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Labels Trying New CD Copy Prevention Systems 520

Posted by michael from the never-say-die dept.
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.'"
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Labels Trying New CD Copy Prevention Systems More

Labels Trying New CD Copy Prevention Systems

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  • And on a Linux PC (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:05PM (#11125755)
    It presents itself as a broken CD.

  • A way around it all. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScytheBlade1 ( 772156 ) * <scytheblade1@ave ... m ['geu' in gap]> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:05PM (#11125756) Homepage Journal
    On most any computer, you have an audio out jack, and a microphone (or line in jack).

    What's to stop someone from playing the CD, only with a cable connecting the out to the in, and pressing record/play...?

    What's to stop someone from making an audio "device" that simply writes everything it gets to disk...?

    Granted, you'll have a generic "loss of quality", but as long as you're playing from the CD, in theory the loss is no more or less than an encode directly from the CD (if using the device driver method, the audio cable may/may not kill some quality).

    I'm just waiting for an automated program that'll do this...it completly removes all forms of DRM, it would remove the iTunes user ID, it would remove everything BUT the audio.

    What a concept, huh? A friend of mine, after I told him this (that I've been contemplating for years), said, "but..that's like cheating!"

    Who cares? It works.

    As long as it can be heard (or seen), it can be re-recoreded at near identical quality.

    • Re:A way around it all. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tuba_dude ( 584287 ) <tuba.terry@gmail.com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:11PM (#11125807) Homepage Journal
      The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.

      • Re:A way around it all. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@@@yahoo...com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:24PM (#11125891)
        The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.

        That's not the point. What these idiots fail to realize is that it only takes one person with too much time on their hands to completely destroy the entire rationale for copy protection. It only takes one guy to rip this way, enter everything by hand (this is not a big deal, btw; I've done it on plenty of my own CD's not in the FreeDB), post to a Bittorrent tracker site, share an album on Edonkey, or whatever. Then it's out there, and everybody's got it. And you're back to square one again, with a DRM system that's doing nothing but inconveniencing people that want to exercise their legitimate and legally sanctioned fair use rights.

        This is why DRM systems cannot work. Because in the Internet age, it only takes one single person to completely mess everything up and make all that work on the DRM scheme for nought. And we're not talking spending weeks cracking an encryption scheme, either; we're talking taking an hour to record a CD through an analog connection and then split the tracks up and type in a few track titles. This is hardly a large amount of work, nor does it require any technical skills.

        Regardless, I'm sure the DRM itself will be cracked within the first day or two of its release. But even if it isn't, it will be worked around. It's just so completely pointless that it makes me angry that any company would waste any amount of money on it. I mean there are so many more useful things that could be done with that money, such as, you know, actually developing good musical acts.

        • Re:A way around it all. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Yartrebo ( 690383 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:34PM (#11125958)
          In fact, unless the DRM is ironclad, it will increase copying because the internet version is now superior to the one that is sold. Even if the CDs were given away (which at $15 a pop and a trip to the store, they're far from there), the downloaded version can be used any way you like, while the store bought one can only be used in very limited ways.

          That's not even counting the people who will refuse to buy it on principle (though most who will do that are already boycotting them for other reasons like because they sue young girls and purchase laws with impunity).

        • Re:A way around it all. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by SpaceCadetTrav ( 641261 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:36PM (#11125968) Homepage
          Tell that to the guy doesn't want to figure out how to rip it himself and is now afraid to download that ripped copy off of BitTorrent and Kazaa. He doesn't know where else to get it, so the protection worked on him. The media companies have never had complete control of their content, but they already know that. Everything they do to make distribution more difficult means more sales for them.
      • The only thing stopping anyone is laziness. It's only going to work at 1x speed, so there's no conveinience there. You can't exactly use the CDDB lookup to get the CD's info automatically entered, you're stuck doing everything by hand. That is far too much work for many people, making this copy-protection scheme work better than many others.

        And how is this going to prevent the professional CD pirates in Asia from making copies, eh? Such schemes will only prevent average music listeners from making their s

        • Re:A way around it all. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:17PM (#11126226) Homepage

          Taking away your fair-use copying rights is where the money is. Despite all the piracy, and hype being made about it, those who regularly download music are still a minority. What the hype is doing is shielding them enough to let them use petty DRM like this. Assuming 25% of the market for any given music are pirates (a high figure) and 75% are not, by forcing that 75% to have to buy a 2nd copy at full price for on the road, the corporations will be 50% ahead.

