Come next week, copying of CDs will be restricted

Star-Ledger (NJ) ^ | September 17, 2003 | Kevin Coughlin

[HAL9000]

Anthony Hamilton may not be a household name yet in music circles. But the soul singer is sure to be a hot topic in Internet chat rooms come Tuesday.

His new CD, "Comin' From Where I'm From," will debut that day with built-in technology to restrict copying.

[Ronin]

More red meat for the computer geeks. I predict this kind of "copy-proofing" will last a week or two at the most before some bright kid finds a way to penetrate it and posts the fix on the Internet.

Warhead vs. Armor again.

[Myrddin]

If the CDs don't play properly on my equipment, they are going back to the retailer as defective goods. That will represent a real loss of a sale not just some speculation on loss of a potential sale. My MP3 mixes are drawn from purchased CDs. If the protection breaks the ability to build custom mixes, there is no point in purchasing the CDs. I'm certainly not going to cart a huge stack of original CDs on a trip.

[Prince Charles]

The last time the RIAA Nazis tried this, they were sued by Phillps NV, which holds claim to the original Compact Disc patent and determines what a "genuine" CD is. Have they now broken their licensing agreement with Phillips yet again?

[weegee]

There is software that will record any audio that passes through the sound card.

Since mp3s quite often had substandard audio, I don't see this being a deterant.

Meanwhile, each bit of computer junk that appears on a CD (whether it is track information, a video file, or copyprotection) messes up many a CD player. Sometimes it is easier to just copy off the song tracks from such CDs so that they will play easier on a CD player (say in you car which doesn't know what to do with the computer data tracks).

Some of the CD copyprotection schemes were dangerous. Didn't one of them kill Macs?

[glock rocks]

CD's and DVD's can currently be copied to protect the investment. The originals go in sleeves in the safe, and the copies are in the factory package to be used... if one gets damaged in normal home use, it can be replaced... after all, the piper was paid for the single end user.

The proposed bravo sierra punishes the law abiding, and deminishes the product. I imagine someone will fill the gap. I suppose XM radio can be recorded, or some such.

Hopefully we'll see some good meat for an industry (re:Philips) suit or perhaps a popular uprising - class action against these arrogant clowns. LOL... maybe even ole Orrin Hatch can start an investigation (makes one wonder how many of his gospel CD's are getting pirated in Asia).

[Mr. Thorne]

One of Celine Dion's newer CDs was copy-protected in such a way that, when placed in a computer's CD drive, it would lock the computer. The newer iMacs were particularly vulnerable.

As I said then, and as a previous poster pointed out, if I REALLY want that song, I have a nice little $25 sound editing program that still runs quite nicely in Mac OS Classic. All I have to do is run a sound cable from my boombox to my Mac, and hey presto. The only special equipment involved is the audio cable and the software, everything else is in the box. As I presume it would be for a newer wintel machine.

This seems like an inconvenience to 'serious' pirates, at the worst. And frankly, when I hear copy protection, with the vision of Celine's computer-munching CD fresh in my mind, I'm FAR less likely to purchase.

Not that it matters. The artist(s) in this article are apparently part of that enormous pool of talent that remain too cool for me to recognize the name.

Ah, well...

[FierceDraka]

I predict this kind of "copy-proofing" will last a week or two at the most before some bright kid finds a way to penetrate it and posts the fix on the Internet.

Easy. Digital to analog to digital. Like this: Play CD on regular CD player with a line running into your sound card, recording as a stereo WAV file at 44kHz. Chop up the file into individual tracks, convert to mp3. Burn CD, tell RIAA to kiss your a$$.

[Bush2000]

Sure, but D/A + A/D = lousy quality. Maybe good enough for radio ... but definitely noticeable to most people.

[Bush2000]

Sure, but D/A + A/D = lousy quality. Maybe good enough for radio ... but definitely noticeable to most people.

[FoxPro]

If you can hear it, you can copy it.

[Timesink]

Why do I get the feeling this is another one of those "technological breakthroughs" that will turn out to be crackable with a felt-tip pen?

[JoeSixPack1]

I'm certainly not going to cart a huge stack of original CDs on a trip.

That is so,, um, er, 21st century!! :-)

[B.Bumbleberry]

Better yet, why not just boycott copy protected CDs. Hit them where it hurts.

[tortoise]

Sure, but D/A + A/D = lousy quality. Maybe good enough for radio ... but definitely noticeable to most people.

Not really true these days. Even a lot of relatively cheap soundcards have an honest-to-God clean dynamic range that exceeds the intrinsic theoretical cleanliness possible for a Red Book CD. It used to be that converters good enough to do this transparently cost a bundle, but these days they are dirt cheap.

We've done these kinds of conversions before for both audio and video. As long as the converters are cleaner than the source material can be, the quality is limited by the intrinsic cleanliness of the source material. And these days, that means you can effectively get perfect copies by transcoding through an analog conversion that nobody can tell wasn't direct from source. Especially true when there is only a single DAC-to-ADC conversion like you are talking about here.

There is some irony in that by the time DAC/ADCs became good enough to not need to worry about accumulated conversion degradation (e.g. when daisy chaining many conversion stages, not just one or two), everything started to being kept purely in the digital domain anyway.

[GSWarrior]

What about us folks who like to create 'mix' CDs? Are we out of luck?

[LtKerst]

A "Cracker I know" (a cracker is a person who cracks protection ) said that there is no protection that cannot
be cracked, and that software that comes out for sale in the morning. is available on the internet that night, and sometimes even before it hits the stores. there are many sites that have software to download, far beyond Kazza and groakster and mozilla...etc. There are people out there who have a hobby of cracking protection, just for the "bragging rights" they dont even want the software.
they do it for the EGO rush of having online first.

[Sloth]

That's ok. All the good music came out already in 1955 - 1975, anyway.

[Myrddin]

Better yet, why not just boycott copy protected CDs. Hit them where it hurts.

Not a problem. I haven't had much time to listen to the radio lately, so I'm not anxious to buy any new top 40 stuff. If its copy protected, it can stay on the shelf.

[Bush2000]

Not really true these days. Even a lot of relatively cheap soundcards have an honest-to-God clean dynamic range that exceeds the intrinsic theoretical cleanliness possible for a Red Book CD. It used to be that converters good enough to do this transparently cost a bundle, but these days they are dirt cheap.

I disagree. Most sound cards generate so much noise and the input levels are so inconsistent that "quality" is seriously debatable.