Oh dear.

I won't be buying any Charlie Pryde records for the forseeable future, then...

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Mmmhmmm...

Anyone want to take bets as to how fast this encryption/protection scheme will be broken? We saw how well SDMI stood up...

(O|||||O)

I wouldn't mind betting that someone's already done it.

beaker
12 gig blue/magenta/orange/yellow (at the moment :-))

there has been a lot of talk about these kinds of protection schemes, it's not encryption, or anything like that.. it's a technique of putting errors into the data itself, and the encoding, so that CD-ROM's don't like chewing on the CD's. what happens, tho, is that any drive based on CD-ROM technology, won't even be able to PLAY the CD in normal mode. this includes laptops, desktop PC's, and from what I've heard, many NORMAL car decks..

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

I wouldn't mind betting that someone's already done it.

Yes, someone has.

___________
Tony Fabris

Ah yes I remember reading th this post. doh!

beaker
12 gig blue/magenta/orange/yellow (at the moment :-))

This has the potential to be so beautifully ironic -

If the average Joe with a cdrom-technology-based player can't play the original, but even one person manages to make a good digital copy (which will eventually happen), it can be (illegally) redistributed via 'normal' cd, mp3, or whatever, becoming the only way that said average Joe can listen to the music he paid for.

It will come down to buying a new player, or downloading a ripped copy from someone that has it. Of the two, I find the latter more likely.

This whole thing could cause a serious increase in trading of copyrighted works.



Bill B.
Mk.2 SN 080000183 - 38 GB / Green

but even one person manages to make a good digital copy (which will eventually happen), (...) This whole thing could cause a serious increase in trading of copyrighted works.

Exactly the point I was making a year ago, when this first came up.

It's terribly ironic that this copy protection thing will have the exact opposite effect of what the record companies intended.

___________
Tony Fabris

Is there some board that issues "CD" licencing? Like Sony or Phillips... I know that there are certain standards for DVD's. All DVD's have to have DolbyDigital (they can have DTS or PCM also, but they need to have at least one mono Dolby Digital track) and they all use (at least now) Macrovision and Mpeg2. You would think that whoever controls the CD standards wouldn't allow this to happen, but politics would come into play anyway...

What is to prevent someone from getting the WMA files, stripping their copy protection (which is pretty easy from what I heard) or converting them to mp3?

I love how everyone (not you guys, I''m refering to record companies) is forgetting that some of us still use dial up connections! If I bought this guys CD (believe me, even with out this new technology, I wouldn't even take it for free, but that is another thread!) I would be seriously pissed that I had to spend up to 25 mintues PER TRACK to download this thing! That eats into my 20hours per month too!

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

Is there some board that issues "CD" licencing?

No, there is no "licensing" for CDs that I know of. There are ISO standards about the way CDs are formatted, but these do not require any licensing I'm aware of, they are publicly-known formats.

The copy protection takes advantage of the standards. It deliberately deviates from the standard in such a way that most CD-ROM drives will reject the disc, but most CD-audio players will accept the disc. The key word, in my opinion, being "most".


What is to prevent someone from getting the WMA files, stripping their copy protection (which is pretty easy from what I heard) or converting them to mp3?

Absolutely nothing at all.

___________
Tony Fabris

Wow.. I guess I assumed that if there were standards out there, they were in place so that manufactures would have to adhere to them or else they couldn't call their product an audio CD.... either way, it is not going to work, so I guess I am not too upset. Just be glad none of you had to develope this as part of your job! what if you were a programmer and the only job you could get a few years ago would be to program for DIVX! "You want me to do what?!" And they say dentists have the highest suicide rates! yikes!

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

I won't be buying any Charlie Pryde records for the forseeable future, then...

Actually, we should all buy them and tham indignantly return them, because they don't play in our players

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Is there some board that issues "CD" licencing? Like Sony or Phillips...

I think that CD-DA logo means the product complies with [whatever colour it is] book standards on it. If those guys put the logo on their contraptions, somebody should sue them for false advertising, missuse of trademarks or something like that.