          The music industry doesn't really care about the piracy as long as it stays small enough, which their various legal threats and other campaigns can ensure. What they will be doing is using the existance of such piracy to justify their own form of ripping the average consumer to get profit levels hat exceed what they could get with zero piracy and total fair-use. It's not really much different than terrorism being used as an excuse to take away lots of freedoms that wouldn't really impact terrorism.

      • It's only going to work at 1x speed

        That's not very slow when comparing to listening to the original once.

        Actually it's exactly the same speed.

        It might be slow compared to how easily it's done now, but I don't think it's slow in general.

        You don't even need to wait for the 74 minutes to pass because of operating system multi tasking.
      • 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

      • Music copying has existed far longer than mp3's, and it was all 1x back then. No biggie.

    • Re:A way around it all. (Score:5, Informative)

      by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@@@alum...mit...edu> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:14PM (#11125830) Homepage

      Even better is to get at the digital audio data before it hits the digital-to-analog converter. Vsound [xenoclast.org] is a free, open source program that does this under Linux.

      • Secure Audio Path (Score:4, Informative)

        by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:26PM (#11126277) Homepage Journal

        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.

        • When you own the box... (Score:3, Informative)

          by po8 ( 187055 )

          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 co

    • What's to stop someone from playing the CD, only with a cable connecting the out to the in, and pressing record/play...?

      True.

      We used to do this, back in the seventies, with eight-track tapes [wgeneration.com]. Those were the days, man.

      How could we have guessed that our simple eight-track hack would lead to the hacking of today's expensive DRM?

      (How, indeed: if I recall correctly -- a questionable venture -- we were listening to a lot of Foghat, in those days.)

      -kgj

    • On MacOS X the tool you want is called Audio Hijack Pro [rogueamoeba.com] 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.

    • As long as it can be heard (or seen), it can be re-recoreded at near identical quality.

      Not true. Take a look at Macrovision [macrovision.com]: "Macrovision copy protection does not affect video quality when content is viewed, but prevents or degrades copies made on DVD, D-VHS and VCR recorders." I think it plays with the luminence settings that are too subtle for the television to detect but plays havoc with a recorder.

    • Who cares! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by haraldm ( 643017 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:29PM (#11125921)
      XCP® successfully protects the content from unauthorised copying.

      Who cares? I've got an old 1989 Sony (!) CD player with an optical digital output, and a CMI8738 sound card with a digital input. I cannot imagine this copy protection scheme to violate existing SPDIF standards (mind you, "SPDIF" stands for "Sony/Philips Digital Interface", see also here [epanorama.net]). So - nobody able of getting an older CD player and a 50$ sound card will be too impressed by any backwards compatible CP scheme. This is ridiculous.

      The CP vendor's web site [xcp-aurora.com] says "It is a robust solution providing the highest levels of protection against casual piracy while ensuring full playability." which says all. This is not (and cannot be) targeted against the professional pirates in Asia who make and sell millions of copies, but against you and me and Joe User.

    • Re:A way around it all. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      Or even better, for when all else fails:
      1. Make raw copy of entire disk using dd or similar.
      2. Load that file into your audio editor of choice as a raw 16bit, 44.1KHz stereo audio file.
      3. Trim the DRM and file system info from the start/end or whereever else it's been put.
      4. Save each block of sound in the remainder as an audio track in your preferred format.
      5. 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

    • Re:A way around it all. (Score:2, Informative)

      by flithm ( 756019 )
      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 likel
    • Well, my Soundblaster Audigy2ZS Platinum has optical in/out... so you get a pure digital audio signal into soundforge/cool edit/ whatever...

      With a windows tool called Easy CD-DA Extractor [poikosoft.com] 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

  • Hooray for fifteen minute long albums!

  • Okay.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dfenstrate ( 202098 ) <dfenstrate.gmail@com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:06PM (#11125763)
    So, who's gonna post the crack?

  • How long before it's cracked? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Darkn3ss ( 812009 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:06PM (#11125764)
    This is all good and dandy, but if something can be protected, it can be cracked.
  • Normally there'd be a bunch of AIFF files ready to drag/drop - with the schizophrenic nature of the disk, it'll be interesting to see what happens...

