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Labels Trying New CD Copy Prevention Systems
bAdministrator writes "What if a CD copy-protection system was developed, which did not compromise sound quality nor cause compatibility problems, and still allowed for your 'rights' to make a limited amount of personal copies (*.DRM)? UK-based company First 4 Internet (F4i) claims to have pulled this off with their 'eXtended Copy Protection' (XCP) system; 'The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs, a Mac CD-ROM to Mac computers, a VCD to DVD players and CDDA disc to audio CD players. This multifunctional disc format offers full playability and therefore greater flexibility without lowering protection levels.' and 'By using a range of methodologies, including the construction of multiple protection layers, limiting the player accessibility to the provided player software, and encapsulating the red book audio content, XCP® successfully protects the content from unauthorised copying.'"
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Even better is to get at the digital audio data before it hits the digital-to-analog converter. Vsound is a free, open source program that does this under Linux.
Or have you forgotten this story http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/11/181625 8&mode=thread
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
On MacOS X the tool you want is called Audio Hijack Pro and is works like a champ. You can intercept any audio stream being played on the machine, and allows you to apply any number of DSP effects to the intercepted stream. It totally rocks. I've used it to record streaming content from various radio programs which shall remain nameless, fscking RIAA.
- Make raw copy of entire disk using dd or similar.
- Load that file into your audio editor of choice as a raw 16bit, 44.1KHz stereo audio file.
- Trim the DRM and file system info from the start/end or whereever else it's been put.
- Save each block of sound in the remainder as an audio track in your preferred format.
- Fire up your digital media player and enjoy.
From CD insertion to listening to the digital music takes me about ten minutes on a bad day, and there simple isn't any method of DRM that can prevent this without breaking compatability with standard CD audio players. The only thing about all this that continues to amaze me is that the music companies are *still* throwing away their money this snake oil.UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Just so you know, if you have a modern sound card (ie any SoundBlaster >= Live) you can do much better than this without any troubles at all. You see your sound card allows you direct access to what it's about to output to the speakers in completely digital format, without any loss.
Here's an easy way to do it (with a SoundBlaster emu10k1 based card in linux, using ALSA):
arecord -f dat -D hw:0,2 > stolen_music.wav This, of course, assumes that you have alsa-utils installed (which you most likely do).
The other assumption made is that your sound cards stream multiplexer interface is located at hardware location 0,2 (which is the default for emu10k1 based cards). To find this out simply type:
arecord -l
That should do the trick. For SoundBlaster (emu10k1) owners, the device is listed as EFX.
Say bye-bye to DRM. No need to worry!
With a windows tool called Easy CD-DA Extractor you can then cut up your .wav rips & convert into mp3 while do full ID3 tagging from freedb.org.
All your CD's are belong to us.
AudigyZSplatinum US$100
Easy CD-DA Extractor US$29.95
Yep, except that when you're playing an audio CD without digitally extracting the info all the program does is send the Play command to the cd drive. That audio goes to your soundcard via the small analog cable.
3 words:
"Exact Audio Copy"
EAC detects audio tracks from current CD-ROM/Audio CD hybrids so I doubt very much this would be any different.
And it rips much faster then 1x
I think they just want to make DRM "compatable" speakers.
And that prevents me from placing a microphone in front of the speakers and recording it that way how?
If it can be seen or heard by a human, it can be recorded.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Your computer CD-ROM is different from audio CD players. Basically, it's smart, they are stupid. Audio CD players are pretty single minded, they start at a given point on the disc (the inside I believe) get a little info on the tracks, and then just read raw data off the disc and dump it into D/A converters. If there are any other zones that have something like data on them, they just don't know and don't care.
CD-ROMs are a little smarter. They have a look at a couple places on the disc and see what zones are there, and present all the ones that the computer can use to it. They can deal with data zones, audio zones, video zones, etc.
Well what most of these protections do is put a data zone on there with a program to be automatically run. That program installs some shit that won't let you actually access the audio zone, only the encrypted files in the data zone.
As you might guess, this is REALLY simple to override. However that's never stopped people form wasting money on copyprotections before.
