Newest Audio CD DRM Proves Ineffective

The Importance of writes "As noted previously, a couple of weeks ago BMG released a new CD by Anthony Hamilton that included DRM. Slashdot readers speculated that the system wouldn't work. Now there is a report proving it doesn't work by Alex Halderman, a graduate student at Princeton's computer science department and the author of an earlier, definitive report (PDF, HTML version) on first generation CD copy protection. Famed computer scientist Ed Felten asks: "Is this the end of the road for CD copy protection?" His answer? "It ought to be.""

Comments

It wont matter

[Honest Man]

As long as I have an audio-in port on my sound card and an external player, drm is a waste of their time and money.

Oh for crying out loud

[stratjakt]

It's not supposed to be uncrackable. I know it's crackable, you know it's crackable, they sure as hell know it's crackable. Just like any other protection mechanism on anything from a PC CDROM to the XBOX.

What it's supposed to do is limit casual piracy. Make it tougher for the average slob to make a copy with the EZ-CD Copier that shipped with his Dell and give it to his buddies. That's it. Most folks would just give up if it didnt work the first time they tried, they aren't going to jump through any hoops, scribble on it with a sharpie, open up a hex editor, solder a mod-chip into their player, run a distributed cracking engine to decode it, whatever. It sure as hell has nothing to do with preventing some geek from leaking it on the 'net.

That's a *large* chunk of the sales they actually lose. Bob Magoo who gets a copy from his buddy Turd Ferguson because he's too lazy or cheap to run down to Wal-Mart and get his own.

So just friggin relax already, and dont be so proud of yourself that you figured out how to "hack" the technical equivalent of the safety pin that keeps a babies diaper in place.