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Microsoft Introduces Its Own CD Copy-Inhibition Scheme
M.C. Hampster writes "MSNBC is carrying a Reuters story about Microsoft's new CD protection technology. At the heart of the technology is the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.""
If that's all it is, it's not going to stop anyone from ripping it on pre-Palladium systems, nor from CD players with digital I/O (although that'll only work at single speed).
And what does the article mean by "layered"? Surely not an actual multilayered disk like a DVD? Is that backwards compatible?
More details anyone?
Jon
Where is the protection if the cd can still be played on a stereo, or PC?
Can someone explain this further? What does multiple layers have to do with protecting the CD if it can be played regardless?
user@host$ diff
>one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC.
Uh-huh. That's nice dear. Well done. I'm sure we'll all be using it in 3 years time.
Morons.
if they could played back on any PC they would have to be capable of being played back on a virtual sound driver designed for the purpose.
.. impossible - NO
And products like totalrecorder will take them in.
Harder to copy ? yes
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
The idea of a copy-protected CD won't work. The only feasible way would to have your computer control everything you do on it (kinda like Soviet Russia), which is what Pallidiam is trying to do.
If you can play a CD, you can get the raw sound data off of it. From that raw data, you can make an MP3. If the CD is playable anywhere, you can copy it. What's to say someone won't modify their PC CD-ROM drive so it reads the "normal" data that isn't copy-protected. Someone would figure it out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. And if copy-protection is implemented in Pallidiam, then it probably won't be long before someone finds a way around it, knowing Microsoft's record on security.
This is a very dumb move by Microsoft. Digital media is one of the biggest reasons people are upgrading their computers and operating systems.
You can run a Word Processor on a PII with Windows 95 without any problems. Ripping and burning CDs are a different story.
So why on earth would they cave-in to DRM pressure? They shouldn't give a darn what the music industry thinks. Technology is the lifeblood of our economy, both directly and indirectly. The Music industry is a bunch of annoying, overpayed execs and stars. In a PR battle technology would win hands down, especially if the battle was over taking rights away from the consumers.
My guess is Microsoft wants to monopolize the music and movie industry. They want the next CD you buy to only be playable in a Microsoft OS. Sure they may release some half-hearted buggy specs (for a price).
Brian Ellenberger
Yes, copying music is sweet because it is free.. but what's even better than it being free is the convenience.. that you can have everything at one place instantly accecible.. now, limit me to an hours' worth of music from one artist per one shiny silver disc, and that becomes a showstopper. I want big playlists of thousands of songs at my convenience instantly playable, nothing else is good enough. That's where they should start.. I still buy CDs, but that is simply because I like to encode my songs myself, as I please. Now, take away my ability to rip these CDs, and what am I left with? That I can play them whenever I want to on my stereo, or even PC?? What good does that do me when I haven't actually played a cd off a cd player in years. It's a BIG HASSLE.
Whoa there! How about the fact that people are sick of proprietary software vendors and their expensive update/release cycles? Or in the case of audio media, prices have doubled in 15 years of being on the market, and being forced to lower prices by the justice department (having been shown guilty of essentially collusion and price-fixing).
Until these companies start listening to the consumers, they'll continue to write their own stories explaining the industries problems that allow them to justify witch-hunts (remember the RIAA seeking authority to hack computers suspected of carrying illegal media?).
Something tells me that history will repeat itself here...
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Let me guess.. this layer will have to be read, parsed and then the file run with some controls deactivated in Microsoft Windows Media Player(tm) and nothing else. Any other software will gladly ignore it (unless MS intercepts this at the OS level) and burn it just fine. If Windows stops you, go Linux. And then reburn as a 100% plain CD Audio disk. Would be a rather nice thing to add to the "Things Linux do that you can't do on Windows"-list. It's not a very long one really...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can someone explain to me how an industry that reports record profits, year and year, can be called ailing?? That's like calling Microsoft an "ailing software company" because they have the minor inconvenience of the Justice Department. It's just not relevent.
Oh wait, I'm not a pirate, because I've never illegally sold someone elses art, and in fact, I am not bound by any agreement with the recording industry with regard to music that I've downloaded off the Internet, any more than I would be for music I taped off the radio!
Grrr.
