!)

Re:thinking ahead

[athagon]

Yes, I'll admit: for some of the more mediocre bands, I will (occasionally) burn a CD of their music. However, I generally try to hold myself to stricter moral guidelines than that; namely: if I like an artist's views, I like their music, and I can afford it, then I'll buy their CD. Artist's views on the MP3 deal is especially important to me; I would own several Metallica and Limp Bizkit CDs, because I personally enjoy their music, but I don't because of the work they put in to ruining Napster. Had Metallica/LB/et al been as - say, Moby, who is a supporter of Napster and free music, then I would have probably paid for their CDs, instead of paying $0.20 for a blank CD-R. An interesting tidbit: in one liberal magazine I read a little while back, it stated that (when Metallica was an unheard of garage band) Metallica was a huge supporter of free music; that they actually encouraged their fans to tape their stuff and redistribute to friends. I call that "irony".

Re:thinking ahead

[Flower]

What makes you think this business model you suggest works? If I buy a copy of RedHat 7.2 and show it off to a friend. He likes it, I burn him a couple of cds and he shows it off to his friend. Does this mean our third party will buy another copy of Red Hat? Let me propose another scenerio which I have seen at work with unprotected CDs.

When the latest Santana cd came out, one co-worker brought it in and played it on his PC. More than one co-worker liked the CD. By the end of the day, 14 cds were burned and no one bought an additional copy of Santana's CD. I've seen this happen for two more CDs.

This is the type of stuff that gives the music industry a credible arguement about loss of potential sales. Everybody says "Well just because they stole^H^H^H^H^Hcopied it doesn't mean they would have bought it." entirely misses the point. It's more than reasonable to expect someone in that group of 14 would have bought the CD and that constitues a loss of profit for the company and the artist. Taking into consideration that MP3s are often good enough for most people and I'm not sure I buy the argument that allowing unfettered copying promotes sales.

Re:thinking ahead

[J. Random Software]

I didn't own any Moxy Früvous until I tried rips of them; now I've bought every CD of theirs I've seen. And then there's the issue of collecting rips of performances that simply aren't for sale....

Re:thinking ahead

[mcubed]

Honestly, no. I've bought a few CDs by artists I'd never heard of before downloading MP3s of their songs, mainly indie-label CDs (which is all I've allowed myself to buy since last July). But even if I wasn't trying to adhere to my own major-label boycott, I doubt I'd buy the commercial releases once I had the MP3s. The reason is that most commercial releases aren't worth the money. The late-60s/early-70s advent of album rock resulted from some brilliant bands making some brilliant albums that people couldn't live without - The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc. When the labels realized how much more money they make selling albums than selling singles, they pushed the albums. The advent of CDs only made this easier. Trouble is, most bands aren't The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Who, etc., and most albums aren't brilliant.

Late last year my apartment was broken into and about 80 CDs were stolen (out of 500 or so). I've since replaced about 25 of them. The other 55 - it really came as a surprise to me to realize this - weren't particularly worth replacing. I downloaded what I remember liking - made my own 'artist favorites' compilations that reduced between two to four of any given bands commercial CDs to one kick-ass CDR. No filler.

If the labels gave me the option of picking and choosing like this, then I'd pay. It'd save a lot of time and I could be sure of finding what I want. But they don't. Pressplay & MusicNet aren't cutting it and neither will the "legit" Napster. The recording industry's ambition regarding internet delivery is to make it an additional revenue stream, not one that will cut into CD sales. The absurdly restrictive offer structures of their services only make sense when you look at them that way. I don't think most consumers are going to buy into that notion. I'm sure not. Sales of pre-recorded commercial CDs are bound to shrink as people get more and more music from other sources. Labels can scream "piracy" at the top of their lungs, but the fact remains that they're trying to peddle a product who's inefficiencies and deficiencies are becoming more apparent to consumers. It's becoming outmoded as the single mass-merchandised medium for music delivery. The usual sort of reaction to that problem is to come up with a better product, but the record industry in it's infinite wisdom seems bent on unleashing a degraded product.

--------

Re:thinking ahead

[Jahf]

In the case of software, especially Linux, I agree with you here. Since Linux is not the artistic creation of Red Hat, and it's freely downloadable, I have no issue with this.

Music is different. There -are- honest people out here in the wild masses. I specifically don't borrow friend's CDs to copy MP3s nor do I use Napsterthings to rip off artists. On the rare occasions I do use Napsterthings I am either looking for live tracks from bands that encourage such things -or- I'm previewing an album to see if I like it. If I like it, I ditch the usually low-quality MP3s and buy the CD, then perhaps rip it to high quality MP3s. If I don't like it, I delete the files and move on.

That's the problem ... I don't fall into the RIAA's ideal customer mold. I don't buy music before I know if I like it, and I tend to frequent bands that don't fit RIAA's mold either.

I know I'm not the only person out there who behaves similarly. And yes, by trading MP3s, I've purchased -more- CDs.

The software model doesn't apply here.

Re:thinking ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is "loungecore"? Is it related to Death Raggae in some way?

Re:thinking ahead

[Squalish]

Limp bizkit? The ones that went on a Napster-funded tour? Their music tastes rotten(like drinking hotdog flavored water, as a matter of fact), and their self-promotion is just wrong(calling us "his generation"), but remember, they WERE willing to join the bandwagon for the perception of supporting free music. For the right price, at least. Lars however, was a complete ass. Hiring a private company to gather names. I thought they were supposed to leave that to the record companies. Or wait, the other 19/20$ is supposed to go into the Big 5's pockets. The problem with Metallica was that they started the trend to criticize something that had around 50 million people using it to popularise music. Other artists followed their idiotic ideology and decided to get their labels into harassing napster. As to metallica's past, an adapted quote:"Absolute Billboard top 40 numbers corrupt absolutely"

Re:thinking ahead

[mpe]

With "rip proof" technology (at least, until its cracked), however:
Person A buys CD1. Person A tries to rip CD1, and fails.

Or even Person A tries to play it. If it won't play they are far more likely to kick up a fuss with the retailer and tell their mates not to bother buying it than they are to replace their CD playing hardware.

Re:thinking ahead

[mpe]

I also have a theory that there's a direct conflict there -- labels have a tremendous amount of power over the artist when they are unknown. However, once an artist becomes known the power shifts dramatically -- contracts help keep artists from reaping those benefits, but all contracts run out eventually.

Remember you are talking about a different group of people. Artists who become "known" have some kind of fanbase and possibly some level of talent. There are a great many who sink into obscurity, e.g. the "one hit wonders".

I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast.

Pop music has always have quite a bit of recycling, just that they used to wait around 20 years.

Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own.

Even if they do it could be difficult in "corporate environment"

You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs,

It's hardly unknown for singers to write their own songs...

Re:thinking ahead

[Ian Bicking]

Remember you are talking about a different group of people. Artists who become "known" have some kind of fanbase and possibly some level of talent. There are a great many who sink into obscurity, e.g. the "one hit wonders".

I was speaking specifically of those who don't have talent, and yet don't sink into obscurity -- e.g., the Backstreet Boys. (Or at least what talent they have isn't well-rounded)

Re:thinking ahead

[Sloppy]

Metal is growing into a pretty boring field as well.

WTF? Huh?

Except for the euro-speedmetal trend (Helloween cloning) that has held for about the last 5 years, metal has been anything but boring for the last decade or so. Ever since the megacorps pulled out of metal, to put their efforts into stuff like Nirvana and Limp Bizkit instead, metal has been largely independant.

How much can the megacorps influence a band, when everyone in the band has to have a day-job anyway, just to put food on the table? I can just imagine, a label exec comes up to Mark Briody or Warrel Dane, and says, "Make your music boring so we can make more money off it." Then the comeback would be, "What if I don't? What are you gonna do, stop pushing our song on radio and MTV? Oh, that's right, you haven't pushed our music since the 1980s anyway."

Right now, most metal is art for art's sake, because there sure as hell ain't a buck to be made there. You can't control someone if they're not getting anything from you. So I'll spin my Falconer and Mago de Oz CDs again, and see how "boring" they are.

Re:thinking ahead

[Ian Bicking]

No, I don't really know what's going on in the metal scene (to say the least). I only know what's being popularized -- and there are a considerable number of metal (or metal-inspired) bands that are being popularized. They seem to me to be fairly tedious -- that was my point. This is just what I'm getting from very brief samples of MTV, but you seem to agree (at least, if you will concede that there are new pop bands that can be classified as "metal" -- hey, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it doesn't have to be a talented duck to qualify as a member of the species...)

Come on, guys...

[ekrout]

Come on, guys.

For every technological solution, there's a technological "hack", right?

