[Johassen]

Breaking copy protection on a music CD is trivally easy: Make a high quality analog copy. Granted this is not an ideally clean copy, but the resulting MP3 could easily be indistiguishable to the human ear and then could be copied digitally from there. At twenty bucks a pop, they ensure that we'll have plenty of time and energy to spend on doing these things too.

[TexRef]

Make a high quality analog copy

Exactly.

If it can be played through speakers then it can be recorded to another source. Sure, you might not be able to "RIP" it to an MP3, etc -- at least not at first -- someone will figure out how to do that.

Remember, DVD encryption was "uncrackable" as well :)

[sam_paine]

Breaking copy protection on a music CD is trivally easy: Make a high quality analog copy.

You don't have to get that archaic!! If you're playing digital audio or video, copy protected or no, at some point it has to go through a D/A converter or frame buffer....which means it has to exist somewhere for some trivial amount of time as raw digital data. As long as this is true, there will always be creative digital methods to "cleanse" protected data.

As one guy said back at an early IEEE1394 DV standards meeting "if you can see it or here it once, you can copy it many times!"