That may be true on Linux, but not so on Windows. Under Windows, an encrypted audio stream may require that only signed audio output drivers may play the stream, and Microsoft will sign an audio driver only if it turns off cleartext digital outputs (such as the .wav redirection) at the request of the stream. Do you listen to music through a receiver connected to a sound card's S/PDIF output? If so, tough shit.
The purpose of copy protection is to make it harder to copy, not make it impossible. Remember, if a protection/encryption scheme can be made, it can be broken/gotten around. This is like wrist watches that say "Water Proof", then if you read the fine print, its only guaranteed to prevent water from leaking in as long as the pressure is below that found at a certain depth. Same thing, it is 'protected' up until it is presented to someone that cares enough to get around it, then its gotten around quickly (it seems that most CD copy protection scehmes have 'cracks' or work-arounds posted online within days of their application on a massively released disc).
--
If it can be made, it can be broken. No reason for me to bother with locks on my door, anyone that really wants to come in will come in anyway, I'll just put pictures of locks on the door to deter those who aren't serious.
Video Production Support
Under Windows, an encrypted audio stream may require that only signed audio output drivers may play the stream, and Microsoft will sign an audio driver only if it turns off cleartext digital outputs (such as the .wav redirection) at the request of the stream.
Until they get Palladium in (and even then there will inevitably be mod chips) you can modify Windows to quit checking the driver signature pretty easily. I've seen it done with NT 4. Then off you go again.
The sad thing about these Windows-only copy protection schemes is that they don't even work for Windows.
Canada? Not for long.
But you have no right to copy the music; that right is owned by someone else. These technologies simply bring common practice into sync with the law.
Try learning the law. The copyright holder only has rights over infringing copying. He has no rights over non-infringing copying.
These technologies simply try to ABANDON copyright law and replace it with "technological" restrictions that the copyright holder HAS ABSOLUTELY NO LEGAL RIGHT TO ENFORCE.
The copyright holder has NO RIGHTS if I make a backup copy. The copyright holder has NO RIGHTS if I want to copy it to a different media/format. The copyright holder has NO RIGHTS if I am copying to parody it. The copyright holder has NO RIGHTS if I am copying it for educational usage, either as a student or as a teacher, or for research purposes. The copyright holder has NO RIGHTS if I copy to modify it in any way I like for personal use. And on an on and on.
Not only is that copying not restricted by copyright, it *CANNOT* be restricted by copyright. This was established in the earliest Supreme Court decisions. Copyright does not grant or define fair use, it is fair use which restricts and defines the limits of copyright. The Supreme Court ruled that copyright would be unconstitutional and struck down as invalid if it tried to restrict fair use.
It is YOU and all of the DRM scemes that are out of sync with copyright law. DRM restrictions/enforcment do not equal copyright restrictions/enfocement. If they were equal then copyright law would simply be null and void, struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
These uses are simply outside of the range of exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder.
Your intent with DRM may certainly be to prevent people from infringing, but that does NOT grant you any rights over innocent people making perfectly legitimate and non-infringing copies.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Not only that. Any band that records their concerts to CD to sell after the show has to pay a patent royalty to Clear Channel. Pretty sick, eh?
What?
Mind you, it won't cost as much as the other factors in a CD:
- coke for the music execs
- whores for the music execs (I know, kind of redundant - should be "whores for the whores")
- fast cars and fat wallets for the music execs
- payola from the music execs to radio playlist directors
- fast women and loose crack for the radio playlist directors (or is that "loose women and fast crack")
- studio overhead - later charged back to the performers
Notice there's nothing in this list for the people actually making the music? Just do a google for "courtney love does the math".Choice quote:
And this is using generous-to-the-band figures.Here's a link to the whole article suitable for printing
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
"And that prevents me from placing a microphone in front of the speakers and recording it that way how?"
Because some companies with more lawyers than sense have proposed that recording equipment should fail to function if it detects a 'watermarked' signal being recorded.
Naturally, this would stop you making phone calls from somewhere where music is playing, and you could disable the recording equipment of everyone in the room (for example, during some political speech) by playing a soundtrack in the background. The only question is whether it can be used to defeat CIA bugs, or telephone wiretaps.