Name one anti-piracy tactic employed by any corporation for use in consumer products that has not, is not, and will not continue to be hacked. Still thinking? I thought so.

Whatever they think of will be hacked in a matter of days (or hours even), no matter how many times or what media/record companies think up a different scheme. If we can get the ones and zeros, then that's it. I'm not sure why more people don't understand this.

The only question is how long it will take Patti Q. User to get a purdy little Windows app that will rip her new N*Sync CD flawlessly.

Re:Come on, guys...

[heideggier]

For every technological solution, there's a technological "hack", right?

hmm... seems a controversial question, the reason I say this is that: if "they" continue to try, then it might only be a matter of time before "they" come up with a technique that, while not unbreakable, will not be worth anyones time to crack. I sometimes think that by breaking this technology we are just beta testing "their" products.

I'm more inclined to take the view that the development of such tech is illegal because it is something which takes away my rights of fair usage. I should not need to crack something just to use it in a way which is completely within my rights.

Also, it tends to piss me off that these actions also break the redbook standard and thus they are selling more-or-less broken CD's. However this is a minor concern inrelation to the above

To best illustrate my view, imagine if the government attempted to fix cars to make them impossible to break the speed limit, I gurantee the response of the average person would not be "It doesn't matter cause my kid can break it with in seconds with a flathead" but that it is a infrignment of liberty. The same kind of thinking should be applied to copy-protected CD's IMHO.

Re:Come on, guys...

[Kuad]

hmm... seems a controversial question, the reason I say this is that: if "they" continue to try, then it might only be a matter of time before "they" come up with a technique that, while not unbreakable, will not be worth anyones time to crack.

Hah! I remember back in tha' day when they had really nasty copy protection on floppy disks. Every time some idiots wasted 6 months of their lives to come up with a new copy protection scheme, it took three weeks maximum for a crack to appear. You can see the same result in more recent times with the advent of SafeDisc2. It took several months to find a way to perfectly copy the damn thing, but you could make an imperfect copy and play it with a crack in about two weeks.

Never, ever underestimate the coolness points you get with the 1337 h@X0r crowd for circumventing a new copy protection scheme. There's no shortage of 17 year-old crackers desperate to crack the bloody thing.

Re:Come on, guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Reader DRM 5 Owner Exclusive? There have been claims, but show me the code...

Re:Come on, guys...

[heideggier]

I know,

I've always had the opinion that, given enough time and money then it will be possible to create a system that will be impossible to crack.

I formed this opinion back in 93 (or it might have been earlier I dunno), when It took forever for a game like dungeon master to be cracked by the scean, But since I was twelve at the time I guess forever was a lot longer back then

I also hold the view that a lot of protection schemes are meant to be cracked based on the way that software marketing works, but this is the same as, 'symantic write all the virus' myth that have been around forever, and thus belong in alt.conspriacy.lunatic.asylium newsgroups right next to threads on zionism

However, if something like safe disk appeared on CD's would anyone bother?? I dunno, CD's are overpriced for sure but they aint that expensive, They aren't purchased by crackers in the majority of cases, and by the time something like that happens people would be more interested in 3ivx or DVD's anyway. Noone would crack a CD just to listen to the BackStreetBoys or the next boy band, maybe mp3 distributers might but not people who got the CD's.

That was the point I was trying to make,

I think that it is more a question of freedom, and agree with the thread that "if people can't rip their own CD's" they will just download the MP3 version off one of the many file sharing utilities. Plus pirate more due to having more familiarity with the medium.

Pot ain't legel but everyone smokes it, so unless your a hopeless idealist, like I am (I guess) does it make much of a deal at the end of the day?

Still it would be nice that the law was used to defend the right's of the citizens and not to promote the rights of some corp like the RIAA are trying to do. Overwise it just fall's into a fast, which is the short road to Anarchy (which if you have ever read/seen the Cruciple, I know spelling, aint that great, expect to some students who don't know the nature of politics)

Re:Come on, guys...

[booms]

Hmm.. how about ID Software's Anti-Piracy Technology built into Quake III to keep pirated copies from being able to play online...

DMCA? Probably not.

[Kjella]

Because I doubt this qualifies as a copyright scheme, neither CD players nor CD-ROM players have any built-in copy prevention. This is more a case of obfuscating and creating a standard-breaking disc. After all, the only thing needed to copy the cd is to emulate an analog CD player.

Kjella

Re:DMCA? Probably not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I doubt this qualifies as a copyright scheme

You misunderstand the DMCA.

The DMCA prohibits circumvention of a technology that prevents copying - it also prohibits talking about it, or selling/importing/exporting anything that tells you how to do it.

Since the cactus data shield prevents copying, then it's covered by the DMCA

One step ahead of the DCMA...

[Graelin]

It's sad, but you're probably right. Just in case anyone wants to archive this stuff, I thought I'd dig out links to all the software they reviewed in the article... ;)

IsoBuster
feurio!
Exact Audio Copy (EAC)
Clone CD

Jargon to English Translation

[Skirwan]

How does the Cactus Data Shield work?

Translation: How can I circumvent it?

As Midbar explains "...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms.

Translation:We got a whole room of smart people who worked on it. Sometimes we race them.

The technology includes proprietary electronic circuits and software algorithms.

Translation:It uses computers and stuff. It's like the Jetsons.

The Cactus Data Shield processor is the engine behind the protection and serves as a platform for encoding original content through robust, multi-layer protection schemes.

Translation: I wanted to just call it Bob, but the head of marketing has a cactus fetish.

An engineering solution, the protection schemes are adaptive, easily updated and significantly more robust than software solutions.

Translation: Even though it's basically done in software we can't say that, 'cause it confuses the VPs.

The Cactus Data Shield copy protection slightly alters the information on the CD in several ways while maintaining perfect audio quality.

Translation: We only fucked it up a little.

--
Damn the Emperor!

This was mentioned before, by the way...

[ekrout]

This was mentioned before, by the way.

Us Slashdotters read about this Cactus crap back on November 18th. And on several other dates, too.

one of 'em

Re:This was mentioned before, by the way...

[meehawl]

This was mentioned before, by the way.

Yes, thats why the intro to this article contained a link to the earlier Slashdot story. You mean you don't click on the links?

So, if the only CD player I have is a CDROM

[pyramid termite]

... I can only listen to the music as a 128 bps MP3. Why should I pay 12-13 bucks to do that when I can download 128 bps MP3s for nothing? (And yes, a person who knows how to record from one audio source to a computer can make an MP3 that's indistinguishable from one ripped from a CD.)

This is a shameless rip-off of the consumer. It's fraudulent, in fact. When I buy a CD, I expect CD quality music, not MP3s. They should have to put a sticker on the case explaining that computer users get MP3 only quality.

And yes, my only CD player IS a CD-ROM. I won't buy one of these "CDs" ever.

Re:So, if the only CD player I have is a CDROM

[Dave_bsr]

Another tact would be to blindly buy the cd's you want, and then take the ones back that are 'broken' for your cd player. Unless they are obviously labelled, play 'dumb customer,' and if that doesn't work play 'grumpy customer,' and if you really have to play 'outraged customer.' Eventually the store will accept your return, especially if you are openly making a fuss about not being able to play a cd that "JUST DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!!"

In the end, you get your money, they get some hassle, and it gets pushed right back into the music industry. Wal-Mart sells cd's, and they won't sell cd's that are 'broken' and take a lot of returns. I suspect it might be that simple.

Who says that she will?

[Kjella]

The only question is how long it will take Patti Q. User to get a purdy little Windows app that will rip her new N*Sync CD flawlessly.

I doubt that, way too much cat-and-mouse game. I think it's more likely she'll find the latest Napster-clone (they seem a dime a dozen these days), get a quality mp3 and stop buying "defective" cds...

Kjella

Re:Who says that she will?

[psamuels]

I doubt that, way too much cat-and-mouse game.

Hey - all of us agree, CDS and similar measures suck kidney stones through Fallopian tubes, but if Big Media were to make it clear that they would only use technological measures "against" their customers and never call down the lawyers for piracy/DRM issues, I figure that's almost a fair deal. I just hate it when they call down the lawyers.

Unfortunately we know they would never agree to tie their legal hands like that....

Re:Who says that she will?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

but if Big Media were to make it clear that they would only use technological measures "against" their customers and never call down the lawyers for piracy/DRM issues, I figure that's almost a fair deal.

I have felt, for a long time, that the role of encryption and copyright needs to be rebalanced along the following lines: EITHER

• You publish everything "in the clear" without any technological access controls, and retain full access to the court system and civil penalties; OR
• You wrap everything inside access control mechanisms, but whatever you publish is automatically in the public domain. If someone manages to crack your protection scheme, tough luck ... you don't have the legal right to sue them, because you have voluntarily surrendered copyright by encrypting the material.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way and, with Big Media and the Content Cartel holding all the cards, especially the rectangular green ones, it's unlikely it's ever going to work that way.