The ultimate solution to revive the recording industry is NOT copy-protection. Ultimately, the industry must figure out how to serve the consumer's desires (this is the basis of all business and economics practices, something that the RIAA among others must have forgotten). What other industry can produce a product that is 90% crap and 10% okay, and expect the consumer to willingly pay for all 100% of it? If this were the standard business model, our Dell computers would be running P4-2.5 GHz processors with 64K RAM and 50 MB hard drives, and we would pay $3000 for them! The recording industry must acknowledge that if consumers are not willing to pay for its product, there is something wrong with (a) the product or (b) the distribution strategy (the 90%/10% ratio). I would have no problems shelling out $20 for a CD if it had more than one or two good songs on it.
By the way, the recording industry in Canada has managed to lobby a 20% levy on each blank CD-R that is sold (21 cents on a $1 CD). That eliminated the last moral reservations I had with copying music (now that the artists get my money anyway), and I bet one could mount a substantive legal defense if one were ever charged with copyright infringement based on that fee.
"It enables music labels to lay songs onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC"
s/PC/PC running Windoze/
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
No... kinda like X-Box.
If 95+% of all PCs are running Windows, it's pretty safe to say "PC" when you mean "Windows PC".
Don't forget that if you're a Linux (or whatever) user, you're in the vast minority, and you really can't expect the mass media to pay you any mind. For the media's purposes (and 95% of computer users' purposes), PC == Windows PC.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Ok, we know that a significant percentage of MP3s online did not come from a ripped CD that someone purchased, but rather, from an advance copy, studio DAT, recording studio leak, label leak, manufacturing leak or other non-consumer source. That's no surprise to anyone, and nicely illustrated by unmastered advances (3 months early) of the last Korn and Pearl Jam CDs.
So, exactly how is this expensive MS technology going to affect that content stream? It won't. All it will do is complicate matters for people who actually are honest and purchase the CD.
Also, as someone else mentioned, if the playback device has 2 RCA jacks or a pair of cannon connectors, anyone can get a great copy via analog. Hey, there are already "Analog Rip" options in many major media applications, so what's the point here?
Rule 1: the audio degradation caused by analog copying is LESS than that caused by MP3 compression. So...I don't care what fancy DRM they bring out, if you can hear it, you can copy and distribute it.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Does this mean I'll have to renew the license on my music CDs every two years?
And will there be a logo on my CD that says "Designed for MusicXP"?
>How do they think it's possible that, one way or
>another, the people who want unauthorized copies
>of multimedia won't be able to make it?
By controlling everything from the bit to the out. It is the only way possible. You have a CD that is digitally encrypted, which plays through a special device that knows you have the license to play it, which encrypts it again and sends it through special wiring to your speakers which also know you have a license for it and allows the sound to pass through. All of your input devices would listen for a watermark that would be embedded in the system and stop recording if they heard it.
Now, is any of that possible? Sure. But how long will it take for all of that to come to pass? Pretty much never.
Random Musings
I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything ...I'm glad Microsoft is in on it because of their "amazing" security track record.
Worse, you make the very rash assumption that this will work. M$ and friends could care less about your anoyances, after all they consider you some kind of criminal for wanting to make backups of the things you own. We've been here before.
This reminds me of M$'s entry into backup programs for floppy disk storage. They bought out everything that worked, such as Fith Generation Systems's Fast Back program, and shut it down. What they offered instead was M$ backup, which was slow and never worked. Needless to say, CDs came along and largely replaced the need for such things and you can now get free software that will break up work larger than a CD into volumes. No rampant "piracy" ever surfaced and no real pirate was ever discouraged. It's the whole thing all over again with CDs. It did not work for floppies and it won't work here.
Another $500,000,000 down the drain, nice work M$! Is that what you spent the last 15 years of dividens on?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's amazing how, in the face of lowered demand and lowered sales, the Music Industry response has been to make their product LESS valuable to an end consumer. $15 for 1 hour of music that can be used across all of the devices in my home, car, and at work is a lot more compelling than $15 dollars for 1 hour of music that can only be listened to in the living room.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
the laying of songs "onto a copy-controlled CD in multiple layers, one that would permit normal playback on a stereo and a PC."
:-) Or is there a difference between "normal playback" and "copy" that I missed?