"Sorry sir, the suspect's daughter was whistling christmas carols in the background, and our recording kit failed to capture the evidence"
Set up your recording application. (3 minutes)
Play the cd.
Walk away. Come back when the CD is done playing.
Split the tracks. It's usually obvious where track breaks will be. (5 minutes)
Name the tracks. (6 minutes)
Encode to mp3. (background task if neccesary)
Total work: 14 minutes
Note that these are very liberal estimates, and it could probably be done in half the time if you are experienced. There are plenty of people with quality audio input. I have an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 that would work for the task, and many others have even better interfaces.
However, the most important thing to remember is that only one person needs to do this.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
The minute DRM starts to chafe for the average user the technology will fail because users want access to the material they licensed at the checkout stand - and make no mistake, they did license the fair use of whatever the hell is on the disk.
They certainly didn't "license the fair use". Has it really gotten so bad at Slashdot that you can string together a few legal-sounding words and get modded up?
Fair use isn't something you license. It's exemption from copyright under certain circumstances. Copyright holders cannot license fair use to anybody even if they wanted to, you already have it.
Well, it's not really a myth. It's a holdover from the day when it really was true. It used to be that the only feasible way to make a professional-quality recording was to use tape machines costing tens of thousands of dollars, and mixing consoles sometimes over $100,000. And you had to have engineers who knew how to run it; there were obscure tricks like recording instruments with high-frequency content (cymbals) towards the center of the tape, and instruments with less high-frequency content (bass drum) towards the outside. (Why? Because the head azimuth is never perfectly aligned, and outside tracks lose more high-frequency than inside tracks due to head misalignment!) And you had to pay a mastering engineer to fix everything. AND you had to pay someone to make a vinyl master, preferably someone who knew how to do it right and attentuate the right frequencies the right amount to fit your songs on one side of an LP without making it sound like crap or making decisions that would lead to the stylus skipping. And then duplicating required high-volume runs in a big facility to be economical. So all this required HUGE amounts of cash up front.
These days, you just buy a G5 tower Mac (or a PC if you want), slap Pro Tools or Adobe Audition or Cool Edit on it, and then away you go. Sure, you still have to know what you're doing and buy good microphones and preamps, but the days when you'd have to spend your life savings and mortgage your house to make a record are gone. You could make a truly good-sounding record with $10,000 of equipment, and probably an excellent one with $25,000.
And then distribution and promotion are changing too. You can copy it yourself if you want to do really low-volume just to sell at shows, or get a few thousand run off cheaply. And you can promote and sell over the Internet. It's not as effective as a big bucks media blitz that will make millions buy a crap album, but if your music is good, you can get the kind of promotion going that you need to support the music, and let the music (and the shows) do the rest.
But, thing is, I would kind of say this concept is still a new one. It's only recently that it's gotten to the point where all this has come together, and people are still discovering how to do it themselves successfully. So, in my mind, the idea that you can't do it yourself is an old truth that's rapidly becoming a myth.
There are several programs out there that will auto-split tracks for you; some of them will also encode to mp3 or other formats as well. RIP Vinyl (available at download.com) is an inexpensive Windows program that will automagically split tracks up based on the silence between them, and you can change a whole bunch of other settings as well. I don't know if there's anything there's anything like that for Linux, but Audio Companion seems like a good bet for Mac OS X, or CD Spin Doctor if you have Toast Titanium 6.
I've wanted to convert my record collection into mp3s for a while now, and after doing a few albums for friends manually using Peak, I would recommed the auto-splitting recording programs. If the industry was really serious about DRM, they'd release all music on vinyl and movies on film since it's so much more difficult to encode analog sources.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Linux users can use Gramofile, which does this. Unfortunately you have to split the tracks up after the rip, but that's not such a problem.
I've found with Gramofile that I have to go through the whole sound file to check the splits are in the right place anyway (you can manually edit them if it got it wrong). It never really gets them completely right---it always needs another half a second or so to get the fade outs right, and it can have trouble with silent sections in songs. Most similar apps I've seen also have these limitations. Okay for quick and dirty, but it does get a bit annoying when you've got headphones on.
Cogito, ergo sig.