Re:Who says that she will?

[WNight]

That makes a lot of sense. Copyrights are supposed to be a balance between the rights of the people and the rights of the creator. If one side gets ahead, we should rebalance the deal to help the other.

While I don't think any individual is owed a living, I think it behoves us to create a system that rewards the content creators in general, so that they make stuff we like. But also we need to make sure that the people get something back for all the tax money that goes into protecting these copyrights. (And that means unfettered access after a certain point.)

So yes, I think that copyrighted work should be easily accessed by all. This means that while a special machine (DVD player) may be required, they shouldn't be able to require access controls, or user tracking, etc.

Or, as you say, they require a bunch of hoops be jumped through, but lose the protection of law and are at the mercy of the first person to crack it.

Mutisession cd's? That's all?

[Elvii]

Well, not all, but seems part of catcus shield is just audio tracks, then data-session that plays under windows.. I have none of these cd's, anyone tried these things under cdparanoia to see if they read? Sounds like if you just ignore extra tracks that might contain false toc info, then you'd be ok.. linked article even says as much, that it's a feature in some (windows?) ripping programs to ignore the garbage designed to "protect" the data.. until everyone buys a new cd/dvd audio player, riaa and friends should just give up on copy protaction, it seems.

Re:Mutisession cd's? That's all?

[742Evergreen]

They tested about 10 drives in the article, and they all encountered some problems while reading, except for the AOpen CRW2440 (up to 91% with CDDAE, up to 100% with EAC).

They managed to copy the disc with CloneCD and the Aopen drive. They also tried to copy it whith one other drive (TDK CyClone 161040), but that one encountered read errors.

"The CDS200 cd-r backup does contain the CDS200 protection, however now is FULLY readable from all tested drives"

Translation: Rip away.

Also interesting to know is the amount of read errors in the original versus the copy. The diagram can be found here.

In short, the "real" cd was one solid block of read errors, the copy had a few spikes, but those were nothing compared to the other, both in frequency and seriousness (note that the scale in the two diagrams is vastly different).

Re:Mutisession cd's? That's all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean a pre-multisession CD rom drive might work ? Now this is assuming such a drive would even support DAE...

Kind of reminds me of a Star Wars quote...

[pxpt]

...the tighter you squeeze, the more systems (CD sales) will escape between your fingers... well something like that anyway!

I had bought the new Natalie Imbruglia CD (here in the UK) when it first came out and discovered myself that it was copy protected. I was very annoyed to say the least and managed to return the CD and get my money back. A while later I ordered the unprotected version from BMG and now I have a CD that I can actually listen to.

There is NO WAY I will intentionally buy any protected music CDs now, or in the future. Music publishing companies will just force copying and distribution of music from these CDs via the channels that they are trying to stop. Duh! why can they not see this?...

...Maybe its due to the age old misconception that number of pirated copies equals the number of lost sales! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The day that all music CDs are protected is the day I will stop buying them.

"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[tenzig_112]

"...but this article addresses the specific concerns of how best to backup these protected CDs, and how to extract the music data at high quality for download to a personal MP3 listening device."

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.

Make your argument based on non-profit-based music sharing [we're spreading the music around and not making any money at it], not on some obviously disingenuous use of the language.

If it isn't stealing, and people really do enjoy the convenience and portability of technologies like mp3, no one is going to listen until the user community grows up enough to level with itself.

If the music industry is going to pull its collective head out of its collective cornhole, we're the only ones who can do the pulling.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Anonymous Coward]

we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.

Bullshit. You may steal music. I rip every CD I buy so that when I want to listen to my albums, I don't have to go through the hassle of finding and switching CDs all the time. I'm then also able to stream my MP3s from home->work. I don't have to lug my CDs around everywhere I go. Having all my music on my computer is a huge convenience to me, and I do it solely for that fact. I don't do it to distribute to friends.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[psamuels]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.

The majority, almost certainly, but not me. I really do use cdparanoia and oggenc purely for my own convenience. I've got 10 GB of ogg files on my hard disk here at work, every last octet of which was ripped from CDs I have at home [well a few are still at work, from being ripped]. Nobody has access to this drive except me.

I appreciate what you're saying - I bet there are more people on /. who use p2p to infringe copyrights than there are people like me - but we do exist. Not that I've given you any evidence to back up my claim of personal audio copyright integrity. (:

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Troed]

I rip all the CDs I buy, so that I can transfer the mp3s to work, or just play them through winamp at parties instead of having to switch CDs all the time. Yes, I put the mp3s in my AudioGalaxy shared folder, but that's because it's up to others to judge whether they want to copy them or not.

I buy more CDs than I download mp3s off the net.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[astrashe]

I've ripped a couple of hundred of my cd's to my hard disk. I never play cd's -- I use the computer as a jukebox. I have my desktop box plugged into my stereo, and I use my laptop, running vnc over a wireless network, as a remote control.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[dietz]

Not only do I rip all my CDs for convenience (as mentioned by other people), I also know people who rip the CDs, compress them with FLAC, and write the FLAC files and the TOC to CDR so that if the CD gets scratched (and I know this happens to me, despite my best efforts) or stolen (this has also happened to me, out of my car) they can recreate a new CD basically identical to the original one.

You don't save too much with FLAC, but enough that you can fit at least two CDs onto one CDR (if you match the sizes... pick a big and a short one, or two average ones).

400 CDrs (for 800 CDs) @ .30 = $120. You've saved money if you have to replace more than 8 or 9.

So, those people do exist. I know two.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[ammulder]

There is the convenience issue. Let's count:

• Number of songs you can play without switching CDs: 15? 18?
• Number of MP3s you can play without switching hard drives: 2000? 5000? more?

Plus, with the multi-GB players, you can take your whole collection to work, to the gym, etc. And you can just drop all the songs you don't like. And let's not forget about playlists. And...

I don't have any MP3s I didn't rip myself. But even so, why would I ever go back to CDs?

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Lumpy]

I'll probably be marked as a troll for this but...

Screw you, asshole.

I have a plethora of mp3 audio playback devices. My car, home and portable personal devices. These devices have been on the market for over 4 years now and sold with high visibility advertising, so you know for a fact they exist and people are using them. Yes, I rip everything to mp3 so I can listen to it MY WAY, on MY EQUIPMENT, in my home and elsewhere. I place the CD I bought in a locked cd storage cabinet and that's where it sits until it's needed again. Now let's look at something else, what about the phillips CD recorder, compiler. Many more people with these or their computers like to make compiliation cd's. for their own personal use.

I am sick of your type of self-ritious attitude that marks everyone with an mp3 playback device, a cd burner, and linux or other non MS operating system as the pirates of the Carrabiean or Evil thieves. the cd's I bought ar my property, I can listen to them how I want, and I will...

and my atitude is the attitude that needs to be taken by everyone that hears someone even try to imply what you said... get in their face.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Rasta Prefect]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.

On the contrary - I rip my CD's for the same reason I used to dub them to tape. Why? Cause if I only really like 3 or 4 songs on a CD, I have to change the damn CD every 15 minutes, which sucks. With MP3, I rip, I have my WinAmp play lists, and not only can I listen to them here in my room(I don't own a CD player that isn't attached to a computer BTW. I used to have one, but it broke) I can take them with me on a (small) Mp3 player or my laptop instead of dragging a book of CD's with me. If I can't get around copy protection, I don't listen to the CD. I'm not about to buy a walkman CD player just so I can actually listen to something I just paid for thats been intentionally munged.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[NachtVorst]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use?
Actually, I do... It's much easier to listen to a few hours of mp3's instead of having to switch cd's. And my roommates can listen to them over the LAN without borrowing and scratching my cd's.

Anyway, even if I didn't rip the cd's to mp3, I'd still want to play them in my CD-ROM-drive (which can play audio-cd's according to the specs).

Oh, and finally, this is NOT STEALING, call it illegal copying if you will (though I don't agree), but it's not stealing. I don't go around calling speeding murder, even though there's a chance you might kill someone by driving too fast.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use?...

Yes.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[lanalyst]

Heh... you must be a riaa lawyer.

We have an in-dash cd player in the car. Besides the obvious theft issues, have you ever looked closely at the back of a cd you changed while driving? It's scratched. Being left out in the heat and cold won't do them much good either, I suspect.

Now is your point I should buy 2 copies of a CD? That indeed would make the recording industry happy but I would be an idiot.

Copies made for personal use are permissable, and the recording industry is preventing that.

For myself, if there's a album I want that's copy protected and someone managed to rip it and post it to a newsgroup... I'm going to d/l it and burn my own cd.