    Simon

  • Err...bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:07PM (#11125772)
    They can make all these grand claims and the like, but the simple truth is that what they're claiming is not possible with existing CD standards. They may have made some sort of hack that works most of the time, but there's no guarantee it'll work in all CDROM drives. I'm failing to see how it's any different from existing "solutions."

    • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RaySnake ( 607687 )
      >> They can make all these grand claims and the like, but the simple truth is that what they're claiming is not possible with existing CD standards.

      Acyually I would go step further and say that this isn't possible with ANY adio media EVER. The simple fact is that whatever your medium, and no matter how much copy protection you like to add, eventually the data is sent to a speaker. By the nature of what you're trying to accomplish (play some sounds) all your fancy DRM/copy protection MUST be discard

      • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:2, Insightful)

        by hom ( 620969 )
        no matter how much copy protection you like to add, eventually the data is sent to a speaker...

        I wonder if anyone has explained this to the PHB's at the media companies?

        I think they just want to make DRM "compatable" speakers.

        • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
          Yes. And DRM compatible speakers must have a DAC in them to transfer to analogue output, which means:

          1. Anyone with a soldering iron can get the analogue output of the DAC and wire it into the audio input of a sound card.
          2. Anyone with a bit of electronics knowledge and aforementioned soldering iron can tap into the digital input of the DAC and get a perfect copy.

        • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:3, Informative)

          by Tim C ( 15259 )
          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.

          • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:5, Informative)

            by legirons ( 809082 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @06:48PM (#11127010)
            "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"
      • You could send it to a chip implanted in your brain that directly stimulates the right nerves :-p

      • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:24PM (#11126269)
        I wonder if anyone has explained this to the PHB's at the media companies?

        Contrary to popular belief, "PHBs" aren't completely stupid. They know full well that it's impossible to prevent copying completely, and that all you can do is make it harder.

        All they're trying to do is make it hard enough that most people don't bother, while going after those that do. Why do you think they're investing in DRM and yet still going after P2P networks, apps and users? It's because they know that even with DRM, with P2P, their stuff will still be distributed. Discourage casual copying and shut down P2P and they're in a much better position, control-wise.

    • Re:Err...bollocks (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:38PM (#11126339) Homepage Journal
      What's going to happen with a system like this is that it breaks on all music CD players that are capable of identifying other formats. This is nothing new, and audio enthusiasts are not enthused to hear "Sorry, your CD player is too advanced to play this non-standard CD. Get a $79 one, and it will work".

      Regards,
      --
      *Art
  • I bet this new scheme yields to cdparanoia [xiph.org] just like all the others.

  • More Hype? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Majestik ( 101669 )
    How many times have we seen these promises, until the technology hits the public domain and its gets it first real world test, we'll never no.

  • Must use their software? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris L. Mason ( 3425 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:08PM (#11125783)

    "...limiting the player accessibility to the provided player software..."

    That seems like a *big* showstopper to me. So, they're saying it works on Windows and Mac, but you can't use iTunes on *either*? I don't see how that would be possible if it's following the standard, as they claim, but if it does, I can't imagine many people going for it.

    • Yup, that's basically useless to me; if I can't rip my music to my HD in *my* format of choice and play it in *my* player of choice, I really don't want to know.

      Big labels would do well to make it easier to get what I want, because if they don't someone [magnatune.com] else [allofmp3.com]* surely will.

      * Anyone else? These are the only two places I'm aware of where I can buy FLAC's for download.

  • they always claim that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by geekd ( 14774 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:09PM (#11125791) Homepage
    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

    That's what they* always claim, and they have not delivered yet.

    I still should be able to do what I want with a product I purchased, for personal use. That includes encoding it into the format of my choice, not thiers.

    * they being CD copy protection creators

  • I am missing something here? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sH4RD ( 749216 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:10PM (#11125797) Homepage
    It talks about a "construction of multiple protection layers, limiting the player accessibility to the provided player software". So I have to ask, how the heck does that work? Is my computer's CD-ROM drive really *that* much different from my CD players? What happends if my CD player is a DVD player too, will it be confused by some of the layers? Is this some kind of magic-mojo protection, or am I just missing something here?
    • 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
  • Nope.

    When I pay for a overpriced CD, I at least deserve the right to be able listen to it in any (preferably open) format of my own choosing.

