eclectica
2005-03-18, 11:05
Two days ago I went to a store named Best Buy and bought Angie Stone - Stone Love on CD for $14. The album has been out for several months, but when I first saw it at Virgin Records it was going for $19. Another thing that made me reluctant to buy it earlier was that it had a warning sticker on the front cover that it was a copy-protected CD. I was both curious to see how the thing would work, but also turned off to the idea of not being able to rip the CD to wav files or mp3 files. This is what the label on the front cover said:
This CD is protected against unauthorized duplication. It is designed to play on standard playback devices and an appropriately configured computer (see system requirements on back). If you have questions or concerns visit www.sunncomm.com/support/bmg
NECPSTK-COM
When I got home I put the CD in the computer and opened up the CDex program. I selected all 17 audio tracks and saved them to the hard drive as wav files. CDex also showed a track 18, which was a data track. I quickly listened to a few of the tracks on the hard drive and they didn't sound corrupted. I looked at the CD medium info in Nero and it showed it to be an Enhanced-CD with two sessions. The first contained the 17 audio tracks, and the second had data listed as track 18 which was 64 MB in size.
The reason the copy protection didn't work for me is because I have disabled Autorun in Windows (http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/showthread.php?t=564). So their software never loaded and took control of my computer. I didn't test Sunncomm's software but I think it would have to work by loading every time with Windows and spying to make sure I couldn't use a program like CDex to extract non-DRM audio files from the CD. Such a program would take up computer resources and in my opinion would act as malicious spyware. There is a detailed article on how Media Max CD3 copy protection works here (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/).
I was thinking of how some unfortunate people who are not as computer literate as I am may have installed the malicious Sunncomm spyware and were therefore unable to get the full usage of their CDs. And I thought about how this copy protected CD was hurting customers and fans who had actually bought the CD. It's certainly a bad business strategy because they are punishing the wrong people. They should be grateful for the sale of their product, and make it worthwhile for their customers. Putting copy protection on a CD reduces its quality and turns people off from the prospect of buying CDs. I saved my receipt in case I were to have problems, but it was so easy for me to get around the copy protection that I felt the CD really wasn't copy protected, and that they were just trying to scare people with the warning label.
I'll tell you what I would have done if the CD were really copy protected and I couldn't extract free digital files from it. I would have either downloaded the whole album off of a p2p network, or if I couldn't find one from a filesharing network I would have made my own by hooking up the CD player with audio cables and recording into my computer sound card as one large wav file, and then manually breaking it into pieces and converting them to mp3 files. For me as a music fan, it would be a labor of love, like the monks who once copied Bibles by hand. I would return the CD to the store I bought it from and I would share the entire album on a filesharing network.
In the letters section of 2600 magazine (Fall 2004 volume 21 number 3), there was a person who wrote to them on the subject of filesharing. And the response of the magazine staff, which I paraphrase, was that if the record companies have a problem with people uploading and downloading digital files then the solution is very simple for them: all they have to do is restrict their releases to non-digital formats. The record companies should only sell vinyl records or tapes if they are worried about digital piracy.
This CD is protected against unauthorized duplication. It is designed to play on standard playback devices and an appropriately configured computer (see system requirements on back). If you have questions or concerns visit www.sunncomm.com/support/bmg
NECPSTK-COM
When I got home I put the CD in the computer and opened up the CDex program. I selected all 17 audio tracks and saved them to the hard drive as wav files. CDex also showed a track 18, which was a data track. I quickly listened to a few of the tracks on the hard drive and they didn't sound corrupted. I looked at the CD medium info in Nero and it showed it to be an Enhanced-CD with two sessions. The first contained the 17 audio tracks, and the second had data listed as track 18 which was 64 MB in size.
The reason the copy protection didn't work for me is because I have disabled Autorun in Windows (http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/showthread.php?t=564). So their software never loaded and took control of my computer. I didn't test Sunncomm's software but I think it would have to work by loading every time with Windows and spying to make sure I couldn't use a program like CDex to extract non-DRM audio files from the CD. Such a program would take up computer resources and in my opinion would act as malicious spyware. There is a detailed article on how Media Max CD3 copy protection works here (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/).
I was thinking of how some unfortunate people who are not as computer literate as I am may have installed the malicious Sunncomm spyware and were therefore unable to get the full usage of their CDs. And I thought about how this copy protected CD was hurting customers and fans who had actually bought the CD. It's certainly a bad business strategy because they are punishing the wrong people. They should be grateful for the sale of their product, and make it worthwhile for their customers. Putting copy protection on a CD reduces its quality and turns people off from the prospect of buying CDs. I saved my receipt in case I were to have problems, but it was so easy for me to get around the copy protection that I felt the CD really wasn't copy protected, and that they were just trying to scare people with the warning label.
I'll tell you what I would have done if the CD were really copy protected and I couldn't extract free digital files from it. I would have either downloaded the whole album off of a p2p network, or if I couldn't find one from a filesharing network I would have made my own by hooking up the CD player with audio cables and recording into my computer sound card as one large wav file, and then manually breaking it into pieces and converting them to mp3 files. For me as a music fan, it would be a labor of love, like the monks who once copied Bibles by hand. I would return the CD to the store I bought it from and I would share the entire album on a filesharing network.
In the letters section of 2600 magazine (Fall 2004 volume 21 number 3), there was a person who wrote to them on the subject of filesharing. And the response of the magazine staff, which I paraphrase, was that if the record companies have a problem with people uploading and downloading digital files then the solution is very simple for them: all they have to do is restrict their releases to non-digital formats. The record companies should only sell vinyl records or tapes if they are worried about digital piracy.