There's no excuse for greed

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Steve B]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use?

Yes. In fact, all non-trolls believe that, because it is obviously the truth that people copy the two decent tracks on a dozen CDs onto one CD, that people convert a hundred or so tracks to MP3 so that they can be carried around on one disk, that people make listening copies for the car in case of damage or theft, etc.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[schon]

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use?

YES.

My car CD player only holds 4 discs (with space in the armrest for 8 jewel cases). I have >300 discs at home. The average commercial CD holds about 45 minutes of music, which is about half of what it could.

I routinely burn mixes, taking the best tracks from the originals; that way I get both a greater variety and more music when I'm driving.

I know others who do the same.

Egad, I think I've been trolled!

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.

Um, this consumer backs up his CDs to MP3 for purely personal use. I have only downloaded one album that I did not (then) own. I'm a little ashamed to admit it was the Tron soundtrack :), which I did once own on LP(!) but which disappeared during a move. I figured, I'd already paid for it, so why not at least get to hear it?

You know what? Within a week or so I deleted the MP3s. I don't need to make the RIAA's point for them, and I do have a legitimate use. From then on, the only MP3s I have had are the ones I ripped from my own CDs. I now listen to the MP3s, since

• I can store my collection on one hard drive instead of scores of CDs
• I can listen to my collection from my computer without occupying my CD-ROM
• I can listen to the MP3s -- which essentially cannot wear out -- and preserve the originals -- which could.
• I can move my MP3s to my laptop at work and listen to my collection there. Heck, I can also bring CDs to work (since the laptop HD is not as large) and not have to cart them back and forth.

So yes, some consumers really do stay within the bounds of personal use and fair use. Of course I won't buy any so-called CDs that sport copy protection, as the inability to control the site of playing lowers the value of the CD. A CD that costs $20 and that I can space-shift is worth more than one that costs $20 and prevents me. The copy protection, in fact, lowers the benefit -- or raises the effective price -- beyond what I'd be willing to pay.

Final irony: When Disney finally released Tron on CD -- just this week -- I went out and bought it. Had I not refreshed my memory via the MP3s, I almost certainly would not. So that bit of "piracy" actually netted Disney a sale. In other words, the record companies are dinosaurs that don't understand all these newfangled furry things running around their feet.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Oh, and finally, this is NOT STEALING, call it illegal copying if you will (though I don't agree), but it's not stealing.

Why not call it what it is, which is "copyright infringement"? Not theft. Not piracy. "Copyright infringement". You want to know why the Content Cartel will not call it what it is, why they resort to distortions of language?

Because "copyright infringement" is a dry, technical term born of a dry, technical field -- copyright law -- and the Content Cartel know that to make your case, you need pizzazz. You need something sexier than "copyright infringement" to connect with the masses, to make them consider the crime as anything more than a passionless pursuit of cash through arcane usage restrictions that hardly speak to the common person. Label it "copyright infringement" and the ordinary bloke will think that it isn't really important, that it's not a "real" crime.

Now, do you want to know the really big dirty secret of the Content Cartel? The one thing they don't want you, or anyone else, to realize? Here it is: The ordinary bloke is right. It isn't a real crime, on the order of murder, or extortion, or speeding. It's a passionless pursuit of cash through arcane usage restrictions that hardly speak to the common person. It's a legal game.

So of course you can't call it what it is.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Doppleganger]

I'll add another "YES" answer of the question of whether people actually back up their CDs. I don't have many places to play the music I've bought, and one of those places happens to be my computer. I have enough trouble with swapping out all the game CDs I own.. swapping music cds is even worse. So, I have a copy of pretty much every music CD I own in either MP3 or OGG format.

This has the bonus effect of allowing me to play music while playing games that require the CD to be in the drive even when they don't have any need for the CD.

I would have copies of the games I own as well, except that most of them are copy-protected. So if something happens to one of my game cds (like the roomate's monitor falling on my Diablo 2 play CD a few weeks ago when the cat knocked it over), I need to either track down a receipt and pray the store will replace it or go buy a new one. Pretty odd, since it is perfectly *legal* for me to make a backup copy of those CDs, and the EULA almost always explicitly gives me the right to do it!

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Clanner]

Yet another "yes" answer:
I installed a Sony head unit in my prevoius car (just totaled last week :( ) that could play "MP3" CD's as well as standard CD's. Let's do the math, here- a normal CD has what, about 15 tracks on it usually? The MP3 CD I created had 109 tracks- all from CD's that I personally own. With that many tracks, that was pretty much the only CD that stayed in the car. In addition, it would be cheap and easy to reproduce that CD if it became scratched or damaged, as any CD that stays in a car is more likely to become. So, am I a pirate for doing this?

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Thing 1]

He says he's not a pirate, but it appears he gives himself away (emphasis mine):

I am sick of your type of self-ritious attitude that marks everyone with an mp3 playback device, a cd burner, and linux or other non MS operating system as the pirates of the Carrabiean or Evil thieves. the cd's I bought ar my property, I can listen to them how I want, and I will...

Ar, matey, indeed.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[mpe]

I have a plethora of mp3 audio playback devices. My car, home and portable personal devices. These devices have been on the market for over 4 years now and sold with high visibility advertising, so you know for a fact they exist and people are using them. Yes, I rip everything to mp3 so I can listen to it MY WAY, on MY EQUIPMENT, in my home and elsewhere.

If you really were just buying a licence to listen to the music. Which is what CDs claim to be... Then people changing the media wouldn't be an issue at all.
The problem is that various people are trying to blur the distinction between use and actual "piracy".

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[mpe]

My car CD player only holds 4 discs (with space in the armrest for 8 jewel cases). I have >300 discs at home. The average commercial CD holds about 45 minutes of music, which is about half of what it could

You could easily make a device to play about 3 weeks of uncompressed CD audio to fit in a car. Even put the controls for this on the steering wheel. Safer than having the driver change media.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[Lumpy]

the lame argument that it is a License is bull.. I never agreed to anything, there is no use license printed on it, nor do I have to break a seal that states that I must surrender all my rights.

Sorry nobody can impose restrictions on people that are outside the law without informing them. so the record companies can go to hell or start doing the license agreement setup that software has.... and then watch the sales drop like rocks. 90% of america and other music buyers believe that the CD they bought is their property. (which it is) and they can listen to what is on it in any way they want and how much they want (which is also true)

This is why any attempt to limit access or limit playback options will back-fire (and are back-firing) as it will make joe-12pack mad or upset. Thus driving them to alternative sources of what they want...

I want them (RIAA) to continue to push this... I want them to start getting more active in trying to force these out there... It will get everything over quickly as the national outrage and uproar will solve the problem quickly.

Re:"backup" audio CDs for "personal" use?

[NachtVorst]

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to say, but didn't take the time to write...

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornfull tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all"

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-glass

Making us criminals...

[fleabag]

If I make 2 assumptions:

1) That this copy protection will be common place in 2 years time

2) I still want to listen to "new" music in 2 years time

Then I will have been forced into criminal activity. MP3 is my format of choice - it is convenient and easy. In the future, if I want to listen to music in the car, then I will have to download it illegally. I will have no choice but to do this. Eventually I will get pissed off with buying useless plastic discs to satisfy my conscience, and they will have lost another revenue stream.

Message to the industry:

1) A large proportion of your future customers use MP3. (i.e. anyone under the age of 15 today). By doing this you are forcing them to "go pirate".

2) A large proportion of your current customers use MP3. You are making enemies of them. This is bad marketing.

3) It's been said before, and I'll say it again. It takes one copy of a CD to be made digitally, and you've lost. The story showed that this is possible - although it says that the protection is effective, it isn't. They made a copy - and that's all it takes. Even if one person makes a really good analogue transfer, then you've lost.

My first copy-pretection experience

[tjansen]

Here is my first experience with a copy-protected cd:
it was 'Better Days' by JOE (Jive Records/Zomba). I got it from Amazon.de. The only sign that it was copy-protected was a very small printing on the back side "This CD is not playable on computers (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM)". So I tried it on my computer running Linux, with a Creative Dxr2 5x DVD-ROM and I could hear it on audio mode. To my surprise I was also able to rip it using cdparanoia (otherwise I would have returned it immediately, I have far too many CDs to manage them in any for but Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format). So I tried it on my DVD-Player (Yamakawa AVphile 715), and it worked, too. However I noticed that the player needed an unusual long time to detect it as a CD. Next try was my stereo, an old Sony CD player: worked fine as well. Then I tried a Windows PC with a 40x Pioneer CD-ROM: did not detect the CD. Ok, so at least in one cd drive the copy protection worked.