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

I think it may be Red-book.

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

They will never learn.. There's so much market space for "copy protecting" companies to invent new mechanisms of "stopping piracy". It's not that they wouldn't know what they're doing, it's just that there's money to make and sadly, enough fools to make believe.

Lost revenues are what frighten the major record label companies as the do the software companies. Too much weight is put upon the impression of how-much-revenues are lost due to piracy, though it is undeniable that piracy in its many forms does also gather people to share knowledge about something they most likely would not ever laid their hands on without. Yes, it has its bad sides, which, I will leave be unsaid at this point.

On the other hand, it has been so sweet to see the protections fail.. every single time. From the good old days of the C64's Duplicator, Amiga's Xcopy, hacking PC software with hex-editors etc.etc. to seeing Dreamcast's "thicker density" CDs being converted to a normal 80min CDR format, to whatever new MPEGx-type rippers emerge, it's been a blast.

Funnily enough, the now very much old school scene people are sitting at the very most respected of many Internationally reckoned technology companies and, how should one say it, "new skillz" emerge.

For every 8 hours spent on creating new ways of protecting software, I'd say there's probably at least 800 hours spent on reverse-engineering or hacking that very same new method. Maybe there's good to it...what would these guys do if they wouldn't work on releasing pirated software/music? I'd say they'd be putting even more effort into creating the most deadliest things to screw around on the Internet.


Amarth

Exactly the point I was making a year ago, when this first came up.

And from that same thread, Rob Schofield's post which I have always maintained is one of the five best posts ever put on this bbs: here

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

to seeing Dreamcast's "thicker density" CDs being converted to a normal 80min CDR format

This could have been easially avoided if Sega had ensured the system only booted from their GD-ROM disks (Gigabyte Disc). Basicially someone figures out the Dreamcast would read a normal CD with no complaints, and then hacked the GD-Rom in the Dreamcast to spit the data out to a computer. From there people have either just burned it to a CD with a new boot program to support this, or they had to actually either remove or compress content to get it to fit onto a CD. Very interesting how this happened. Had they ensured the disc was checked at hardware level, they would have avoided much of the piracy that occurs on the Dreamcast, since many people are willing to burn a CD and stick it in, but not too many want to crack open their system and install a mod chip.

This isn't the first though - I've seen "locked" cd's in the past - they've usually failed though as they've also had problems in older cd players..
-mark

...proud to have owned an Empeg since 00287

ok so it's a charlie pride album I am guessing most of the people that are into mp3's and downloading music don't like charlie pride

so I wonder how many more copies they will sell to people who are buying it just to try to crack the copy protection

...Which will inflate the number sold, and allow a media campain that because the CD was protected people actually bought it instead of copying it... (Adding "evidence" to the RIAA case that copying is costing their members millions)
Then more record companies try using this technology.
However, it's _not_ copy protection, it's CD audio standard breaking.
If I'm thinking of the right system, they've added extra data to the TOC. Most CD Players only read up to 99 tracks from the toc (so work fine), but computer cd roms read the whole toc with the spurious data.

Cracking it will probably involve rewriting the firmware of a cd rom drive, but somebody will do it, and then everyone is back to square one...

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Bang on the nose. This is exactly what you should do - vote with your feet & your wallet. That hurts them the most.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

I wouldn't worry too much about these technologies gaining much market share. As others have pointed out, they work by exploiting audio CD players' general ability to work around errors on the CD and try to play through it (versus a CD-ROM drive's general desire to report "correct" bits).

Unfortunately for the purveyors of these new audio CD formats, many consumer audio CD players aren't so good about decoding these funky new CDs. Imagine what would happen if a major pop star released an album that 10% of the general population wasn't able to listen to on their pre-existing consumer equipment. Mayhem!

Furthermore, if this technology ever became more widespread, you could certainly imagine that CD-ROM drive vendors, the ones currently advertising how great they are at digital audio extraction, will simply release new drives that work just fine.

As to SDMI stuff, well, most of you know how I feel on that subject.