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Copy Protection On CDs Is 'Worthless'
zotler writes "NewScientist.com has an article about how copy protection on audio CDs is worthless. I thought this was funny since I just read this earlier Slashdot article 'BMG copy protecting all CDs'." The article also neatly sums up the technology behind current fair-use-inhibition stratagems.
It's quite helpful in pissing off paying customers, and driving them underground to pirate...
Seriously though... If it can be played, it can be copied... no matter what kind of protection they use... Why waste the money and resources to 'secure' the CD, and piss off and lose customers?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
from the article:
Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
amen!
R.I.P.
The majority of tracks on the CD are also often *worthless*. Just let me download the songs I like and pay a reasonable amount per song!
Boom Shanka
...they didn't mean to say "The music on copy protected audio CDs is worthless"?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
a black sharpie pen is priceless.
$cat
Leave it to the british to add up to ~140% on a poll graph.
It amazes me how intelligent and qualified individuals can show time and time again how copy protections are at best a short to mid term solution to unwanted copying. On the otherhand, you have Macrovision snapping up competitors in a race to stay ahead of consumers. It is just a war of attrition which will be around long after we're all gone.
What one man can hide, another can find.
Cheers,
VonKraken
There's a lot of "well, duh" moments in this article:
Such as:
the idea of CD copy-prevention is "fundamentally misguided".
And:
To ban upgrades, he argues, would lead to "buggy software and poor hardware."
And best of all:
Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
Are you listening Ms. Rosen?
I go into the Best Buy and look at those new CD's and I look over them and look over them and I can't tell if it's one of those copy protected CD's. To heck with it, I am not going to buy a CD I can't play on my computer and I can't tell if it's copy protected or not so I'm not buying any CD's now. Copy protect this.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
One thing that a lot of people seem to ignore is that most people are pretty clueless about the relatively easy methods of circumvention.
Then again, for a while now those people are also the least likely to try to copy a CD so I guess there is some truthfulness to the original claim.
Either way, we all know that there's an industry model change on the way. That's easy to predict. Knowing what it is or when it will hit, that's the hard part (always has been, always will be). It reminds me of Warren Buffet's comments about the invention of the automobile -- (paraphrased) nobody could have predicted how it would develop with any kind of guaranteed accuracy, but it would be fairly obvious that buggy-whip manufacturers were on the way out.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
will his report on how the hardware/software can be updated to read the correct TOC fall under the aegis of the DCMA?
I always understood that *any* copy protection of media such as this is useless, because at some point the content has to be decoded to analog so that the speakers can physically create the sound. At this point you can capture the analog signal and encode it in any digital format you like.
A simple (and ineffective due to quality issues) example is connecting a line-in cable from your CD player's head phones jack to your PC's line-in, and then recording and encoding to ogg.
What's stopping people doing this?
"Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."
is this man insane??? doesn't he know that making an audio CD is a horribly expensive thing and the HUGE royalties given to the artist forbids such tactics?
Oh wait... someone hit me in the head with a 2 by 4 again..... sorry, my bad... I lost my mind for a minute there...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The never ending game of copy protection and "crackers" will end one side gives up. I think we all know the crackers aren't going to. Is there ANY proof that these copy protection schemes have saved any company any money? I can pull up a lot of "research-data" that says they have lost money, but it occurs to me that these protection schemes are quite a waste of money. Does anyone have an argument as to why companies should continue to develop such technologies?
The author is making a classic mistake,
thinking that the security must be perfect
in order to be effective.
The systems do not have to be perfectly
secure to be effective. They just have to
encourage most consumers to follow the
rules set down by the copyright holders.
--
take a look at this Tom's Hardware Guide article on CD-RW drives and what copy protection they could get by out of the box by using blindread/blindwrite:o m/storage/02q2/020617/i ndex.html
http://www6.tomshardware.c
Three out of four were successfully copied (two versions of safedisc, cactus data shield, and the one they couldn't get by: TAGES, which is used in games).
If people want to copy CDs, they will.
/. I'm sure you can find something to do for an hour.
No matter what they do to CDs, if you can play them at all (whether it is in a Car stereo, home stereo, computer, discman, whatever) you can always feed your line out to the line in on your computer.
Obviously this is a pain in the ass. But if you're set on not buying a CD nothing "they" can do can keep you from making copies.
