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Felten Follower Examines Crippled Music Disks
D4C5CE writes "Following in the footsteps of his famous professor, in his paper "Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs" (yes, that's pure PS), which is one of many interesting contributions to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Princeton student Alex Halderman takes apart (bit by bit, literally) the "tricks on tracks" employed by the music industry to frustrate fair use."
I think examining the strength/weaknesses of algorithms without regard to the surroundings is not a good idea. With Windows providing most of the drivers in signed form, and refusing to accept unsigned drivers, it could be difficult to apply the "breaking" methods defined, in the mainstream operating systems. Ofcourse, in other OS's this shouldnot be a problem.
"Do something man. Right now."
I hope he knows such trips to conferences may last longer than expected. Instead of bodyguards he should be guarded by lawyers.
Yours, Martin
For those that don't have a Postscript viewer and run Windows, check out RoPS - small, fast and effective.
Is it just me, or does he have a picture of Natalie Portman in his photo collection?
Her name is Julie?
Copy-protection bashing and Natalie Portman... A hero to us all. I salute you!
they prefer the term "Music Discs with Disabilities"
here is a PDF version for those people stuck on systems with only an acrobat viewer.
It looks like he used a bitmap font, so the conversion looks a little ugly, but it is readable. I'll try to replace it with a better conversion in a half hour or so, as soon as I match the font he used.
Exactly. There is no way that an audio cd can be made copy-protected, and remain reasonably compatible with redbook CD players. It was never built in to the spec, and there is no way to shoe-horn it in to the spec now.
As the paper points out, these schemes rely on "bugs" and "mis-features" in reader firmware, and it suggests that CDDA copy prevention won't last since "[...]Hardware and Software adaption is an inevitable and natural extension of improved design and bug fixing".
The question is if the hardware manufacturers will begin competing for customers by providing the very best fireware in their drives, or if they will join hands with the RIAA and the snake-oil salesmen. So far I see no decisive move in either direction.
Some drives can 'clone' protections just fine or need only better software on the computer side, but on the other hand there's a whole class of typical hardware -- like the Toshiba in this case -- which has been b0rken for so long that I really think the manufacturer is playing nice with the copy-protection industry.
Maybe what we really need is drives with a more capable RAW reading interface, then all errors could be emulated and/or corrected as necessary on the side we control, the computer.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
...as if the music industry's actions has nothing whatsoever to do with frustrating music pirates.
Let's be fair here. We all know that recent copy protection schemes do in fact (at the very least) interfere with fair use, but we can't forget/deliberately ignore the underlying goal of the music industry for the sake of sensationalism, however faulty their methods are.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
it doesn't have an icon on my windows xp system. Do I use notepad :(
I just had contact with an copy protected audio cd.
It was a present at a birthday party on which musik was played with a pc. We just wanted to insert the CD to the cdrom an listen to the music. The music wasn't playing and the cdplayer just hung. So we booted into Winblows to try it over there. Same result. The guy was only listening to the music with his computer. So i took the cd with me and ripped it in my CD-Burner. So now i have a spare copy of the disk just because it was copy protected. Doh.
Music industrie annoys me - haven't bought any CD's lately. This boycott is not very constructive
but i just don't have any idea how to "fair use" the music of the artist.
Whatever games they and you (and for all we know you are they) play to pretend otherwise, their goal is to squeeze more and more money out of those who legally purchase their works, thinking that as long as the market may be able to bear more, it is their duty to extract more by further restriction of rights, whatever that means to their customers.
This is also very obvious from your / their push to extend copyright perpetually, extracting more and more, not from the copyright violators, but from those who abide by the laws.
While you / they feel it is your right to push it to the edge to squeeze every last drop from the paying public who have suported you thus far, claiming you / they are just trying to make pirates pay their fair share. The fact kicking those who have been buying dozens or hundreds of new titles every a year does not make us more loyal, and will eventually lead to changes more fundamental than what you / they complain about today.
We know your industry hates discussion of fair use. If they ever showed any signs of actually caring about preserving the rights of the customer, they might have a legitimate sympathizer or two among the paying public. An approach that exhibited any evenhandedness, restoring some of what they have driven so hard to take away, would shock their opponents. There are any number of forms this could take technologically.