  • copy protection that works (Score:5, Funny)

    by kajoob ( 62237 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:10PM (#11125805)
    I have a feeling that this will finally be the copy protection scheme that works because this morning the RIAA stopped by my house and removed the shift key from my keyboard.

  • an excellent hack... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Doktor Memory ( 237313 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:11PM (#11125806) Journal
    The best way to look at these systems is not as an attempt to actually prevent people from ripping CDDA audio from CDs: that's effectively impossible.

    Think of them as an elegant method of separating the record labels from millions and millions of dollars of their money, in return for...nothing.

    Hm. I'm in the wrong line of work.

  • OS (Score:2)

    by Xshare ( 762241 )
    The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs, a Mac CD-ROM to Mac computers
    What about linux?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • (Inserting freshly-bought DRM cd)

      dexter:/tmp$ mount /dev/cdrom /tmp/cdrom
      dexter:/tmp$ cd /tmp/cdrom
      dexter:/tmp/cdrom$ ls -l

      -rw-r--r-- 1 root riaa 120281 2004-12-18 21:16 LICENSE.IMPORTANT
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root riaa 124098 2004-12-18 21:16 DRMplayer.c
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root riaa 12858 2004-12-18 21:16 Makefile
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root riaa 65707 2004-12-18 18:39 codec.cfg*
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root riaa 194115 2004-12-18 18:33 configure*
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root riaa 523737122 2004-12-18 18:33 rocknroll.dat

  • Sound still leaves your hifi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kaleco ( 801384 ) <greig.marshall2@ ... GERcom minus cat> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:12PM (#11125820)
    Unless they find some sneaky way to encrypt the audio as sent to the speakers, no DRM scheme will be effective. I know recording line-out to line-in is more convoluted than common ripping, but all it requires is one person to do it well and distribute the file.

    I like to archive my music (I buy a lot of CDs every month, sometimes I can't find something a friend recommends I re-listen to) on my PC, and will not buy any CD that tries to prevent me.

    • That was the whole idea behind TCPA. EVERYTHING in the audio and video stream is encrypted, all the way to your speakers and video display. If the bits inside the file say 'do not allow this to enter the analogue domain', then the last piece of digital TCPA hardware in the stream will say 'no, I refuse to send an unencrypted stream to the next device'.

      Of course, that doesn't stop you putting your microphone in front of your speakers, or videotaping the screen on your display, but neither of those are attra

  • They admit it can be hacked (Score:5, Informative)

    by Porn Whitelist ( 838671 ) <tomhudson411@yaho[ ]om ['o.c' in gap]> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:13PM (#11125825) Journal
    From the article:
    "Could it be broken? I'm sure that somebody must be able to do it," said Graham Oakes, the head of Los Angeles-based Ezee Studios, which represents First 4 Internet. "But is there a generally known hack that has been put on the Net, or have any of the record label IT people found a hack yet? No."
    So it's only a matter of time ...
    The company got its start by offering a tool to identify pornographic images
    Like you need a tool to do this? :-)
    • Basically they're saying "works for now, but it will probably be problem sometime" - where sometime is anywhere between now and the future.

      If this protection became widespread, I'd bet on a compromise shortly after it does, possibly within weeks to a month. So how much would record companies have to pay for this, and how much are they going to jack up our CD prices because they did so?

      I think this is where the real "cost of piracy" comes in. Not in the piracy itself, but in the idiotic measures they pa
  • Look, I'm not going to go for any bullshit DRM-restricted music. If I can't rip to WAV and then encode to OGG or MP3, forget it. If I can't make my own mix CDs and playlists in the format of my choosing, then I'm not going to buy it.

    I'd like to think I'm not alone in this. I just want the freedom to listen to the music I buy in the way that I want. Anything less than that is not acceptable.

    -Jem
    • I almost bought four CDs yesterday as part of a "buy 4 for £20" promotion in a branch of HMV. One of the CDs, an album by Ultravox originally recorded in the early 1980s, was DRM-locked. There was no other CD that I was remotely interested in the offer and I wasn't going to buy a CD that I couldn't listen to freely (my PC with Winamp or my Palm Tungsten E is how I listen to my CDs) so I left the store empty-handed.

      End result of the DRM: the non-sale of four CDs. The crazy thing here is the DRM was on
    • I didn't go into all the article details, but the thing did claim that you would still be able to conduct fair use copying.