As far as signal degradation goes, your line in can [theoretically] be of the same quality as your stereo's line out, which is as good as your going to hear it anyway. So while it's not a purely digital transfer (although it could be with a high end stereo/soundcard) you shouldn't really notice the difference.
If you're an Audiophile that can notice the difference, you're probably not going to be copying CDs/Making MP3s anyway.
I know, I know, you read all this and you're saying, but what about the time it takes.... Yeah you're right, but you gotta deal with that. Start it and walk away, or check your email, or read
My two cents
(Read this 999 more times and you can afford one CD)
Oh, so you can actually BUY cds from the store without having to download them from the internet for free?? Wow, Its so hard to keep up with current technology these days.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but seriously, why don't the record companies do something productive like adding more content to CDs if they're not willing to lower the price? Recently I've seen a few cd's on the shelves (the one that comes to mind is the Nick Carter CD > ) that include a DVD with videos and stuff for the same price as a regular cd. If more labels did that, offering video content at DVD resolution, I would gladly plunk down the $16 for a new cd!
Romeo & Juliet for 1337 hax0rz! http://www.redcoat.net/pics/romjul.swf
This is one very bad article. It states copy protection is worthless. Then, supposedly in an effort to back up that claim, it says that the copy protection schemes the author of the article examined can be circumvented by updating software used in CD players. IANAL, but I think such `updating' is illegal in the USA (think DMCA).
I do think that [some] future computer CD players will be made such that they correctly play those mangled CDs, which would indeed make _this_ form of copy protection useless (if not backed up by laws like the DMCA). However, that does not port to copy protection in general, which is what I initially thought the article was about. Plus the copy protection works against current technology, and that's all that can be expected of it. (Although I recall something about a German magazine detailing how one could disable the copy protection using a felt-tipped pen.)
The author ends his article by saying that selling CDs for cheap would be a solution for the record companies, as it people would find it too much trouble to find their music online and burn it on CD. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I find finding [ack] music online and downloading it less of an effort than going to the store, searching for the CD, and paying for it. Besides, does the author _really_ believe that reducing prices by an order of magnitude would _solve_ the record industy's problem??? I think it would rather create a currently percieved but nonexistent problem...
Rant off.
---
The more laws and order are made prominent,
the more thieves and robbers there will be.
-- Lao Tsu
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Dudes, it's easy, and yes you can do it with a lot of the new crop of "copy protected" CDs. The secret is *shh! don't tell anyone!* Old crappy hardware. Some of the new tricks to protect against copying assumes your equipment, like your CD drive, is relatively new. Pick up an old 4x CD ROM drive. You'd be surprised how well all of a sudden things like the supposedly protected Shakira album just play... and as we all know, if it plays, it can be copied.... ;)
However, it's more fun to implement this with a microwave than to buy them pre-destroyed.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Music sales are down for the simple reason that there is very little music these days that inspires folks to run out and get the album. I mean come on, I remember when U2's The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree came out and everybody I knew HAD to go out and purchase the album because it was a new sound and soooo well put together. Same held true for Peter Gabriel's solo albums, Bob Mould's solo stuff, Rush etc...etc...etc.... These limited examples of 80's music were albums that were crafted with heart and soul and lots of work. Now we get "engineered" bands and artists who rarely if ever write their own material and the artists on the discs are commonly studio musicians. All because the large corporate studios wanted a bigger cut of the pie than they already were getting. Because of this stranglehold, musicians like Jen TryninJen Trynin [jentrynin.com] were forced out of the music biz despite being very talented. Check out United Musicians [unitedmusicians.com] or QDivision [qdivision.com] for other smaller labels with real talent.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The copy protection schemes are created to force consumers to *buy* legit copies of the CDs, as opposed to stealing the MP3 versions. So Mr. Honest Consumer with lots of discretionary income:
1) Goes to the store and buys a new copy of some Top-40 Fluff band of the minute.
2) Tries to play it in his new "Super Fancy 500 feature Play-Any-Format CD player", but it can't play the new CD because the CD thinks his player is a PC player.
3)Tries it in his similar car CD player, with similar results.
4) Says "screw this", D/Ls his favorite songs for free, burns them to CD, and lives happily ever after, perfectingly *WILLING* to pay for new CDs, but he can't, because they won't work with any of his "Advanced" stereo eqpt.