I thought about the possibility of returning it to Amazon, but I felt bad about the idea of returning a CD that I had already ripped and that worked in most computers, so I didnt do this. I wrote a letter to Amazon.de though, asking them to include information about copy protected CDs in the description and I told them that I would never buy a copy-protected CD, and if I would ever get another one I would return it immediately. They replied, telling that they cannot put this information in the description, but because of the special circumstances I was allowed to return even opened CDs if they are copy-protected.

Re:My first copy-pretection experience

[Anonymous Coward]

They replied, telling that they cannot put this information in the description

translation: They don't want to put this information in the description, because it would impact sales.

Isn't this copy protection always useless ?

[Krapangor]

All music playing devices have an analog output - the speakers. Nothing is easier to rip that sample this output and therefore rip the content. Unless we have some kind of digital speakers, I don't see why the recording industry even brothers with such "copy protection". It only scares away customers. Yes, there is a quality loss when sampling the analog output, but there is also a quality loss with MP3 and noone seems care about this.

Re:Isn't this copy protection always useless ?

[dietz]

Unless we have some kind of digital speakers...Yes, there is a quality loss when sampling the analog output

We do have digital "speakers". It's called S/PDIF.

Any modern CD player and reciever should have it. (My $200 Sony disc changer does. So does my $250 Technics reciever... this stuff is consumer-grade). If you do any music production, there's a good chance you have inputs and outputs on your computer, too.

Start your computer recording and then play just one track on the CD player. Strip leading and trailing silence. You now have a perfect digital copy.

Re:Isn't this copy protection always useless ?

[kwikfire]

My 25 disc CD changer has a optical digital output, as do many other standalone cd players. Currently my soundcard does not have optical digital in, but next go around I'd get something similar to Creative Lab's Audigy Platium. It is the newer version of the Live series. The "live drive" puts some easy access ports on the front of your PC, two being optical digital in and out. By doing this you can only rip in real time. However there should not be any data loss, because it doesn't go analog and back.

Re:Isn't this copy protection always useless ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with a digital speaker, the audio signal is still going to drive the voice coil some how.

Unless the RIAA makes a drug that make you think you heard the music...

What about lengthy CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sticking MP3s or other digital music formats on the audio CDs works ok for Pop Star Of The Moment's latest 40 minutes of music, but what about CDs that normally would have 60-80 minutes of music? For example, the Beatles 'One' CD was over 79 minutes long - definitely no room for anything else.

So will the record companies:

A) Ship 2 CDs - 1 copy protected audio CD, and 1 data CD, and charge more.
B) Just not include digital formats on lengthy CDs.
C) Edit the music so that both the protected audio and data will fit.
D) Option C, and also release a "Collector's Edition", that contains the additional music cut from the original CD, at a higher price.

Just the idea of copy protecting audio CDs is repugnant, but when you really think about the side effects, it gets even uglier.

Re:What about lengthy CDs?

[Anonymous Coward]

E) Encode the music at such a low bitrate that it will fit onto the CD. Explain that the crappy audio quality is due to the MP3 format, and how WMA would be able to deliver worse^H^H^H^H^Hhigh quality in 1/2 the space?

ummmmm....

[waddgodd]

How can Cactus Data Shield "protect" Audio CDs, when the people who wrote teh spec (Phillips) says that TPM'd "CD"s aren't supposed to use the trademark? Cactus Data cannot protect CDs, because once Cactus Data goes on, it's not a CD.

Re:ummmmm....

[Aneurin]

Yes and no. IIRC it isn't compliant with Compact Disc-Digital Audio (CDDA) standard which is what Phillips has control over and therefore they can't really use the CDDA logo. But it can still be marketed as a "CD" being that it is one. :)

Re:ummmmm....

[arkanes]

Ooh. But they can abbreviate "Cactus Data" to "CD" and call it one anyway!

Further Analisys of a Damn Stupid System:

[Romancer]

They hope to sell more of these altered CD's that have copy protection, cause less people will use piracy?

Wait a sec, this sounds too stupid.
Try to follow a little train of thought that'd probably help
some executives somewhere in the recording industry:

Why does someone buy a CD?
To listen to the music.

What does the industry do to get more people to buy the CD?
Not let people listen to the music, by:
a. limiting the playability
b. limiting the portability
c. limiting the quality

Why do people download MP3s?
to listen to the music free.

Why do people upload MP3s?
to let people listen to the music free.

What does the industry do about it?
force us to download the music, by:
a. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in any of our PCs
b. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in some of our DVDs
c. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in some of our cars
d. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in any of our MP3 players
'cause we can't get them there

If I cannot listen to the music from a CD that I just paid for, and I have to go download it off the internet because I cannot easily rip it to an MP3 to play in my MP3 player I am a very small step from not paying for the CD in the first place and just going and downloading the songs for free.
I can make a regular cd from the MP3s that will play on anything, and the media costs a whole lot less than $9-$18 and I get to pick the tracks!

Freakin brilliant RIAA!
Thanks for making my decision so easy!

Not letting us listen to the music that is the sole reason we paid for the CD, is the most retarded thing I have heard of in a long time.
People make choices with some consideration to the ease of using the result.

CD w/ security = Hassle = less are going to choose
Free MP3 = Easy = more are going to choose

In case anybody has a perspective.

[Romancer]

They hope to sell more of these altered CD's that have copy protection, cause less people will use piracy?

Wait a sec, this sounds too stupid.
Try to follow a little train of thought that'd probably help
some executives somewhere in the recording industry:

Why does someone buy a CD?
To listen to the music.

What does the industry do to get more people to buy the CD?
Not let people listen to the music, by:
a. limiting the playability
b. limiting the portability
c. limiting the quality

Why do people download MP3s?
to listen to the music free.

Why do people upload MP3s?
to let people listen to the music free.

What does the industry do about it?
force us to download the music, by:
a. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in any of our PCs
b. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in some of our DVDs
c. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in some of our cars
d. Not letting us listen to the CD we just paid for in any of our MP3 players
'cause we can't get them there

If I cannot listen to the music from a CD that I just paid for, and I have to go download it off the internet because I cannot easily rip it to an MP3 to play in my MP3 player I am a very small step from not paying for the CD in the first place and just going and downloading the songs for free.
I can make a regular cd from the MP3s that will play on anything, and the media costs a whole lot less than $9-$18 and I get to pick the tracks!

Freakin brilliant RIAA!
Thanks for making my decision so easy!

Not letting us listen to the music that is the sole reason we paid for the CD, is the most retarded thing I have heard of in a long time.
People make choices with some consideration to the ease of using the result.

CD w/ security = Hassle = less are going to choose
Free MP3 = Easy = more are going to choose

This is stupid

[t_allardyce]

why are we letting ourselves get into this situation. Business is supposed to work on supply and demand. No-one wants copy-protection, cds and dvds cost nothing to press and the intellectual property is not worth allot, so why are they selling bits of plastic for so much money? When a dvd comes out, the film has already made a profit from the box office so why do they get away with such a high price - way higher than even the ticket you paid for to see it on the big screen? (because people are dumb enough to pay) can the interviews and out-takes that you see on tv anyway be worth so much? i think not. As for cds, why can they not understand this simple idea: "If i can hear it, i can copy it" its very simple, but no, they waste millions developing new technology that usually degrades the product that the customer pays for, and the customers take it without question, why?

You can't ban file sharing, because you would have to ban the entire idea of the internet and people would just resort to private modem-modem networks (thats if they didn't riot in the streets). So go face the music record companies - your days of extortion are over so go back to your coke sniffing and prostitutes lol

Re:This is stupid

[mpe]

Business is supposed to work on supply and demand. No-one wants copy-protection, cds and dvds cost nothing to press and the intellectual property is not worth allot, so why are they selling bits of plastic for so much money?

However the supply and demand bit dosn't work where you have a monopoly. The laws surrounding "intellectual property" create a monopoly (originally a very restricted one. But extended, through one sided lobbying.)

Re:This is stupid

[t_allardyce]

True, arn't there supposed to be laws to stop monopolies?

This depresses me...

[Kit Lo]

I'm still afraid these CDs will blow up my DVD-ROM drive or something of the sorts - is that possibility still true?

Re:This depresses me...

[October_30th]

Yes, and masturbation gives you acne and makes hair grow on your palms.

In other words, the answer is no.

Those who don't learn from history...

[martyb]

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Back in the late 80's it was all the rage by software manufacturers to copy protect their software. (I still have a copy of Lotus 123 from that era.) Various schemes were used:

• Bad sector(s) on a floppy disk that needed to be present in the drive for the program to run. The disk could not be copied easily using conventional means, but soon people wrote programs to crack the protection.

