Copy protected CDs - the future or already past?

[M Peasley]

I routinely copy all the audio CDs I buy to my hard drive. Out of the hundreds I've bought and copied, I've only run across one that was effectively copy-protected.

 

The CD contains a little software player that pops up on the computer screen and plays the thing. It's kinda cute, but I'd much rather just convert to MP3 and add the tunes to my Media Player Library.

 

The CD is about 5 years old since first released and I'm wondering - is this kind of CD what we will all be facing in the near future? Or was it tried for a while and abandoned?

 

I bought the CD off half.com and it does say "For Promotion Only - Not For Sale" (the seller said nothing about this). So is this kind of protection only being used on promo copies?

 

I'm sure some of you folks know the whole story on the outlook for copy-protection. What's up with all this?

 

M Peasley

[theblue1]

I won't buy a CD that says it can't be played on a CD or copied onto my HD. Like M Peasley, I try never to use the CD drive in my machines for listening -- in both my laptop and my desktop, the CD drives are incredibly noisy. I do have a CD player, or actually 3, one in storage, one in my studio, and one a portable mp3 CD player.

 

And I DO pay for the music I listen to. Most of it comes via streams (MusicMatch On Demand) and the rest is from mp3s ripped from the CD's I have that aren't available on MMOD or that I bought from the old Emusic (I have about 69 GB of them from there, actually).

 

If I ever buy a CD that's not marked as being "copy protected" or otherwise not playable on a computer -- but is -- I will return it for a refund. And if they refuse, you can bet I will pursue it in a thoroughly obnoxious manner. I'm good at that. (I hate doing it. But I pride myself on my ability to 'get even' with people doing bad business.)

[M Peasley]

I just played the CD on my PC using the little embedded player, routed the sound internally and recorded it in Sound Forge. Then I cut the Sound Forge file into separate files, one file per track and exported them to wav files. Then I burned all the files in a group to an audio CD, turned around and ripped the audio CD to MP3s using Windows Media Player 10, and now I'm in business.

 

If I had to do that with all my CDs....sheesh.

 

M Peasley

[Lee Flier]

Yeah, hardly anyone is using copy protection now because 1) lots of people like blue1 (and myself) won't buy a CD with copy protection, and 2) it was discovered that Sony's copy protection, which they spent millions of dollars developing, could be defeated by running a magic marker around the edge of the CD.

[Super 8]

Originally posted by M Peasley:

I just played the CD on my PC using the little embedded player, routed the sound internally and recorded it in Sound Forge. Then I cut the Sound Forge file into separate files, one file per track and exported them to wav files. Then I burned all the files in a group to an audio CD, turned around and ripped the audio CD to MP3s using Windows Media Player 10, and now I'm in business.

 

If I had to do that with all my CDs....sheesh.

 

M Peasley

Just download the MP3 off of Gnutella. It's not like you didn't buy the music or something. You are just getting the MP3 copy off someone else's hard drive. What's the difference?

[M Peasley]

An obvious suggestion I didn't think of 'cause I stay intentionally ignorant of the file-sharing sites.

 

Besides, I always rip CDs at the highest quality settings which I doubt I'd get off a file-sharing site.

 

Plus it would be just my luck to be one of the one-in-a-million downloaders that gets prosecuted.

 

M Peasley

[Anderton]

I'm about as anti-piracy as they come, but IMHO the idea of limiting the ability of LEGITIMATE USERS to make personal copies violates the Disney vs. Betamax decision.

[Björn Fröberg]

I read an article in Tekniikan Maailma, a finnish magazine about different types of copy protection, and it was really bizarre.

 

Apparently, most of the copy protection methods use errors encrypted into the soundfiles on the CD's, which makes them "uncopyable". They are not always audible, but sometimes they are.

 

These errors can also have the effect that your standard home CD-player won't recognize the CD's, and when they had tested a lot of different players they came to the conclusion that the players that won't play the protected CD's are often newer models, and/or car CD-players.

 

Then again, with computers, the buildt in program that plays the CD is, of course, crap, but it also crashed a few PCs they were tested on. Some of them actually crashed so bad that you had to install Windows again, or even format the hard drive.

 

Apparently, these errors are also against the Compact Disc standard, so you're not allowed to call them CD's anymore, even if you can (if you're lucky) play them in your CD-player.

 

And, if you look at the world nowadays, (or at anytime, I guess) it will take about a week or so until the first program comes out that overrides the copy protection. This also happened, of course.

 

After reading this article, I made a promise to myself that I will never buy a copy protected music disc.

[MikeT156]

I think the key to eliminating people stealing music is keeping the selling prices low. Only "kids" would bother ripping off a CD that costs 8 to 10 bucks in a store. Once an album crosses the 15 dollar threshold, its fair game. Personally, I wouldn't steal it, but I wouldn't buy it either unless it was an album I absolutely had to have.

 

 

Mike T.

[Angelo Clematide]

The copy protection as it was on certain CD will disappear.

 

The new technology is watermark. This is not a copy protection, but subdata in the content stream which alouds to visit the producer website and get additional value.