Hats off to the file sharing companies for coming up with this brilliant scheme to deprive record companies of their most secure source of income, the Honest Customer! Wait, they ARE the ones who came up with this copy protection scheme, aren't they? No? Hmmm.....
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
So, in other words, the RIAA should respond to supply and demand.
Now, why has not anyone in the music industry come up with this yet. Clearly, after every 30 seconds of CD-listening, the copy-protection contained should ask (with a sexy female voice) guestions like : "On page 3, of the pamphlet that came with CD you purchased, which one of the following ten options best describes the hair color of Britney Spears, punch ff>> 1-10 times to enter your answer". Simple as that, copy-protection re-inveted!
Not only do I think this will be ineffective, I think in many cases it'll be self-defeating.
I've got a toddler in the house, which means that CD cases left in the open get opened and covered in peanut butter fingerprints. C'est la vie, so I went ahead and ripped my library via iTunes to a pair of 80 GB drives, and now I've got a wonderful, searchable, kid-proof music library.
I simply can't imagine going back to having to deal with physical CD media anymore. I'm happy to rip the disc when I get it and put it in the storage room, but that's about it.
So, if I really wanted music that was on a copy-protected format that was effective, I'd HAVE to pirate it to listen to it.
Other folks are in the same boat - everyone who listens to music on systems not compatible with this protection. The presumption behind this copy protection is that users will replace their in-dash CD players with a compatible one. Instead, I think it is MUCH more likely users will return the CD to the store, and download the tracks from a P2P site.
It only takes one user to crack the copy protection to make the content available online. But EVERY case where the copy protection works is a lost sale for the record company.
They need to understand that the effectiveness of a copyright protection scheme is inverse proportion with how difficult the copy protected version is to use compared to a cracked version.
This is one of the reasons dongles have been disappearing in the software industry - users would crack a legit copy just to use the software on a laptop!
My video compression blog
This is one of the few intelligent suggestions I've heard for stopping music piracy. Production costs, printing costs, and royalties to the artist amount to less than $1.50 for most CDs. If the music industry was willing to cut some of the fat out of the middle man they might be dealing with more honest customers. But, clearly that's not their main concern.
What amazes me is that you can buy an average DVD for $20. With this, you get an entire movie that required much more money to produce. You also get other things like extra materials, or deleted scenes, music videos, interviews, alternate audio commentary, etc, etc. The average CD will cost you somewhere around $14. With this you get 10 to 14 songs, 80% of which suck, and nothing else. Now how in the world can the MPAA produce a DVD with so much material, and something that is so much more costly to produce(meaning the filming budget) for barely more than what you would pay for a CD with a dozen songs. This makes no sense to me.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
This is an article I have put on my site as well. Because I am a DJ I am very dissapointed in the decision of BMG.
:)
Bertelsmann (BMG Music) will stop to sell uncrippled CD's. This means such cd's will not play at certain older & newer CD players, certain car players and will not play in your computer. This for the price of 20US$ to 22US$ per CD !
As DJ I am very worried because one scratch crashes my CD into oblivion. The copyprotection does not let me play half of my cd's on my old cd players in my house (and I have three of those).
The protection on these cd's is the Cactus Data Shield from Midbar. The protection is currently only being used on EUROPEAN cd's. A lot of the cd's being used in Europe are not available in the US what leaves only one option, buying them here and praying they do not get damaged + work in the CD players you use at that time.
The error is in your player, not in our copyprotected cd's.
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BMG distributes a lot of the cd's that are currently being used by me as DJ and shows no respect for their customers whatsoever by creating CD's that work on only 80% of the home/pro audio equipment. Additionally they say "the error is your player's, and not in our CD's".
I am at a very moral dillemma because every time I buy music I first search the MP3's and then write down the titles I want to find. Some of these titles are only to be found on CD's and some of 'm are only to be found on vinyl.
legally bought music is working against me now!
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I used to go to the recordstore and get about 20-30 records whereof 1 or 2 where usable. Whenever I go to the recordstore now I give 20 titles and get 15 useful numbers out of it. I currently have over 800 CD's and over 22.000 records of vinyl. Currently I am buying more on CD because carrying all the vinyl is breaking my back
Since I cannot use the cd's wherever I want and 1 scratch can kill the CD because of this lousy copy protection I need to buy the CD *and* burn the same MP3's to seperate CD's to be sure I can keep using the music I want to play legally!