      I think the movie companies are delusional. There are so many uses they don't consider. For example, I only use copies of my CDs in my car. The car CD player tends to scratch the disc when I am blindly shoving them toward the slot, and this way, if they're stolen, I don't have to replace them.

      They just need a better business plan.
  • > '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.'"

    ...at least until we run up against someone who realized "Autorun / Autoplay / Autoload / Autoanything on insertion of media" was insecure-by-design and turned it off the first time he installed Windows 95, and grew into the h

    • I don't think you (and lots of others who mentioned the shift key) understand. If you stop auto-run, you CAN'T PLAY THE MUSIC. Period. It's in some wierd ass format that prevents you form playing it at all. Of course, there are always ways around THAT...
  • Clicked on DRM on the site and this came up:

    Flexible Approach
    DRM is a key feature of copy protection and our philosophy is to provide a flexible range of solutions for the Record Labels. While XCP itself is a single session technology it has been developed to incorporate third party Second Session DRM as well as our own proprietary DRM which uniquely enables protected burning of copy protected CDs.

    Sounds pretty good if you read it straight right? Now if you look DIRECTLY under it it has this (bold m
  • '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
  • Ummm... No shift key this time? Maybe player comes with free spyware too, freshly reinstalled on every song. K00l!

    BTW, any "copy protection" scheme for information which shall be reproduced is impossible from the pure mathematical reason. If you can't understand this, read some Shannon, Wiener or Von Neumann book about classic cybernetics/information theory.

    Well, at least impossible until whole CD became entangled quantum pair with your CD player box, and both will cease to exist in response of copy attem
  • Can this override your fstab and other cd-ripping related settings. I doubt it considering that generally takes root access and that's assuming you allow autorun (which probably takes some fancy configuration involving WINE to even work).

    It only takes one copy to be made, and then everyone will get their on-DRM enhanced .mp3/.org/.flac files on the internet instead of paying for crippled CDs.

  • The Corporate IP War Against Fair Use... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mankey wanker ( 673345 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:27PM (#11125911)
    ...will never work and isn't really a war - it's just greed, plain and simple.

    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.

    The lie IP hogs want us to believe is that they have rights over and above our right to hear/view/access what we have already paid for.

    The real world says no.

    But like a drunken man in search of more drink the IP hogs go for more DRM, they always do - like a blow upon a bruise.

    "Doctor, it hurts us every time we try to implement DRM."

    "Then stop trying to DRM everything."
  • Users have a right to make a backup copy of their media. This new format does not allow for any backup copies, and even though its nicer than pure DRM, it's still not allowed.

    I dont think consumers are going to be concerned with "piracy" until record labels are concerned with fair use. Why should consumers refrain from illegal copy distribution when at every turn the record labels continue to take away fair use rights?
  • IIRC, there is no autorun feature for Data CDs under OSX. If you have Mac OS 9 and quicktime for Mac OS 9 (aka Classic), be sure to disable autorun in the Quicktime prefs pane. Autorun is a security hole as it could be used as a virus/maleware delivery method.

    I don't see how this will work on OSX as it should present the user with several sessions on the desktop including an audio CD session with the tracks that you can drag off as AIFF files.

  • Post looks ripped from the website. Website is very low on details.

    The section on pressed-cds makes it seem as though the disc can tell what kind of device it trying to read it, and somehow take action to prevent access if the disc was not intended to be accessible on that device.

    Huh?

    If it's "encapsulated" red-book, then it's not red-book anymore. An audioCD player would need to be built with logic to read and remove the encapsulation.

    I don't see how they could implement this without "bastardizing" the

  • Once again, this only hurts legit owners. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @03:39PM (#11125994) Journal

    Because there is nothing you can do to stop the copying of bits if you don't control the hardware. Nothing. And it just so happens that pirates are always more sophisticated than the average consumer. Absolutely pointless.

  • This holiday season, don't forget what a real audio CD is! A true audio CD doesn't have track errors and doesn't try to hide data or offer mixed data modes (DRM or low quality/crippled audio): it's just pure, sweet 16-bit 44KHz samples.

    So if you buy something that's marketed as or implied to be an "audio CD" (maybe according to the section of the store you bought it from) check it out to make sure it works with your computer's CD player and that you can save the original audio tracks to your hard drive.

    If
  • Copy protection can never work. Ever.

    In this case: Audio out jack, meet audio in.