  Many customers ran into problems when trying to use a legitimately purchased copy as their system reacted differently than expected to the copy protection. The vendors would add increasingly more complicated schemes that never blocked the motivated copier, but DID interfere with legitimate users being able to use the software on certain systems.
  
  

• Printer port dongle that needed to be present in the parallel port. This allowed unlimited copying of the software, but you couldn't run it unless the dongle was in place.

  There was a time when I had a half dozen of these hanging off the back of my PC (imagine 12 inches of dongles sticking out the back; couldn't push the PC against the wall; major leverage against the connector on the PC, etc.) Besides, each dongle interefered somewhat with the timing of the signal going through it... we had a case where a printer attached to the end of the dongle-chain needed to be powered up for the system to boot.
  
  

• Startup questions that required the user to look up a certain value in the documentation and key it in when prompted by the application.
  

  The thinking was users could easily copy the software, but photocopying the documentation was a much more difficult task that most "pirates" would not go through the effort of doing. I have a game somewhere that came with a "code sheet" printed on red paper that claimed it could not be photocopied. Truly, it was difficult using the black-and-white copiers available at the time, but I persevered and got a usable, albeit poor contrast, copy. (I feared spilling a coffee on the original and becoming unable to play the game which I had legally purchased.)
  

In short, users began to revolt and companies eventually began to recognize they were selling fewer copies of their software as people migrated to using non-copyprotected applications.

Software vendors learned this lesson the hard way many years ago, yet we now have audio (CD) and video (DVD) treading down the same path. I'm waiting to see how long it takes for them to learn this lesson, too.

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[Anonymous Coward]

imagine 12 inches of dongles sticking out the back

You know, your post was going quite well until you decided to boast falsely about your penis size. 12 inch dong indeed! Pheh!

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[ammulder]

Look on the bright side:

When your next CD comes with a dongle, you'll know what's happened!

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[dietz]

Bad sector(s) on a floppy disk that needed to be present in the drive for the program to run. The disk could not be copied easily using conventional means, but soon people wrote programs to crack the protection. My favorite was the Copy II Plus program for the Apple II. It was a commercial program with a built-in, ever-updated list of copy-protected programs and internal instructions on how to copy them. It made pirating software trivial. (Hey, I was 9, OK? Right and wrong were fuzzy topics.) The best part about it, though, was that it actually had copy protection itself, but contained instructions on how to defeat its own copy protection. I always thought that was totally nuts.

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[Aneurin]

I have a game somewhere that came with a "code sheet" printed on red paper that claimed it could not be photocopied.

They could be manually copied with pen and paper and_that_photocopied and distributed. It just further illustrates that as long as any form of CP exists someone, somewhere will take the initiative to make it easier for other people. As mentioned many times, this is the same as with music: one digital copy (MP3, Ogg, whatver) is all that is needed to revert the CP to nothing and mass pirating can begin.

Speaking of older methods of ittitating users I remember the most horiffic CP "documentation" method ever: the "dual-wheel" discs. I remember them being common with popular Amiga games (Monkey Island et.al.). I do recall writing letters to the creators telling them that it was unnecessary and was alienating people - I had lost the disc many times and feared breaking it so ended up_recreating_one and archiving the master.

Nothing ever changes.

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to
> repeat it." Back in the late 80's it was all the
> rage by software manufacturers to copy protect
> their software. (I still have a copy of Lotus 123
> from that era.) Various schemes were used:

And all of them could be easily defeated if you had the right kit (there used to be bus add-ons for several computers for this purpose, although they were usually sold for "cheating"): load the game into memory, halt the processor and step through the code. Replace all the calls to the protection routines with noops or jumps to a routine that emulated the protection. Once you've got them all, either write a bootloader to do the changes automagically to simple copied images or just write the cracked image out and use that directly (the same sort of thing goes for the dumb CD checks some games still have)

No software protection scheme is uncrackable because the code has to be in assember and held in memory at some point, and once it's there you can do anything you want with it.

And just like with music CDs, all it needs is for one person to crack it and that's the thing that will be distributed...

Re:Those who don't learn from history...

[Waffle Iron]

And don't forget that the Lotus 123 floppy-based scheme used an incredibly supid CPU spin loop to time the floppy shennanigans. This was calibrated for the orignial 4.77MHz PC, so of course faster CPUs didn't work with Lotus.

Thus, we were cursed with "Turbo" buttons for over a decade to slow the PC down while loading Lotus. I'll bet that the consumers wasted orders of magnitude more money paying for these useless hardware switches on their PCs than Lotus ever recovered with their copy prevention scheme.

Fair Use

[Anonymous Coward]

I put every CD I own on HD. This would be >800. I hate it, if a copy-protiction is on the CD. I have no stanalone player but a DVD standalone with very good audio quality. This drive does NOT play the copy protected ones.

One of my 2 protected CDs had a sign on it, well I shouldn't have bought it. The other one has NO sign: Natalie Imbruglia.

This is annoying, very annoing. I won't buy such CDs in future and even less CDs in general, because if I have to study WWW pages with "broken disc" lists before shopping I won't do it any more.

However I could copy any CD to HD so far. One had a second broken 2nd session on it. With an PLEXTOR Ultraplex 40 an appropriate software it was easy to read the frist session (no other protection involved). Natalie Imbruglia was easy too, I ripped it normaly (cdparanoia) with my TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6702B. [Thank god I have 2 computers]

Furthermore the first CD (a sampler) had NO CD-AUDIO sign on it, not even on the box and a label, though it's not ok it's better than NO label AND the CD-AUDIO sign.

But BOTH of this CDs are NO audio CDs and incompatible with standalone players (at least DVDs - why by a CD player if a DVD player handles CDs as well - my player even had very good ratings in an audiophile magazine).

If this continues, I
a) won't buy CDs any more
b) will get them from somewhere else.

I know this is illegal, but I have no choice. I need to play all my music from my HD or mp3 player.

This is what hearing music means to me... (not carrying hunderts of CDs arround and scratching them, those with copy prtection have even less sratch protection)

Thanks Universal..

[haggar]

..for pre-scratching the CD for me. It would probably take thousands of hours of careless handling for me to produce all those C1 errors in the soundtracs.

(I was just sarcastic. But seriously: when you buy one of these protected CD-likes, bear in mind that they are much less robust against scratches and dust than the "real" audi CDs.)

Re:Because I got Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this to the tune of?

I thought Positive K's "I Got A Man", but it doesn't match, and it's not really well known enough, either.

Help?

Hasn't been hacked yet

[Outland Traveller]

How about the X-box?

Re:Hasn't been hacked yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Bleemcast, the dreamcast PSX emulator, has not been cracked yet, and that's been out for atleast 5 months.

They need an editor

[FlamingAsshole]

Ok maybe I'm being picky, but I kept bumping into sentences like these:

"When the EAC v0.9x version is being used will automatically detect the copy protected CDs and will display only the correct Audio tracks."

"This time only 2 tracks didn't ripped correctly: "

Yaaa!! That grates..

Ability to play in a computer is questionable

[Phil Wherry]

I'm just about to finish up ripping all of my CDs to 160 Kbps MP3 format so I can do casual listening without handling physical media. I'm not too terribly bothered by the loss in quality caused by compression, since I've got the original media to work with for those occasions when I need higher fidelity.

It occurs to me, though, that the inclusion of a compressed audio player on the CD really doesn't solve the problem, even if it's possible to copy the audio files in some protected way to a hard disk.

Here's why: my earliest CDs were purchased in early 1986. At that time, my PC was running MS-DOS 3.1. Think for a moment about the odds of a copy-protected program from 1986 working unmodified in a modern computer--let alone the computers we'll have twenty years hence. The inclusion of a copy-protected player program in lieu of a standards-compliant CD looks even more pitiful when one stops to consider the fact that the player program will be basically unuseable in a few years' time.

Can they copy-protect Natalie Portman?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a good reason to copy-protect everything

I see this all of the time ....

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to nitpick but:

" ... and how to extract the music data at high quality for download to a personal MP3 listening device."

Yes ... its early Saturday morning, yes ... I am hung over like a bastard, but shouldn't that be upload?

What about CD recorders and the AHRA?

[dpbsmith]

I own a Teac RW-CD22 CD Recorder.

According to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, I'm AUTHORIZED to make single-generation digital copies of CD's onto "Music CD-R" media, a portion of whose price includes a payment into two funds administered by the Library of Congress: two-thirds into a Sound Recordings Fund, with small percentages of this fund earmarked for nonfeatured artists and backup musicians, 40% of the remainder for featured artists, and the rest to record companies; one-third into a Musical Works Fund, to be split 50/50 between songwriters and music publishers.

My Teac appears to be rapidly turning into worthless junk. UMG's "More Fast and Furious" will not copy on it (it gives the error message "CANT COPY, SCMS ERROR").

