Copy Protection - how it works (or does not)
Unfortunately I fear it is only a question of time till the new copy-protections reach the Disney-CDs too. Here in Germany quiet a few releases already use the new protection system since late summer last year.
The CDs are easily to recognize as they have written "does not play in PC/MAC" in large letters on the front and rear cover usually (or at least on teh rear-cover). So far I have seen the system only utilized on new releases of big name bands / solo stars and on popular compilation CDs (e.g. best love songs of 2001, chart hits of 2001, ...).
The result? NONE besides disgruntled CD-buyers who now may reduce the number of CDs they buy even further (in times where the CD-industry anyway is fighting sinking sales-figures).
Why no results? Well ... you know there are quiet a few computer-magazines out there for sale which package a CD-Rom with the magazine every month and nearly all of those at one point or another had a blarring headline on their front-cover "How to copy protected CDs - all necessary software included for free", not to speak of the fact that the software is available on the net without problem.
Why is it so easy to copy these protected CDs? This has to do with the type of protection they chose. See when CDs where introduced they came up with a standard how the data must be saved on the CD. Basically this standard says: one block of music-data behind each other without anything else in between. Only if the music is written down in this way the CD may show of the wel known "Compact Disc"-logo. The new copy protected CDs are not showing the "Compact Disc"-logo for the fact that they are not following the old rules set up when the CD was introudced as a music-medium.
Instead the copy protected CDs make use of the fact that music-CD-player usually have an error-correction-system. If a music-CD-player encounters unreadable/unplayable/non-music-data-blocks between the music-data-blocks on a CD it just skips over them and continues to play the music track without any glitches / pauses with the next available music-data-block. These error-correction-systems where introduced by CD-player-manufactures to allow use of scratched CDs without the CD-player ending up stuck trying to read an unreadable / scrached block on the CD. So what the new copy-protection-system basically does is adding countless of garbage/non-music-data-blocks in between the music-data-blocks of each song. The usual CD-player tries to read them, figures out it is no music, skips over them and continues playing the track without a pause. Unfortunately this is only true if it has a usual error-correction-system. Even so I never heared of any report about a CD-player/music-equipment being damaged by the new copy-protection-system (the only way for this to happen I could imagine is if the CD-player actually plays one of the garbage-blocks and the noise produced by this causes damage to the boxes / the amplifyer - just as was reported in the past when people tried to play their non-music-CD-rom-tracks on their stereo) there have been reports about some CD-players following the official guidelines for music Compact-Discs that exactely that they don't have a good enough error-correction-system and therefor are stuck on the copy protected CDs and can't play them. It seems there were some people who planned to go to court because their player (a CD-player which was part of a stereo only) couldn't play the new copy protected CDs - but I never heared of this again. What I do know is that the first copy protected CDs were still showing off the "Compact Disc"-logo but the record companies had to call them back and reissue the CDs without the logo as a lawsuit was already being prepared for unallowed use of the logo as the CDs weren't matching the criteria for the "Compact Disc"-standard due to the "garbage-data-blocks".
No why is this "garbage-data-block"-adding a copy-protection-system? Every CD-Rom-player build into a PC / MAC comes with it's own operating software which basically similar to that of the CD-player in your stereo, but then a CD-Rom-player originally was not intended to play music-CDs. But if you sratch a CD-Rom a error-correction-system ordering the player to jump foward to the next usefull/readable block would cause the computer to miss vital information / parts of a computer-programm which would make the programm unusable (while skipping a damaged block of music-data on a scratched music-CD just cuts out a few notes of the song in some cases is not even recognizable for the listener which would make it even more unpleasant to have a whole CD unplayable due to a small scratch). Therefor an error-correction-system would be of no use for a CD-Rom-drive (keep in mind: these were never originally intended to play music-CDs) as the program after the skip of the damaged block would be unexecutable anyway. Therefor the firmware of CD-Roms does not include any error-correction-system (it would be of no use). The new copy-protection-system just makes use of this fact. So if you insert your copy-protected CD in your CD-rom-drive and order it to play it as a music-CD it starts and stops (due to the missing error-correction-system which would order the player to skip ahead) after a few notes of the first track (if it is able to read the tracklist at all a task most drives are not able to). So the new copy-protection-system is less a copy-protection-system (if you have a music-CD-player with a digitial line-out and a CD-recorder with a line-in you can copy the CDs without a problem) as a system that prevents the CD from being played at all on PC/MAC-CD-Rom-drives (and unfortunately on stereo-CD-players following the original Compact-Disc-guide-lines to exact).
To get the CDs playing on CD-Rom-drives anyway (and once you got them playing on these you can copy them) all necessary is a piece of additional software which tells the CD-Rom-drive to skip ahead if it encounters a garbage-data-block. This kind of software is the more complicated but allows to play these CDs on your CD-Rom-drive there are other software programs which are taking an even more basic approach: they don't try to get the CD-Rom-drive to play the CD they are just mend to allow you to copy the CD. All these pieces of software do is stop the original firmware from stopping the reading-process if the player encounters garbage-data / error-data, instead the player then continues to send the data to the connected CD-writer and the garbage-data is burned onto your copy too. This way you end up with a "copy-protected" copy which you can't play n your PC/MAC but everywhere else (or nearly everwhere else - see above).
As the software was spread out by the magazines and the web the new protection has barely any success - everybody who wants to copy the CDs easily gets the software necessary to do so and only the guy occassionally copying a CD gets into trouble...
By the way: copying a CD which you OWN is legal and spreading the software to do so is legal too, the european law even states that it is legal to make a copy of a CD you own for personal use (e.g. the original is at home and the copy in your car) and in Europe the producers of CD-writers have to pay a certain amount for each writer sold to a agency which then spreads that money among the artists who release CDs as a kind of extra-payment for the music-CD-copies going to be produced with those writers.
Hope this was of some interest.
Yours
Dirk
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