    For video copy protection can only work as far as a screen capture: Framebuffer, meet harddrive.

    Video games fall into two categories, ones where you're paying for a social service (MMORPGs) and ones you can play with a specific group or alone. Anything that requires internet authentication can be fooled.
  • The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs

    Uhh... To Windows or to PC's?

    I assume they mean "present itself as a CD-ROM to Windows Explorer", but then you just need to write a low level CD reader right? I mean, if they're just trying to fool Explorer. If it can be read properly by existing several years old brain dead Audio CD players without having those requiring an upgrade to do so, surely you'll be able to develop software to do it on Windows, Linux or whatever as well?
  • And we will still be able to bypass everything they have hyped so hard by, lo and behold, putting the disk in a DVD player instead of the intended CD player.

    Wake me up when the madness ends.
  • If you can access the audio 'unprotectedly' on a audio cd player, then you definitely can access the audio data 'unprotectedly' on a computer, unless there is some hardware 'protection'. If it does the hardware to enforce DRM (like differences between cd players and computer cd drives) then it will definitely give compatibility problems. Another thing to note is that, it can be easily circumvented through device drivers. You just need to create your own device drive for your pseudo-soundcard which will just

  • Just what we need (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:04PM (#11126149)
    A technology that makes buying albums online less restrictive than buying a physical CD.

  • Illegitimate copying is not the tartget (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:10PM (#11126183)
    It's always worth remembering that DRM is about preventing legitimate copies, not illegal ones. The vast majority of people are not comfortable with the idea of their favourite band etc not getting even the pathetic cut of the cover price that they do at the moment and are happy to pay a fair price for a decent product. On the other hand, everyone likes to make compilations or at least take their existing music collection to different locations.

    Logically, then, the market for selling the same product multiple times (ie, using DRM to force you to buy two or more CDs if you want to have one in work/car/etc. and one at home) is vastly more valuable than the illegal recording market, which has been in existance for a long time anyway.

    The people behind DRM are not idiots; they know as well as anyone (or better) that sales figures show downloaders buy more music than any other group whether their downloads are iTunes or BitTorrent. They couldn't care less about stopping that - they just want to have the same bonanza that they did with the vinyl->CD repeat buying period, but now they want it every year.

    TWW

  • Using a custom player? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Migraineman ( 632203 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:15PM (#11126212)
    Poking around the XCP Aurora [xcp-aurora.com] website, there are buried references to "playing through the XCP player," [xcp-aurora.com] or "using the provided player." Makes me think they require playback through custom software that they include on the disc. There are also references to RealPlayer, MS Media Player, Winamp, etc. It's possible that they're providing a plug-in to those programs that allows decoding of the audio portion while still appearing to be the playback tool of choice. If they're breaking the CD-ROM access by putting bogus CD structure info up front, someone will break out a Sharpie and "fix" it.

    My guess is that some MBA looked at the market, and included OS's and playback programs until he got 98% market coverage, and said "that's good enough. The 3% [sic] represented by the remaining folks won't matter - we'll more than make up for that with the increased sales that result from the reduction in bootleg copies." The unfortunate truth is that it won't make a damned difference. They fail to realize that the Internet is what the military folks call a "force multiplier." You only need one determined individual to crack the coding, or to make a decent D-A-D copy (thus stripping off the DRM), and post it on the 'net. Once that happens, you've got a gazillion traders who are more than willing to propagate the copies.

  • As an independent musician...I love this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flinxmeister ( 601654 ) on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:18PM (#11126232) Homepage
    Why? Because it makes the phrase "This disc has NO copy protection measures...please support the artist by purchasing music" a real selling point.

    Independent musicians (the kind that make a living off their music) are slowly but surely rejecting the myth that you need a record deal to be successful. (In fact, if you're good you can almost always be more successful without a record deal these days). These groups see the listener as a potential supporter, not a potential pirate.

    When labels keep up this DRM crap, it just makes these indie musicians look more and more listener oriented. People aren't stupid, they pick up on this.

    So keep it up DRM content producers! It's just one more selling point for your slowly growing competition. By the time you realize how bad you screwed up it will be too late.

  • Copy Protection, not Copy Proofing. (Score:3, Informative)

    by tonsofpcs ( 687961 ) <slashback&tonsofpcs,com> on Saturday December 18, 2004 @04:38PM (#11126342) Homepage Journal
    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.

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