So, the copy protection fails to prevent UNauthorized copies... but succeeds in preventing AUTHORIZED copies.

Midbar and UMG are cheating those of us who BOUGHT and PAID FOR the right to make copies.

Re:What about CD recorders and the AHRA?

[Anonymous Coward]

try using clonecd by elaborate bytes

The situation will evolve like DVD players.

[dmaxwell]

The default state of most DVD players is to have all of the fuckware features enabled. However, hardware manufacturers have nothing to gain expending energy to protect the fuckware. Within days of a player coming on the market new firmware is available to restore full functionality. The only thing that is often necessary is to burn a firmware cd and stick in the player. In my case, I'm going to have to use a little skill to build a twenty dollar firmware burner but it won't be any big deal.

The same will happen with CD-ROM drives. The manufacturers will make them the same way they do now but not go to any great trouble to obfuscate the firmware. Why should they spend all that money on expensive engineers when it's going to get hacked anyway. It's the media conglomerates that are obsessed about this. The hardware companies (except for one's like Sony) just want to sell the kit and get out.

There is another way....

[Mark19960]

and its probably just as easy.
Most CD players you buy nowadays have optical outs, and most DVD players you can buy also can play cd's and have optical outs/coax.
high end soundcards have optical/coax inputs
(getting the hint?)
set up your favorite CD/DVD player with your TOSlinks, or coax... and record those tracks into wav files.
then compress with your favorite utility.
what about quality?
isnt it still digital?
yep. thats the beauty of it.
go forth, and rip disks :)

Re:There is another way....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasnt there a signal included with the optical out to prevent compliant hardware allowing copies? Wouldn't a soundcard just refuse to make the signal available to the PC side of its connections in this case?

- Richard

It is Impossible to Protect Any Audio Signal

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can play it and get this new fangled thing called "SOUND", the signal is yours.

For the most part, ripping would be as simple as playing in a traditional CD player and running the headphone jack output into your computer.

There is no copy protection system in the world, nor will there ever be, that can prevent someone from recording SOUND.

The CD's would be on popular file sharing services within minutes of someone taking the sound files into a WAV editor, trimming them up, and running them through an mp3 compressor.

And once they are on filing sharing services, it's too late to do anything.

Proper terminology

[thumbtack]

The proper term is CORRUPTED, not copy protected.They do not conform to Red Book Standards.

Congressman Rick Boucher of VA has written a letter to the IFPI and the RIAA suggesting that under the AHRA this may illegal and asking for explanations of the methods used. Under the AHRA there is a 2% surcharge on every CD recorder sold in the US at the wholesale level (See section 1004), that goes to the RIAA, just as there is a 2% surcharge on "Music" designated CDR media.

In addition Philips refers to these corrupted discs as "silver disks with music on them, but which do not resemble CD's" See this article

Boycott-riaa and Fat Chucks are maintaining a list of the corrupted CDs. Also, Check out the Home Recording Rights Coalition

Re:Proper terminology

[haggar]

I see that Decca and Deutsche Grammophone are both Universal labels. This worries me because I love classical music (and Decca and DG used to be a source of great recordings).

But when I looked at the list of CDs that were reported corrupted, I could not find a single classical CD. Is it possible that the recording industry doesn't have them on the radar, or it's just that people who can tell a corrupted from a proper CD, don't buy classical music?

I hope in the former...........!!

Re:Proper terminology

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely most people who listen to classical music would be more likely to notice the degradation in quality, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:Proper terminology

[cheezehead]

Just a theory: maybe they think that people who buy classical music don't copy it? I think classical music lovers are a little older than average, and also a little less computer literate. Nothing wrong with being old or loving classical music, of course.

Also, it seems the list of corrupted discs consists mainly of popular stuff, therefore more copies sold. If you think you're losing money due to pirating, better corrupt the best selling stuff first, right?

New slashdot poll

[Dave_bsr]

What is the source of the music your are listening to right now?
1. Paid for compact disc
2. MP3/OGG on your hard drive from your cd's
3. MP3/OGG on hard drive from a modern p2p client
4. MP3 from napster (old-school, extra points)
5. Radio
6. The CowboyNeal Opera

Re:New slashdot poll

[TXG1112]

or

7. MP3's from both modern and old-school p2p clients of tracks you already own on cd because you're too lazy to rip them and have a fat pipe.

(this is what I do anyway)

Re:New slashdot poll

[uspsguy]

8. Streaming audio over the internet

+1 insightful to the above

[Dave_bsr]

I don't seem to be getting any mod points soon, but I know someone does - the above needs to be pointed out.

"This is NOT STEALING, call it illegal copying if you will (though I don't agree), but it's not stealing. I don't go around calling speeding murder, even though there's a chance you might kill someone by driving too fast."

So true. There's an important distinction in 'stealing' intellectual property, that a lot of people forget. 'Illegal copying' is much more precise, because in the end, no matter how much IP you steal, the original people still have their IP, there is no exlusivity to it, and you might still go out and pay for a valid copy because you want to support the artist.

CD Analysis Software

[HunterZ]

In case anyone is curious about the software used to view the tracks (see the screenshot on page 3 right after "Let's now see the structure of the CDS200 disc. There are 2 sessions inside:"), it's a great program called IsoBuster (www.isobuster.com) that I often use myself to verify and extract the contents of CDs and CD image files.

Re:Because I got Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Afroman - Because I Got High

Quake 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you can play online without a legit CD Key still. The Carmack knows what he's doing there.

*ROFL*

[HunterZ]

Sweet, they've already compressed the tracks for us! Now all we need is a little program that will extract the individual tracks data convert it to MP3 format (which it's probably already in anyways)

Re:*ROFL*

[MImeKillEr]

Exact Audio Copy combined with LAME will bypass the Cactus protection. I purchased the soundtrack to Fast & the Furious. It's "Cactus-protected". Took me all of 15 minutes to rip it using EAC & LAME.

Your drive must support digital audio extraction for EAC to work.

How-to: bypass Cactus "security"

[MImeKillEr]

Just get a copy of Exact Audio Copy and LAME. EAC will extract and LAME will convert to .MP3 format. How do I know? I did the same to my LEGALLY-PURCHASED copy of More Fast & Furious. Your drive must support digital audio extraction to work though...

Fuck UMG.

Dumb marketing at Universal

[pinkpineapple]

In a European country where I used to live and study, drivers in the opposite traffic lane flash there high beams to alert you way ahead of cops sitting on your side with a radar . And this is not illegal.

Why? Couldn't cops catch more speed offenders if the opposite traffic were prevented to inform you?

Sure they would, but that's not the point. The point is to reduce traffic speed on your side, so by letting the other drivers inform you, they can slow down the traffic for more than 50 miles at some point.

The same happens with the Music industry: if they were letting other people rip cds and do the cheap distro, people would discover artists and bands that they haven't heard about before. And owning a CD would be the next thing people would do because let's face it, it's still better quality and more convenient.

So the fascists at the music companies are simply not aware of good marketing. Shouldn't we educate them?

PPA, the girl next door.

Totally OT, but...

[sconeu]

Congressman Rick Boucher of VA has written a letter...

I know it's totally OT, but how is Boucher's name pronounced? I'm planning on trying to get a face-to-face with my local congresscritter to trye to give him a clue, and was going to tell him to look up Boucher, but I don't want to sound like a total idiot by fscking up the name...

Thanks!

Re:Totally OT, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like voucher with a B. His legislative assitant for technology affairs is Johanna Mikes.

Re:Totally OT, but...

[sconeu]

Thanks. I *really* didn't want to sound like an idiot.

Re:Because I got Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh... how stupid and out of touch are you?

Afro Man - I got high.

Aint it weird

[Kizzle]

Ever wonder why you can get in allot more trouble for downloading a CD than if you were to walk into a store and steal it?

Just play stupid

[karlm]

So nobody has found an economical way to individually press CDs. Therfore, all of the CD images should be identical.

[insert devious grin]

Simply grab disk images of these things from your favorite P2P client. (Anything that'll get read by a diskman should still be available via dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/me/LimeWire/Shared/CactusSucks.img .) Email customer service claiming your CD is broken... that your CD player won't play it. Make sure to include the image as an attachment and ask if your drive read it properly. Make sure to word it so that after reading it 3 times, they figure out that your computer is the core of your entertainment center.

Enough "gosh, my there CD done gone not play in the player. Cuzin Jeffro showd me how uh send you the CD, rigt off the player like. See, it's attached to this here email." and they'll realize that

1.Breaking standards combined with the average American mean lots of customer service complaints.

