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Public CD Copying Machine in Australia
kanad writes: "With all the news of banning cd burners, taxing blank CD-Rs, DMCA, and whatnot in the U.S., here's a breather from Australia. Some stores have installed coin-operated CD copying machines. Basically it's very simple: put the CD to be copied and a blank CD in two different slots and drop your coins and Presto! In 10 minutes you get a copy. It even bypasses some anti-copying measures. ... Obviously the burden of not violating copyright rests with the user under Australian law, which is the same as that applied to photocopiers. Today evening I saw the machine and it's really cool. Wonder what would happen to this machine in U.S. and Europe."
I can tell you, there's one in the Union Building of the Clayton campus of Monash University where I study. It costs AU$5 and you have to BYO blank. I imagine that it's there under the pretext that people will use it to copy their own data files...
I've never used it, so I don't know if there's anything it won't copy, but I also have never seen anyone else using it. I have severe doubts about its popularity. I'm not surprised that it was allowed because as a potential form of income I'd bet the Uni jumped at the chance. But that's just Monash I guess.
Sham on
Some of our Internet Cafes here in Ontario offer CD burning on the premises for a reasonable fee. The same rules seem to apply; the copyright infringement is up to you not to break. Granted, these aren't some kind of coin-operated specialized burning solutions, but it's still the same. Of course these same outfits (or the slightly more savvy of the bunch) add a heavy dose of temptation in to the mix by letting you run amok with file-sharing software already installed on the machine in question before you get to burning your CD.
Maybe we'll have a USB port on the next models for easy burining from your laptop.
I would imagine that it is nothing more complicated than that (except perhaps a bit more horsepower than a 486..).
:)
I would imagine it could probably copy playstation discs (presuming they use disc-at-once mode, and if they claim to bypass some copy protection, it most likely is). Of course you would still need a modchip (can't put the information into the CD hub that is needed. I don't know what safedisc is even
cdrdao works great for PSX backup... I'll never have to open my Lunar box sets to play ever again.
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Can be found at this website
It actually looks kind of neat. That article will give you the lowdown of how it works, and what kind of profit you can expect. Neato.
I think that I'll stick with my Pinball Machines or to writing Movie Reviews
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Which means in US dollars the price for the burn + CD is US$3.50.
These machines have been installed at the student guild offices in Murdoch University for at least a year.
The reason you need a modchip for PSX discs is because the checksum for the "bootsector" is deliberately encoded to FAIL on original PSX discs. No CD burning software can instruct your burner to deliberately encode all zeroes instead of the properly calculated error-correction value. I have heard stories of people hacking CDR firmware to forcibly encode the bootsector like a PSX disc to eliminate the need for a modchip, but I never actually have seen any "pirate" firmware floating around the various PSX sites.
If this device doesn't use a standard CDR drive, then maybe their copying system CAN make perfect copies.
You just need a quality burner and good burning software. Go to http://www.elby.org/CloneCD/english/ and have a look. Personally, I recommend getting a Lite-On burner. There is almost nothing the new ones can't copy. They read all the subchannels and so get copyprotections like the old safedisc and Laserlock and so on, and they even do all the EFM bit patterns correctly and so can get the new safedisc as well. This is legal, even with teh DCMA. Why? Simple, you aren't actually circumventing copy protection. You are just making an exact copy of the disc. All the copy protection will actually be intact on the copy, just as it was on the orignal.
Apparently the only point of contention is the ability to amplify weak sectors of Safedisc 2 discs. CloneCD will disable that ability if your Windows profile indicates you live in the US.
At any rate, get yourself a Lite-On LTR-24102B (24x burner) for about $110 off pricewatch and get a copy of CloneCD for $31 and you'll be able to copy more or less any disc out there.