...because this only pisses off their existing customers. I've yet to see one CD protection that hasn't been bit-exact ripped by someone (which is all it takes).
If they can't play it in the devices they have will they
a) Call it a defective cd? Most likely.
b) When they find out it's defective by design, will they
1) Continue to buy defective CDs?
2) Get a normal CD(-R) from friends or mp3 from internet?
We get more and more DVD/CD/MP3/kitchen sink consumer players. Break compatibility with those, and the MPAA will have only themselves to thank when the customers abandon them (Who the hell pays $20-25/CD anyway, that's the usual full price here in Norway...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is no scheme yet devised that will significantly hamper true music pirates. And by that term, I mean people who create and redistribute bootleg CDs for profit. Any of those folks will just take an audio CD player and capture the music via the SPDIF output.
The music industry wants to convince the world that anyone who records a CD to their hard disc is a "pirate." They want consumers to believe that making a backup copy in case of damage is piracy. They want people to believe that creating a "mix CD" of your favorite songs is piracy. They want the public to believe that the guy who copies a CD so he can have one in his car and one at home is a pirate. In short, they are waging a campaign to equate simple copying with piracy.
In their ideal world, if you wanted a copy of a CD for the car and one for the home, you would have to purchase two of them. If you wanted a "mix CD" with numerous hits, you would choose from their canned compilations. If you damaged the CD while moving it from player to player, you would have to purchase a new one (since you would not have a backup). This is not about piracy. It's about making you pay multiple times for the same music.
Now it's not just the DMCA we're up against; we also have to worry about the ADA. If you don't buy one of these copy-protected CDs you may be sued for discriminating against the handicapped.
Perhaps it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut but I would rather use GhostScript. Both variants (AFPL and GPL) are esentially and totally free, respectively which I prefer. For such an article, is a commercial (and overpriced)viewer really appropriate?
Nope - that was Acrobat Distiller.
.ps file, the fonts are labeled %DVIPSBitmapFont: Fa cmsy10 10 2 - showing that they are the 600 DPI bitmap version of 10 point Computer Modern.
You don't want to see how badly the copy I made using ps2pdf turned out.
If you look inside the
Acrobat distiller did what it could - it left all of the detail in the fonts. If you view the PDF file at 600 DPI or print it you can verify this for yourself.
The problem is, the bitmap fonts are designed to display at one resolution - 600 dpi. While they print well, they scale down very poorly.
I've been trying to replace the bitmap font with a vector version and reconvert, but I haven't had much luck so far.
The difference, I feel, is that the region system is something which average joes can understand and question; "So you're saying that for some artifical reason this player will reject DVDs I've bought over-seas?", while the reliance by CDDA copy-protection schemes on reader firmware (as opposed to being fully contained within the CDs themselves) isn't as apparent or easy to convey. Basically, people are mostly unaware that their choice of drive will and can change the degree to which they can use copy-protected discs on their computer.
I wish they'd used a Lite-On drive in the tests too. Plextor is mostly bought by people in-the-know, while Lite-on provides quality firmware (my experience) on a much wider level and could be used as a good recommendation based on quality, high availability and low price.
I'd also like to see future research which goes beyond the black-box approach and actually use a custom firmware to dump the disc.
I just hope that some manufacturer recognize the opportunity and either provides a good quality firmware with good failovers which just rips through these protections, or provides a firmware which can be switched into "dummy cd-player mode" in which it would behave exactly like a dumb cd-player would. This shouldn't take up too many bytes, and the interface could be anything from a simple "tripple-click eject button to change mode" to a nice looking GUI-app (which Plextor is very good with already, via their "PlexTools".
(I don't work for Plextor or Lite-On. I do own drives from both manufacturers though)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
1. I'd have a hard time saying that the industry's intent is to destroy fair use. Where's the profit in that?
...while preventing the sort of rampant piracy that is driving small record chains out of business.
Fair use is largely concerned with being able to copy a work. The problem that I and many like me see is that it can't even be properly argued that there IS any profit in it. The point is not profit but control, with the idea that in some time in the future this can be leveraged to make profit. It's the same reason Disney are so scared to let "Steamboat Willie" fall out of copyright. You think they're going to many a fortune on that any time soon?
