Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sony's New DRM Technique

Posted by Zonk on from the no-reburning dept.

skochak writes "Sony has introduced a new DRM scheme. You can burn a CD-R from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy." From the article: "The concept is known as 'sterile burning.' And in the eyes of Sony BMG executives, the initiative is central to the industry's efforts to curb casual CD burning. 'The casual piracy, the school yard piracy, is a huge issue for us...Two-thirds of all piracy comes from ripping and burning CDs, which is why making the CD a secure format is of the utmost importance.'"

9 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Who will crack it first? by jasonmicron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It only took a week to crack their last attempt at enabling copy protection with nothing more than a pen.

    Who's game? :D

  2. "if it can be seen [heard]..." by Speare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When will the execs stop wasting their money on all this ineffective DRM "technology"? If it can be seen, it can be copied. The profit comes from producing a complete package experience with liner notes and pride-of-bookshelf, not just the (approximate) digital waveform.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  3. Two thirds? by Tenken · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm sure everyone is going to point out that this will most definitely be cracked without much effort, what bothers me is why they're going after the casual copiers at all. They say that two thirds of all piracy happens from casual copying, how do they know this?! It seems like an excuse to go after the consumer rather than a legitimate reason. I think this statistic really amounts to nothing. We all know that what they should really be focusing on is the large-scale pirates, especially in EU markets where CD's are even more extravagantly priced than they are in the U.S. I can't imagine how much time and effort that this new protection scheme has eaten up. Shouldn't they be doing something more useful like seeking out the large-scale pirates?

  4. my favorite quote by sootman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet."
    --Bruce Schneier

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  5. How evil is casual piracy? by PCM2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was sort of a "late bloomer" for music. My older sister had bands that she liked, mostly picked up from friends, and certainly I had heard the Beatles and the Stones and the stuff that was on the radio. But I never really became somebody who listened avidly to music myself until I was maybe 15 or 16. I got into it after I developed a taste for the stuff that wasn't on the radio all that much. Some of the first bands I got into included old Oingo Boingo, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, GBH, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Sigue Sigue Sputnik ... connect the dots between all those bands any way you want, but the point is that I wouldn't have heard any of this stuff if it weren't for my friends who dubbed me off tapes of it. (That's right, cassette tapes, remember those?) Did I buy records? Sure. Did I buy more records than I listened to copies from friends? Maybe, but I can't say for sure that I did. But even if half the music I listened to wasn't paid for, it still made me a more willing consumer of music today. So how evil is this "casual piracy" really?

    But then, more willing consumer is one thing; better consumer -- at least in the eyes of the major conglomerates -- is another. I think I'm far less likely to buy into a lot of the garbage that's forced down the primary media channels today and far more likely to buy from independent labels/genres than most Americans. All that piracy in my youth made me more likely to spend my money on music today, but it made me less likely to spend my money on "the right music," as far as Sony is concerned.

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  6. A Step in the right direction? by nokiator · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Despite all the criticism that is likely to flame on this thread, this is a step in the right direction. I rahter see Sony focus on preventing people from making copies of copies instead of making copies of originals.

    There is really no way to prevent technically savy people from making copies of content which is distributed on media that does not have user specific encryption without owning the complete system that is responsible for playback. I am sure the long term dream of Sony is a transition from the relatively open CD format to something more proprietary like SACD. In the short term, they have to deal with CDs, which represents more than 99% of the music that is sold in stores.

    Sony's goal is probably to make it difficult enough to copy coied CDs such that 90% or 95% of the people don't bother to deal with it. A copy protection system that is tedious enough to break can be commercially successful even if it is a technical failure.

    Of course, the basic flaw in this system is that most people who copy music are not that conscious about the quality. Ripping the tracks from a copied CD to MP3s and then burning them back on to a CD would defeat this sytems with some loss of quality.

  7. This is what killed DAT. by Bassman59 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is all ancient history, but DAT was killed by a similar DRM scheme. Consumer DAT machines were sold with S/PDIF digital interfaces, whereas pro machines (like the ubiquitous Panasonic SV-3700) had both S/PDIF and AES/EBU.

    The main difference between the two interfaces (other than the obvious -- S/PDIF is on unbalanced 75-ohm coax and AES/EBU is on balanced RS422) is that S/PDIF machines have to honor the SCMS ("serial copy management system") bit in one of the control subframes. AES/EBU does not.

    SCMS works in the same way as this "new" scheme. As you record from a digital source (over S/PDIF), the recorder looks at the state of the SCMS bit in the incoming data stream. If the bit is set, then the machine will refuse to record. If the bit is not set, then the machine will gladly record -- but it inserts a set SCMS bit into the the recorded data. So when you go to copy your copy, you're locked out.

    This, in and of itself, didn't kill DAT. DAT was killed because pro machines were substantially more expensive than the consumer machines (I remember paying a grand for a TASCAM DA-30 when DAT was still very much a viable format). Consumers weren't willing to pay a lot more to get a feature they wanted -- the ability to make copies of copies.

    "Those that ignore history are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.

    Now, of course, S/PDIF still exists. I know that some S/PDIF interfaces (the CardD Digital, for one) let you disable SCMS. The most common use for S/PDIF these days is digital transfer from a DVD player to a home-theatre multichannel amp. Dunno if you can route that audio to a digital recording device and have it record.

  8. Re:Not new! by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hear, hear. The MD had a LOT of potential - as a "next gent" cassete tape/floppy/etc. Yet, Sony locked the format so hard it became a hassle to use.

    I sold my MD player a while ago and bought myself a MSI 512mb MP3 player. I grew sick of having to reencode my music to shitty ATRAC3.

  9. Refresher course in crypto theory by foo23 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As Cory Doctorow put it (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here):
    ... Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [... A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.