I guess we all need more technical information for this not to sound like a real dumbass copy protection.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I believe that this would indicate that "Desktop PC" is synonymous with "Windows". The media reflects the general ignorance level of the general public (I use the term ignorance in a descriptive rather than derogatory sense) with regards to computers, your "digital" rights, etc. I share your frustration, but there is a solution. My company (shameless plug = Premier Networks) is an integration and system engineering firm. We primarily work with either integrating with or replacing MS based systems (W2K, SQL, IIS, etc.) with OSS (Linux + SaMBa, Apache, MySQL, etc.). Before we can do this, we have to sell the customer on the idea. That "ignorance" I mentioned earlier is really the only impediment to that sale and as such, my/our job is to educate the customer. In all honesty, once the customer "gets it" or understands OSS vs. CSS it's like the proverbial scales fall off of their eyes. The key my friend is to educate those around you. Truth has a way of cutting through even the best marketing (and saving a few thousand bucks helps too).
Demographics yo. 'Record profits' are generally the result of sales hype, inflation, and overly simplistic accounting reports (read: people who look at the 'bottom line' profits and nothing else).
Now, I'm not in the music industry, but I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center, and we were doing some statistical analysis which was related to this topic. So, I'll give my 2 cents, and attempt to answer your question.
Anyhow, as I understand it, fewer and fewer CD/albums are generating positive returns on investment. At the same time, more and more CD/albums are being produced. The fact which seems to be keeping the industry alive is that when a CD/album does generate a return on investment, the return can be extremely large. In fact, the return on investment is increasing for those albums which do generate a positive return. (Mostly due to an increasing world-wide population, an increase in potential consumers, world-wide communication networks, and peer-to-peer network phenomenas. )
For example, consider Eminem. Selling more CDs than anybody else around. Who has ever heard of a CD selling over 1M copies, in its first week?! But he did it. Now then, I know my estimations are inexact, but figure that 1M x $20 = $20M in one week, from one product. That number (or a similar one) is what the industry reports as a record profit.
Behind that number (and similar numbers reported, which include record-label and industry-wide sums of sales/product) are tens of thousands of titles which are lucky to sell 1,000 copies per year. Over time, those tens of thousands of titles become part of the hundreds of thousands of titles which are lucky to sell 100 copies per year. Which then become part of the millions of titles which are lucky to sell 10 copies a year.
Now then, as to your question: The music recording industry actually is ailing (as an industry), because they've lost what economists call a 'moat'. That is, they don't have any protection from other competitors getting into the business. As an industry, they don't have something which protects them from Microsoft, Apple, or Linux competing with them (read: Independent Labels.)
Now, if the recording industry were not ailing, and were healthy, here would be the situation:
Every CD produced sold exactly N copies +/- 10% of N. For example, every CD would sell 90,000 to 110,000 copies. No more, no less. There would be approximately M titles produced per year. If a new employee was hired by the company, they would produce 'M + 10' or 'M + x' titles to offset the wages and cost of the new employee. In addition, the industry would use proprietary technology, which nobody had access to, and nobody else could produce compact disks. Those people in the CD industry would be the CD producers, and nobody else got to participate in the game. That is how the industry would be structured if it were healthy.
But, that's not the way it is, now is it?
All things considered, Microsoft getting into this business is very bad news for the recording industry. For the record labels, it just means another major player who wants a cut of the pie, which is already spread too thin as it is. It also means that anybody who buys a Microsoft Small Business Server license can start up not just an 'Independent Label' but, rather, a medium sized recording label. Put another way, the small fish have just gotten bigger.
The quality would not be too dreadful. Once you have done it once, you have a digital version that you can copy as much as you want without losing any more quality (unlike the situation you would get if you had to keep making analogue copies).
One would think they had got the idea by now but no, lets keep trying to make that perpetual machine! The holy grail of the music industry is a bedtime story never to be fulfilled in real life.
1. If you can listen and see you can copy.
2. The quality isnt as important as the content.
3. Restrictions in use applies mostly to legit buyers since the not so legit users tends to use nonrestricted copies.
4. Pissing of legit customers tend to make them not pay for the goods.
5. If there are two versions of the same goods and one of them is unusable what do people choose?
They can never ever succeed in making a hackproof music or video format. All they can do is push their legit buyers over to pirating. I think that is a very stupid thing to do if you have a music business. Then again, not using the net to distribute music back in 1997 was a pretty stupid move too.