The secret agent not working everywhere!
I have bought the CD of James Bond (Universal) and it seems not to work in my PC (where I play the most of my music, my PC speakers are the best in my house!) and they seem not to work in my old cd players of my own DJ equipment! Next to that the shop does not want to take the Bond CD back. With the line of defence BMG has by saying "their cd's are fully redbook compliant and it's your player's fault" they also tell you you can bugger off by bringing it back to the shop where you bought your precious CD.
I have bought several other CD's like "Solid Sounds" which is giving me errors as well. Currently I am trying to recover one of the legally bought CD's by searching the MP3's and burning them in the same order on another CD because I cannot just copy it and the CD is damaged by (over)usage as DJ.
BMG's reply of one of their CD's
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Whenever you send a note to BMG you get the following mail back (unaltered):
"we are sorry you have troubles with our copy protection technology. The copy protection reacts on the special new technology that is build in in burners. Unfortunately htis technics was built in many new CD players, even if they can't copy a cd.
"The copy protection yet does not recognize wheather that burner technics is build in a cd player or in a burner. That's why the cd playern might not play a copy protected CD. Since burner technics are also built in car radios, this may be the reason, why you can't listen to a copyprotected cd in your car.
"As far as we were adviced, our copy protection is according to the Red Book Standart as well as all labelling on the cd.
"A standart home CD player is one that has no burner technics built in. Our Cds play on all Cd players without burner technics.
"There will be no cd manufactured without copyprotection any more."
This seems to limit a lot of options and costs me a lot more to find the numbers, import these from wherever possible and find them on mp3 to have a backup CD of my original CD! Of'course they tell "we are sorry" though they also tell us "the fault is in our bought players and there will be no cd's manufactured without protection anymore"... I wish I should not have read this blasphamy towards a lot of customers!
Moral dillema, I am for the music, not against!
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Because I am a DJ I cannot tolerate (for myself) to be using illegal material! I live by the music and I live FOR the music and not AGAINST. Seems to be BMG has the same reason but not only FOR the music but to protect their precious wallet!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Seriously, I've never purchased many CD's in my lifetime (10-20), but if CD's were only $3-4, I would be buying them impulsively with little regard as to whether I would even listen to it.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Looks like they have pissed off audiophiles as well...'no digital outputs are being put on SACD/DVD-AUDIO Players until they can secure the digital audio stream'...wtf is the point of higher quality sound on a disc if the output will be even worse?
I, for one, refuse to buy new CDs anymore, but that doesn't mean that the dozens of people who turn to me as their local geek don't. The lil ole lady who lives next to me got sent some CDs from her son (who's overseas ATM), and couldn't figure out why they wouldn't play in her new(ish) CD player. You try explaining to a 90 year old luddite the intricacies of CD TOC practices and Redbook.
BTW, how does having a corrupt TOC adhere to the Redbook? Just curious how they managed that.
So, anyways, I end up bringing the f*cking things over to my place to burn off onto *real* CDs for her, which unfortunately ends up with her seeing my setup when she brings me over homemade cookies to say thanks. Next thing I know, I'm putting every bit of music she owns to CD... and I mean *every*, considering I have a turntable, cassette, CD (old-skool, to read those f-ing cds), and 8-Track all on my line-in. So I end up spending all day and night pulling off all this music (it took days and days of 24 hour play to get this stuff in), and more days and nights of doing some rudimentary cleaning on pops and crackles. She ends up so happy with it, she tells everyone else in the complex about it during the monthly condo meeting... I now have a computer slaved to nothing more than audio reads, and literally SHELVES of cookies and cakes and preserves and everything else you can think of. If you consider the average phono/tape/8-track/cd to be roughly 1 hour in length, it's going to take me over 3 months just to read this shit in.... and it still hasn't stopped. They don't even say hi anymore, just leave a stack of music at the door with a bag of something homemade on top... the guy from the other end of the complex left his DVD player and a bunch of out-of-region DVDs for me last week (he's maxxed his region changes). And every time I say I'm too busy for this crap, whatever sweet lil grannie it is this time looks up (wayyy up, I'm 6'4") and says "Don't worry dear, whenever you get to it. I kind of like the silence."