2.Joe Average doesn't need a lot of intelligence to trade and burn raw disk images and they can't mess with anything at that low of a level (redefine the representation of 1s and 0s) without releasing their own players and abandoning all hopes of reverse compatability with the HUGE installed base of CD players. (Economic ritual self-disembowelment with a rusty spoon.)

Isn't it all just ones and zeros?

[HuskyDog]

At the end of the day, a CD is just a great big heap of ones and zeros. In some fancy way, your CD player turns this into sound. Presumably, it does this via a combination of software and nifty electronics (which could be emulated in software). So, therefore, if we could extract all the ones and zeros we could write a program which emulates an audio CD player (on which these crippled discs seem to work fine). We just put an OGG encoder where the D/A converter would be and voila! If a 15 year old CD player can convert the binary data into sound, then so can we.

So, what is the problem with implementing this scheme (apart from the DMCA). Is it that there is no way of persuading a CDROM drive to output the raw data? If so, this just confirms my view that the entire problem lies in CDROM firmware. Could we re-flash this in some drives?

Somewhere in a CD player the bits we want are wizzing along a PCB track. Does anyone know the practicality of tapping into this?

Just my random thoughts on the topic.

New Trick: Buy It, Rip It, Return It!

[BeBoxer]

The dumbest thing about this whole scheme is that in the end, it doesn't provide decent copy protection! I purchased a copy of the "Fast and Furious" disk to try and see how hard it was to rip. Let's see, I had to put in in my CD-RW drive, and run 'cdparanoia'. A few minutes later, an almost perfect copy. A few errors showed up, but none that were still audible after the automatic correction in the software. The next day I returned the opened album to the store for a full refund! I didn't actually bother to keep the music because, well, I think it's crappy music.

If this system actually provided copy protection, or at least made ripping inconvenient, maybe it would be worth it for Universal. But since it doesn't even provide copy protection, what the hell are they thinking? It only takes one person to populate the MP3's onto the P2P network. Given that common drives (an LG 8080B CD-RW in my case) and common software (EAC, cdparanoia, etc.) don't seem to have any problem reading these CD's. And given that Universal at least has a stated policy letting you return the CD for a full refund if you have 'problems', what the hell are they thinking?

Let's break it down. Folks who don't rip their CD's and have a player which isn't impacted by the protection: no change
Folks who don't rip their CD's but experience problems during playback: pissed off, and lost sales.
Folks who do rip their CD's: they still rip their CD's, only now the pirates can return the CD's for a full refund. This is actually worse for the companies than not selling the CD in the first place! Good lord, are they actually this dumb?

If it's copy protects it's can't be a CD (tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course if it's copy protected it's not a CD (tm) and can't legally be labled as such. It's a shiny aluminum data storage disc, but it's not a CD (tm). Phillips owns the CD trademark and is enforcing this. Check out the story on The Register

So if you buy something on a credit card and are refused a refund, have charges reversed. It's not a CD (tm) that you purchased, but it was labeled as as one and that's fraud.

I am not a lawyer, a dolphin or a large white rabbit.

Re:If it's copy protects it's can't be a CD (tm)

[Master Of Ninja]

Sorry, but I think that's slightly naive. Remember, don't believe everything that you read. Philips may own the trademark, but what chances are there that they really will piss on all the other companies out there who want to "protect their investment".

Even if they do, how is this going to matter to consumers. CD has become a bit generic (its a shiny round thing with a hole in it which ha music), so they could probably put a "compatible with most CD players" on it. Even then a lot of CD's that I've seen have no easily visible compact disc logo on it. Consumers just buy the thing and expect it to work (unless it has DVD plastered all over it). Sorry to rant but the industry is not going to stop because they can't get a logo on their stuff - they'll just make a new standard up.

Enough /. bashing re: editing....!

[dbCooper0]

Interestingly, I hurt my eyes when reading the associated story - on the cdrinfo.com site:

After reading such interesting news we decided to test the Cactus Data Shield 200 protection and found out how effective is or not! - What does the indrustry state?

Good God, what are they THINKING?

[kiscica]

This is just getting silly. I can't imagine why the record companies don't see that the "cure" is far worse than the "disease" -- what better incentive than marginally-functional-to-nonfunctional CDs (sorry, music-containing silver platters) could people have to download free, untrammeled MP3s from the net instead of buying their music?

Cactus and all other such schemes that maintain at least nominal compatibility with the CD-Audio standard are quickly defeated with the right software, or the right combination of software and hardware, and thus obviously, if this so-called "copy protection" spreads, it is only going to prevent the most casual PC users from making copies, whereas it will block countless legitimate listeners from enjoying their purchase fully -- perhaps at all. Thus alienated, the frustrated music buyer, even one who never copied CDs or downloaded MP3s before, will be far more likely to seek out copies or MP3s made by those who are able to do so; perhaps, if sufficiently annoyed, se will be motivated to learn to defeat the copy protection hemself.

End result for the record companies: pissed-off customers, ballooning costs of dealing with with a flood of returns and with lawsuits from Philips and God-knows-who-else -- and even more "piracy" than before. Again, what are they thinking?

My suggestion is that we all give them a clue by going out, en masse, to every record shop we can find, buying a copy-protected CD or two, opening it, then returning it for a refund the next day with a randomly-selected complaint (won't play in my car/portable/Mac/Linux box/ten-year-old vacuum-tube-containing audiophile CD deck/whatever). The record companies have instructed stores to take copy protected CDs back. The cost of dealing with a flood of returns will cause (a) record stores to be unwilling to sell copy-protected CDs and then, one hopes, (b) record companies to decide to stop making them.

On the other hand, I worry a lot that they are going to try to sneak more effective copy protection through in the guise of some supposedly new and improved format -- DVD audio or God-knows-what. Hell, I'm sure that they are going to try sooner or later. As long as the music we want to listen to is released in untrammeled CD format we're OK, but if a new, tightly locked-up format (playable only on, say, licensed devices with encrypted digital streams all the way up to the speakers/headphones) ever gains a foothold, they will eventually start to phase out CDs in favor of that, the same way as LPs were phased out in favor of CDs. It'd start simply by releasing certain highly desirable albums only in the new MusicPrison (tm) format....

Now, I'm sure that technological circumventions would be found quickly for even such draconian measures as that, but the cost to society of having a completely locked-up music medium foisted upon us would be immeasurable. I would strongly urge everyone not to buy, under any circumstances and no matter how attractive the extra bells and whistles are, any "new and improved" music media that are not 100% open-spec. CDs (real CDs, that is), while they're starting to show their age, are still a pretty good format for music distribution. I think we can live with them until record companies finally realize that copy protection is pointless and start trying to protect their livelihood in more productive ways.

kiscica

A few thoughts

[frozenray]

"...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms." (Midbar Technologies, cited from the linked article at cdrinfo.com)

1. Midbar should make sure there's a graphics designer on the team next time. This is the ugliest player skin I've seen in a long time. Gaaaack.

2. If they're so smart, why didn't they think of actually including the track names instead of just "Track 01", "Track 02" and so on? Get a fucking clue, guys.

3. Somebody please explain to me how to issue the Prodigy's "Music for a Jilted Generation" (playing time over 78 minutes) using their fscked scheme. Answer, probably: it isn't possible - so what we get is shiny silver discs at the same price as before, but with less total playing time.

4. Including a player which relies on a proprietary and soon-to-be-obsolete software and hardware platform is simply brain-damaged.

5. "Nobody has ever won an argument against a customer."

Raymond

This is just the beginning

[frozenray]

For those who think this is no problem, since the copy "protection" is easy to circumvent:

Read this patent application by Microsoft.

Scary stuff, really.

How about...

[africanswallow]

Get two high-quality sound cards (A and B) and patch the output of A the the input of B. Play CD and record B to WAV. Convert to MP3. Enjoy as desired, repeat as required.

legitimate back up uses

[efficacymanUM]

I almost always back up all of my cd's, especially the ones I use in my car changer. Why you might ask? Because I have a cd text compatible changer and I enjoy having the data displayed on my tuner. Almost no commercial cd's have the cd text burned on them so I am forced to add my own data on it (albiet merely for my convienince/ appearance). Just my two cents.

This is SO 1980s!

[rickthewizkid]

Reminds me of the 80s. Remember when you booted up your favorite game on the Commodore 64 and before the game started, you would get a "intro screen" saying that the game was "cracked" by the 1001 crew, Eagle Soft, etc with music and animations ... ? I wonder how long it is before we see something like this on MP3s.

I can't wait for the day when I hit the play button on WinAmp and the first thing you hear is "This MP3 was cracked by "The Hormone"" before the N'Sync music starts....

But then again, I can't stand N'Sync, so I guess I'm safe.

-RickTheWizKid

Question

[Mr. Piccolo]

What happens if you disable Autoplay, then run CDPLAY.EXE?