HTTP/1.1 400
All these copyright protection schemes do is prevent me, the consumer, using the copyrighted work in a way which is legally supported (at least here in Australia, where the DMCA isn't used as a catch-all...).
It's been said before, and'll be said again: if someone truly wants to violate copyright, there'll be a way to do it - so in the end, the only losers are Mum and Dad users.
Sigh.
Even then, all it would take would be a pair of aligator clips on the posts of your speaker drivers, along with a device to step down the signal to line level (and undo any crossover splitting if it's a multiple-driver system), and you've got yourself an analog dub, ready to create a new, unprotected digital master with.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The way I see it there are three primary considerations here.
1. The first is whether or not your PC, running the OS of you choice (Linux, MacOS, Windows, Lindows, etc), will be able to read the disc in existing CD-ROM drives. I believe that the likely answer to that question is yes, because the music industry and Micro$oft have seen the results of violating the Redbook Standard and rendering CDs unreadable. This approach leads to widespread incompatibilities, confusion, and frustration on the part of consumers about which CDs will or will not work in which devices. Thus people refuse to buy them.
2. The second question is whether or not it is possible using multiple layers on the CD to render the CD-ROM drive capable of reading only the WMA digitally encoded tracks and not the standard audio tracks. I am not an expert in CD-ROM drive hardware and drivers so perhaps one of you other slashdot people know the answer to that for sure. Let us assume for the moment that CD-ROM drives can only read the WMA encoded data tracks and move on to point number three.
3. WMA is a proprietary file format which is readable only by Windows Media Player (as far as I understand it). Thus this constitutes a "security by obscurity" type system scheme because presumably Micro$oft will keep the file format secret and somebody will have to write a program which parses the file and extracts the audio. History has shown these types of "encryption" schemes to be vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before some information about the WMA format leaks or somebody cracks the format encoding (case in point the CSS scheme employed on DVDs).
In closing, the only other alternative for additional protection beyond proprietary files is to use a real cryptographic scheme. However, it is difficult in practice to operate a public key encryption scheme under these circumstances. Basically, the more people who have access to a decryption key, even though it may be buried or hidden in the Windows Media Software, the less secure the system becomes. This was a problem faced by DVD manufacturers in the early DeCSS days (As I understand it, the original program used a key which was leaked from a manufacturer, Xing technologies I think, to decode the mpeg streams). The problem became even worse when some enterprising hackers discovered that it was possible crack CSS and decode the DVD without a key. I will bet that even the hardware player manufacturers don't bother with the keys anymore because it is cheaper to put a DeCSS based decoder chip in the box instead. Thanks for reading.
Afterthought:
The only truley secure solution would be a single all in one device (speakers and everything) with end to end encryption. I dont believe anybody would accept that draconian of a solution and even if it were somehow forced onto people they could still record the sound coming out of the speakers. The music industry will only be happy when it becomes possible to pipe the music directly into your brain so that nobody else can hear it and you cannot copy it. Oh wait! what if I remember the song and it sticks in my head? did I violate the DMCA? lol friggen hillarious.
MySQL is an example. We of course use PostgreSQL, DB2 or whatever the situation calls for. The reality of the matter is that most of our customers simply don't need anything beyond My or Post. We are talking MD practices, clinis and small hospitals. In most cases, they are NOT already paying for licenses on MS SQL. If they have it, and it works, we don't typically recommend replacing it...our competition does this sort of thing (replacing and or upgrading needlessly) and that is why we win the bid. ;)
to get into a permanent arms race with crackers is potentially expensive.
/expensive for most people so we don't often see photocopied book at swap meets.
Media people want a reasonble barrier to copying.
Photocopying a whole book is too time consuming
The fact that one can rip it via analogue is an unescapable fact so spending millions on developing a foolproof anti-digital copying mechanism is generally a waste of time.
Rememebr the VHS-VHS anti-copying machanism where some sort of modulation is inserted so that the sounds & colour fades in and out when the modulated signal is introduced as aliasing?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It seems funny that Microsoft should build MP3 ripping software into Media Player and win XP then do this. Even if they make somthing that works it still doesn't stop people from playing it in a stereo and then straight into the computer.
cat