New Copy Protected CD Technology announced by Sony

[JohnnyCNote]

New CD copy-lock technology nears market

A new kind of copy-protected music CD will likely hit U.S. shelves early next year, as record label SonyBMG experiments with a technology created by British developer First 4 Internet, according to sources familiar with the companies.

Several major music labels have already used a version of the British company's technology on prerelease compact discs distributed for review and other early-listening purposes, including on recent albums from Eminem and U2.

The releases for the retail market, expected early in 2005, will be the first time the Sony music label issues copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market, although the company's other divisions have done so in other regions. BMG, Sony's new corporate sibling, has been more aggressive, with a handful of protected CDs released last year.

I wonder how long it will take for someone to break it....

[Tidy]

Well if it is anything like CSS encryption. The work around should be available before the copy protection is widely available HA

[BJ_M]

i swear this was already posted before ... about sony and copy protection ...

funny -- the top selling cd with copy protection was the kind all you had to do is turn off autostart or hold the shift key down ...

and they say U2 new album pre-release had copy protection -- isntthat the one that was on p2p 3 months before release ?


anyway -- merry christmas for some people

http://news.com.com/RIAA+files+754+new+file-swapping+suits/2110-1027_3-5494259.html?tag=st_lh

[Darth Paris]

i swear this was already posted before ... about sony and copy protection ...

Yeah, I saw this on here before to.

Well if it is anything like CSS encryption. The work around should be available before the copy protection is widely available

There can't be any knew encryption added to CD's because it has to work CD players already on the market. The only thing they can do is make it unreadable by a PC.

[JohnnyCNote]

I wasn't sure if it was posted before, but the article is new...

[DereX888]

LOL
sony & others in the entertainment biz will never give up... they rather spend few billions more on yet another soon-to-fail "copy protection" scheme instead of lower down CDs prices and have most of the kids actually buying their products for $5 a disc, instead of downloadng mp3s...
This Im not surprised of.
They proved to be stupid countless times.
What Im surprised is this:
Where is some international standards commitee in all of this?
Shouldnt they slap some hefty penalties on those like sony for releasing out of standard, whacky CDs? IIRC all of their 'copy protected' crap still bear CDDA standard logo...

[DRP]

Cactus Data Shield protected discs do not have the CD-DA logo on them anywhere. The logo is missing from the printed U-card cover on the back, on the printed side of the disc itself and is even missing from the top right and lower left corners of the moulded spring-loaded tray.

CDS disc are not permitted to use the CD-DA logo because they do not comply with the rainbow book standards for CDs. They are thus not strictly speaking compact discs. All other forms of copy-protection that I've seen thus far use variations on adding data tracks behind the audio track to confuse computer drives which by default read the last session on a CD first as opposed to music CD players which read the first session first.

Just adding a data session to an audio disc (even a corrupt one) does not make the disc non-compliant to the rainbow book standards. They can thus still use the CD-DA logo.

It is no coincidence that Cactus Data Shield protected discs are also by far the most effective at doing what they're intended to do. Of course dragging a drawing compass across the face of the disc would effectively do the same thing and be much cheaper as well. CDS is basically electronically scratching the disc. They are pre-damaged discs before you've even bought it.

[dnix71]

This seems to be something else. A web site promoting the 'new' scheme said the disc would 'present itself' to the OS as whatever kind of disc the drive and OS was expecting to see. If you put it in a dvd rom drive, it would appear to be a music dvd. I've seen cd's with a similar adaptive file structure with movies on them which were pressed in S.America. The dat file on the disc can only be read with the software included on the disc. The dat file in this case is the music and the software will cr@p up your OS so you can't copy it directly.
The work around for the S.Amer movies was raw copy, or if you had the codecs, copy the dat file to the hd and rename it .mpg.
If you have a Mac there is a free app called "Wiretap" that hijacks audio being played through the system, so you can save it as an .aiff. So if these new discs will play on a mac, they can be saved with a little work. I use Audacity(also free) to edit and export to mp3.

[Gurm]

Wait a minute - the new U2 disc was "protected"? Funny that I ripped it the other day. *sigh*

[Garibaldi]

@Darth Paris.. I like your Jack O'Neill avatar. SG-1 is great!

[spiderman2k1]

Can some say ANYDVD LOL?

[BJ_M]

Wait a minute - the new U2 disc was "protected"? Funny that I ripped it the other day. *sigh*

only some of them -- and it was the type where it was easy to defeat.. (shift key)

[Garibaldi]

only some of them -- and it was the type where it was easy to defeat.. (shift key)

So the shift key would override the protection if you held it down while ripping?!!

[BJ_M]

while inserting the disk

[DereX888]

..and it cost few MILLION bucks to create...

[Nilfennasion]

There is a quote in one of my favourite sappy comedies, Dave, that sums up these repetitive exercises in trying to preserve the freedom to price gouge. "If I ran my business this way, I'd be out of business."

[DJRumpy]

I don't know why everyone seems to forget this. The audio piped into your home stereo speakers is analog. It sounds find for the average Joe. What's to stop you from simply piping the audio out, to your audio in on the pc sound card? If you can hear it, you can copy it. I for one could care less if it's been through a digital to analog conversion. I'm not that picky.

[hsugawar]

I doubt anyone forgets that. There are just a lot of people who are pickier than you are, including myself. In addition, doing everything in digital is usually a lot easier.

hiro

[DJRumpy]

If they'll settle for 128 mp3, they'd settle for audio that's been piped through analog connections, which is still by far, the most common bitrate for mp3. Even now, your probably listening to an analog signal, regardless of the digital source, since pretty much all stereo component, home theatre, PC Speakers, etc, use analog speakers. About the only digital speakers I can think of are USB, and even those may do an analog conversion. I don't know, I've never looked at the specs for them.

[bazooka]

This will be broken easily.

The hackers are cracking their knuckles

[Roundabout]

This will be broken easily.

The hackers are cracking their knuckles

I agree. I'm sure it'll be just another in a long list of quickly cracked copy-protection technologies. Makes you wonder why they even bother. Anyway, guess it gives the hackers something to do in their slack time, since it seems most of these protections are broken in days, if not hours