Therefore, based on the imperical evidence of the growing hell life is becoming, coupled with the expected dentist bills I'll get soon from all the cavities I'm sure to develop, I'm forced to conclude not only that copy protection == PAIN, but also that CP==EVIL. And, based on this, I'm lead to the conclusion that Hillary Rosen must be the bane of my existance.
It's time for it to end. I can't take another day of "The Beach Boys greatest hits!". Someone tell me where the bitch lives. It's time to go give her a cookie.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
What the music industry executives don't quite get, yet, is that it only takes one successful rip of a CD to spread like wildfire over sharing networks (which incidentally are digging deeper and deeper underground).
Given the quality level of a lot of music out there now, it's clear to me that absolute CD perfection is not the desire of the masses. Back when piracy was done (more slowly) by multiple generation analog re-recording, the quality level would drop each generation. It didn't take long before it totally sucked, and even then people often would put up with music 4 or 5 generations deep, just because it was free. Digital basically eliminates the generation problem, completely. Therefore a semi-sucky rip is actually good enough for the masses because it won't get any worse from there. And all it takes is for someone to rip it by playing it on a device that can play the copy protected CD and recording it via a sound card input. And if the device has no electrical analog output (permanently wired headphones, for example), it can still be captured by other means (some player will have to be able to play it for big home sound systems or else the music industry will be cutting out more market than piracy). It might suck to have to record music with microphones propped up against speakers (possibly with filters and noise generators to mask watermarking), but the quality of that won't be any worse than 2nd or 3rd generation analog was, and will probably still be better, anyway. The "analog hole" does exist, and it means that people can rip the music and swap it online, anyway.
What the copy protection is targeting most effectively is not the online trading, but rather, the casual CD duplicating. Many people do buy CDs then make copies for their friends. And with holidays approaching, the reverse will be common, too (buy CDs, duplicate or rip them, and send the original to your cousin for a gift).
Because of the fact that online music swapping is already virtually ubiquitous, it won't be much of a stretch to engage in that practice even more in the future. As more and more CDs fail to be playable on equipment that people paid good money to buy, be that an actual stereo system, or a custom made personal computer system running the latest Debian Linux, people will more often explore getting their music for free from the internet instead of buying CDs that don't work. They aren't going to just trash their stereo systems, and they aren't giving up on computer systems that still do other functions well. They will just get music in other forms instead of the store bought CD. And it's not because they necessarily want free music (those that do are already swapping anyway); it's that they want music that works, and swapped music may eventually be all that does. And to the extent the music industry doesn't want to serve this market, the more they drive this market away from buying any CDs at all.
Yes, there is a lot of piracy going on, and probably a lot more than there ever was. But it's the music industry itself, that will effectively destroy the CD format as we know it today. You just watch. They will do it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
haiku...
/haiku
at the planned conference,
Mr. Halderman's Sharpie
is displayed; he leaves.
This space for rent.
This issue has spread through several DJ-related email lists since many DJ's with large collections like to reduce the number of CD's they have to carry by burning just the tracks they want to CD-R. Again, what is the likelihood of a "copy-protected CD" getting airplay?
Third, many DJ's record their shows in advance on a PC and burn them to CD-R. Once again what is the likelihood of a "copy-protected CD" getting airplay?
(quoting Tom Lehrer) "Now let's not see all the same hands!"
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I don't see Sears blaming "pirates" on lower washing machine and refrigerator sales.
Nor are airlines complaining about stowaways causing ridership to be down.
RIAA: Charge me a decent price for a CD (lets say, 1hr at minimum wage) and I'll buy them. Oh, and perhaps promote more than your top 15 bands to me.
Check out the RIAA's official line on CD costs. There's a lot of overhead, much of it advertising. Like many other products, the consumer pays for a lot in products that don't at all improve the product, but make it popular (which ironically makes it cheaper).
The costs of producing the music are nearly beside the point, as are the media costs. The other stuff sets the price.
Emphatically, I think a more efficient model can be created, but as with books the transition to the internet has been slow. But eventually I am certain will be plenty of $1 songs, and that the artists will be better off -- esp. the small-market ones not blessed by the marketing focus of a major label. In fact, it may be the big names that produce mediocre music who suffer.