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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.
Has anyone actually been able to prove that this works? I'm not talking about anecdotal evidence, I mean, has any geek with /.'s general communal respect actually taken a stack of CDs, tried to rip them, gotten errors, marked the CDs up, and then got them to rip with no errors?
:) But I'd swear that an earlier posting talked about marking the inside, not outside, of the CD. Anyway, my question still holds -- any geek-written report on this, or do we only have the mainstream press to trust as to whether this actually works, and for which CDs?]
And then documented the crap out of it?
This all smells too much like the audiophile tricks of the 80's where coloring the outside rim of a CD was supposed to "trap stray laser radiation and improve the [clarity | transparency | imaging | other-nonsense-claptrap] of the music." (see the snopes entry on this one).
I ask because I'm really curious what the scientific explanation for this would be. It was my understanding that they (the infamous "they") did something to the actual track of the CD, with bad physical spacing, introduced errors, or something like that, but did it *throughout* the CD. How on earth would marking the inside of the CD fix that?
[okay, I just actually *read* the article.
No. Read the DMCA. It outlaws devices which can be used for bypassing digital copy control mechanisms, regardless of possible legitimate uses. CD burners don't pass copy control mechanisms, photocopiers don't deal with digital media (unless it's a barcode or something...). But a felt-tip pen which is used to bypass the manufacturer's CD copy control mechanism -- that's illegal under the DMCA, and I hope somebody sues for outlawing these evil things, that should show 'em...