2. I have little doubt that the problems that are occurring are because they're trying to -comply- with spec, not obliterate it -- namely, the problems some have noted with copy-protected compact discs are because the industry is trying to protect its content while remaining compatible with an obsolete standard.
I have to wonder if you're not just having a laugh with this one. Altering a specification, for whatever reason, is quite the opposite to complying with it. The proper method of adding functionality to a specification is to create a new one. Compare how PNG could not support animation, so a new specification was made, MNG, that could. Also compare how no-one uses MNG, because they are quite happy with PNGs and animated gifs. This is how you determine whether a standard is obsolete or not, and the same logic applies to the CD. If everyone is happy with it, it isn't obsolete... or will you be listening to sounds with a frequency out of the (44100/2) = 22050Hz that CD supports?
3. I have little doubt that when the next generation of media arrives, with effective digital rights management built in, that it will have the capability to deliver content and permit fair use...
The two are the antithesis of each other. When the day comes that I can't copy a CD to play on another stereo, or just to make a backup, I've lost all pretence of having fair use capabilities in the CD.
4.
Examples, please. I have yet to see any examples that have evidence of piracy harming small record chains, while I have seen some that suggest it helps by providing wider exposure. "Piracy" has been bandied around so long as the cause of all commercial suffering that people are beginning to believe it, even using it for an excuse for failure.
5. I think that the free market will probably be the best way to determine how importantly fair use should factor in to these new designs.
Spot on correct! So when are we going to repeal the DMCA and throw out the SSSCA/CBDTPA? Let's let the free market (including all the fair-use supporting consumers) decide whether crippled content delivery will fly or not.
Call me a karma-whoring idiot if you like, but I thought I'd stick up a copy of this in a format that's not quite so bitmapped. ph33r my l33t OCRing skillz, etc. :)
Click here for an HTML version.
Looks like we can get ahead of the game here, by ensuring that we have our "Free Alex" flyers and placards printed out in advance.
Seriously, the amount of information in this paper is similar to that which got Dmitry Sklyarov detained under the Downloaded Music Criminalization Act (DMCA). It even gives information as to which programs and hardware are most effective at bypassing these copy-restriction technologies.
It's well worth a read to see how these technolgies only work due to buggy or fragile implementations of the standard.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
The industry likes to threaten lawsuits over technical discussions of their various techniques, but they will never actually let one of those lawsuits be taken to court because they know they'll be bitchslapped into the middle of next week by a pissed off judge. They'd far rather stick an academian with the cost of initially retaining a lawyer rather than risk having to pay his legal fees for blatantly abusing the legal system.
So they may file a lawsuit but it'll be retracted as soon as Halderman's lawer files his first brief.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not to feed the trolls -- or, in this case, the Balrogs -- but...
There are far fewer than six degrees of separation between Tolkien's Magnum Opus and the Third Reich's own modern mythology. Himmler and the good Professor both drew from the same sources. Himmler, of course, took a very wrong turn Eastward through Hindu Mythology, but had both men sat at the same table at a dinner party, they would have had a lot to talk about...
I continue to feel that attention should be paid to how these things interact with home audio CD recorders, and not just because I happen to own one.
Under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, blank media for home audio CD recorders includes a fee which is distributed to publishers and artists in exchange for the right to copy the CD. Home audio recorders are restricted from writing to ordinary blank CD-R media; the media must have the encoding that identifies them as a "Music CD-R" thus verifying that the fee has been paid, and they also incorporate a "serial copy control system" which makes it difficult for people to create huge numbers of copies by making copies for three friends who each make copies for three friends, etc.
Copy-protection schemes have to corrupt the data enough to prevent access by standard computer software. HOWEVER, they must not corrupt it so much that home audio CD recorders fail, or they are (probably) violating the AHRA.
In practice, Universal Music evaded answering any questions I asked them about this issue; however, when I sent them a copy of "The Fast and the Furious" which my home audio CD recorder refused to copy, they sent me a replacement which did! I believe their strategy is "avoid public discussion by taking care of any individuals who complain, on a case-by-case basis."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Tips for all the people churning out crappy PDFs from LaTeX: here