Felt Tip Marker Defeats Copy-Protected CDs

We posted this story over a week ago but the mainstream media has flooded us with stories about felt tip markers and copy protected CDs so I figured I'd post it again since I'm really sick of deleting hundreds of submissions from people who didn't read Slashdot on May 13 ;) Basically you can mark the rim of some CDs and defeat the copy protection. And we all know what the DMCA says about tools for circumventing copy protection.

Comments

Re:Has anyone actually proven this?

[Dimensio]

The explanation is simple.

The "copy protection" is simply a means of preventing the discs from working in a PC. This is done by putting a phony "data" track on the outer rim of the disc. It's visibly seperated from the rest of the information on the disc by small ring between the data and audio sections. An audio CD player will never access this track, but a PC CD-ROM drive will always try to read the data tracks first -- since it can't read the data track it regards the CD as non-working and you won't be able to play it. Using a sharpie on the outer rim (from what I understand you make a diagonal mark along the data track that runs tangent to the seperator for the audio track, but does not actually mark over the audio tracks) you block out the data track, and as such the drive won't read it.

Reuters picked up the story and said that they tried it with success on the known Celine Dion non-CD.

Read the DMCA

[Royster]

Right here.

Specifically:

Title 17, Section 1201(a)
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Felt tip markers are not primarially designed to circumvent access controls. Felt tip markers have lots of commercially significant purposes other than circumvention.

But, if you marketed a felt tip pen with the name CD Rip (TM) brand felt tip pens and included instructions for how to circumvent CD protection than you should expect a C&D letter.

It's the same situation as the fellow who's program unset the true type embedded bits and a generic hex editor. The first tool has one purpose, to twiddle embedding bits. The second tool has lots of commercially significant purposes many unrelated to any kind of circumvention.

CD Protection Strategy May Be Violating 1992 Act

[ranb]

I came across this interesting angle on CD copy protection a while back in Now you can't make a copy:

"The other difficulty for the recording industry's new CD protection strategy surfaced on 28 December in a letter from the Virginia Congressman Rick Boucher (Democrat) to executives of the recording industry's trade association. The letter reminds them that their fancy new technology may violate a statute for which they themselves lobbied vigorously a decade ago. This is the 1992 Act which gave music listeners the right to make some personal digital copies of their music in return for allowing recording companies to collect royalties on the blank media used for this purpose . Under this, the industry cheerfully collects a few cents for every digital audio tape, blank audio CD or minidisc sold. Boucher has not yet had a reply from the movie and record moguls. But when he does he will discover vicious animals are at their most dangerous when cornered."