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Author Topic: Defeating Copy Protected CDs Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 10-09-2003 11:08 PM                        What's the extraction software have to do with this? Just don't let the CD autorun the protection software... hold shift.  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 10-09-2003 11:10 PM                        quote: Rather than continuously inventing lame and ineffective copy-protection schemes, he RIAA would be much better served by a) providing a quality product at a reasonable price and b) by providing some sort of online service whereby users can pay a reasonable price to legally download MP3 files of a wide variety of music. (Rant On Full) This is a classic rationalization. Make a complaint without offering any sort of constructive alternative. A: What do YOU consider a "reasonable" price to be? B: If YOU considered the music business your career, what do you think you would consider a reasonable return for the process of creating a music product, then adding the talents and facilities of a recording studio, pressing plant (or whatever they call them nowadays) and personnel, then toss in the established marketing and distribution channels of a particular music label so the product can be mass-distributed. How much would all that be worth on a "per-song" basis? These processes (not totally unlike those in our industry) all have a "value", which must be reflected... along with the cost of shoplifting (read: 'downloading') in the final retail price. Not that I'd know... or particularly care... but if you're going to complain about the current going rate, at least offer up what you think a fair price would be and post some excusable rationale for your thinking. For better or worse, right or wrong, the music industry (and to some extent... ours) is reeling from rampant outright theft of their output... mainly because they just didn't catch on fast enough. It's gone on for so long now that we have an entire current generation of young people who see absolutely nothing wrong with the practice. It's a totally frustrating issue that I deal with frequently when trying to explain to a kid why it's not OK to sneak into my drive-in in the trunk of his car... even though his parents glorified the practice because they also did it when they were kids. People tend to rationalize by looking at their theft as an individual issue... the fact that THEY (singularly) are doing it really doesn't matter in the big picture. Same thing with the kids in the trunk. They look at my field full of paying customers and don't understand what the big deal is. They don't understand that, left unchecked, we'd eventually be dealing with 99% of our crowd coming out of their trunks... the infrastructure that they're consuming being supported on the backs of the 1% with some kind of moral structure... not to mention the better part of my life's work. I once had a parent with 6 kids sneak in to my drive-in. While kicking her out, I endured her reasoning that she "wouldn't have to sneak in, if I offered a suitable price for people at her economic level. Look at it any way you want... it's the same crap, and your distaste for the asking price will never excuse ripping it off. (Rant Off...)  |  IP: Logged Phil Hill I love my cootie bug Posts: 7595 From: Hollywood, CA USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 10-09-2003 11:21 PM                  OK Daryl: Once again, you make me sooo f*ckin' sick of your "get to the meat of the subject" and pointing out where we are straying. Have I ever told you that I hate you? >>> Phil  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 10-09-2003 11:30 PM                     Phil said: quote: Not trying to convince anyone of anything... An opinion and personal experience, just like others.... Yup! I agree with you, Phil. Just like Fords and Shoverolets... Unfortunately, both of the above are junk. Rather have a Honda.  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 10-09-2003 11:31 PM                        I believe you just did. Phil's email now being routed to /dev/null.  |  IP: Logged Josh Jones Redhat Posts: 1207 From: Plano, TX Registered: Apr 2000 posted 10-09-2003 11:40 PM                        THere seems to be a movement towords the $10 CD. I find this to be a reasonable price. Some CD's are around 16-18 dollars, and I often pass on these. Josh  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 10-10-2003 12:19 AM                     10 bucks a pop? I still think that is over-priced for most of the crap that is on the market. On the other side of the token, I would not balk too much at buying a 5 CD set of artists like Johnny Cash, Gordon Lightfoot, Marty Robbins and a few others that were GOOD music for a substantially higher price. I ordered the CD that had the song that was played at Vern's Memorial Service. It was priced at 10 bucks plus shipping. Because of what the song was, the emotional value in conjunction of how, where, and when it was played, I would have paid 50 bucks if that was the price. 20 years ago, I came to the conclusion as to why all this "distorted guitar and other distorted musical instruments" crap came to pass. If the artist hit a sour note because he/she were not true musicians, nobody would know the difference because it was all distorted and out of tune in the first place.  |  IP: Logged Phil Hill I love my cootie bug Posts: 7595 From: Hollywood, CA USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 10-10-2003 12:27 AM                  10 bux is too much. I agree with Jack! CDs should NOT cost more that $6 retail. $1 to the artist. $1 to the music production/Label company. $1 to the hardware production. $1 for the promotions/ads. $1 to the distributors. $1 profit to the retailer. (Or some variation and/or re-distribution of the costs...AND in most cases those costs a WAY overblown!) That makes 6 bux to us low-life consumers! Other than that, I support the "let 'er rip" philosophy! >>> Phil  |  IP: Logged Dan Lyons Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 698 From: Seal Beach, CA Registered: Sep 2002 posted 10-10-2003 01:15 AM                     Speaking of prices, CD's are waaaay overpriced in most cases. I don't like spending more than 13 for one. If you go to some places like Tower or Virgin, they often want 18 or 19!! Then we have DVD-A and SACD which they have unsuccessufully been trying to push on people for the past few years; that's right, admit that regular cds suck, but hey, "look what we have now, you need to re-buy all your music again!!" This whole Ipod thing is beyond me. Why would anyone actually pay a dollar per song to download a crappy ass MP3! Some people just have low standards. Danny  |  IP: Logged Michael Schaffer "Where is the Boardwalk Hotel?" Posts: 4143 From: Boston, MA Registered: Apr 2002 posted 10-10-2003 02:32 AM                        quote: My mind has not been changed on "Creative Labs CD recorder." If you use that, are your copies THX-certified?  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 10-10-2003 03:21 AM                        Roommate here uses Exact Audio Copy for ripping and LAME for encoding. Both are highly reviewed freeware that gives very satisfying results. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ http://lame.sourceforge.net/ Looks like that Princeton PhD student is going to face both civil and criminal (DMCA) lawsuits by SunnComm Technologies, the company that provided the anti-copying software being tested by BMG. Also note the forth paragraph from the end of the following CNET News article that mentions that SunnComm is planning alternate future delivery paths for their software, i.e. trojan horses that won't come from playing a protected CD. Student faces suit over key to CD locks By John Borland Staff Writer, CNET News.com SunnComm Technologies, a developer of CD antipiracy technology, said Thursday that it will likely sue a Princeton student who early this week showed how to evade the company's copy protection by pushing a computer's Shift key. Princeton Ph.D. student John "Alex" Halderman published a paper on his Web site on Monday that gave detailed instructions on how to disarm the SunnComm technology, which aims to block unauthorized CD copying and MP3 ripping. The technology is included on an album by Anthony Hamilton that was recently distributed by BMG Music. On Thursday, SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said the company plans legal action and is considering both criminal and civil suits. He said it may charge the student with maligning the company's reputation and, possibly, with violating copyright law that bans the distribution of tools for breaking through digital piracy safeguards. "We feel we were the victim of an unannounced agenda and that the company has been wronged," Jacobs said. "I think the agenda is: 'Digital property should belong to everyone on the Internet.' I'm not sure that works in the marketplace." The cases are already being examined by some intellectual-property lawyers for their potential to test the extremes of a controversial copyright law that block the distribution of information or software that breaks or "circumvents" copy-protection technologies. Several civil and criminal cases based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have been filed against people who distributed information or software aimed at breaking through antipiracy locks. In one, Web publisher Eric Corley was banned by a federal judge from publishing software code that helped in the process of copying DVDs. In a criminal case, Russian company ElcomSoft was cleared of charges that it had distributed software that willfully broke through Adobe Systems' e-book copy protection. Both of those cases dealt with software or software code, however. The issue in Halderman's case is somewhat different. In his paper, published on the Princeton Web site on Monday, the student explained that the SunnComm technique relies on installing antipiracy software directly from the protected CD itself. However, this can be prevented by stopping Microsoft Windows' "auto-run" feature. That can be done simply by pushing the Shift key as the CD loads. If the CD does load and installs the software, Halderman identified the driver file that can be disabled using standard Windows tools. Free-speech activists said the nature of Halderman's instructions--which appeared in an academic paper, used only functions built into every Windows computer, and were not distributed for profit--meant they would not fall under DMCA scrutiny. "This is completely outrageous," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that has previously represented computer academics concerned that copyright law would impair their ability to publish. "This is not black hat (hackers') exploits he's revealing. This is Windows 101...It is relatively hard to imagine any better example of how the DMCA has been misused since it was passed five years ago." Jacobs said SunnComm's attorneys would refer the case to local federal authorities, who could make the decision on how to proceed on the DMCA issue. He said the company was also exploring a civil suit based on damage to the company's reputation, since Halderman concluded that the technology was ineffective without knowing about future enhancements. Future versions of the SunnComm software would include ways that the copy-protecting files would change their name on different computers, making them harder to find, Jacobs said. Moreover, the company will distribute the technology along with third-party software, so that it doesn't always come off a protected CD, he added. The damage to SunnComm's reputation, while not necessarily permanent, was quickly seen in a drop in its market value, totaling close to $10 million over several days, Jacobs said. No final decisions about legal action have been made, he added. Halderman said he's not overly worried about the legal threat. The EFF represented his advisor, Princeton professor Edward Felten, in a lawsuit dealing with academic freedom to publish computer security information, and Princeton University supported Felten in that case. "I expect I will be well-represented in the case of a lawsuit," Halderman said. "If pressing the Shift key is a violation of the DMCA, then the law needs to be changed." ##### [ 10-10-2003, 05:57 AM: Message edited by: Paul Mayer ]  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 10-10-2003 08:34 AM                     If anyone is interested in the actual "shift-key" story and how this protection scheme (purportedly) can be defeated... http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/  |  IP: Logged Daryl C. W. O'Shea Film God Posts: 3977 From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from) Registered: Jun 2002 posted 10-10-2003 10:02 AM                        Boo hoo! I feel so sorry for SunnComm having their smoke and mirror protection scheme 'revealed'. I'm sure glad I don't have the cash to spend on CD's... I could have saw this and opened my big mouth and suggested people use their shift keys.  |  IP: Logged Adam Martin I'm not even gonna point out the irony. Posts: 3686 From: Dallas, TX Registered: Nov 2000 posted 10-10-2003 01:40 PM                     And you could've posted it right here on Film-Tech and made us all FAMOUS! I've read through much of this guy's paper. It sounds like the people at SunnComm need to hire someone who knows something about computers.  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 10-10-2003 03:21 PM                     Seems to me that taking the audio output of a good quality CD player and stuffing it into the line input of a good quality sound card and recording it to the hard drive through a professional grade sound recording program will yield an excellent recording. Am I wrong? Lot of the older CD's were reproduced from Analog sources anyway. So what's the difference? Chances are, the average human ear could not tell the difference if any CD was recorded to a hard drive and played back via analog means. All this hype about MP3 files is crap! I can hear the difference between an MP3 and a WAV file. True...many of those who take care of their ears and stay out of dangerous sound enviroments usually have excellent hearing and could probably tell the difference. Many of the younger people have poor hearing because of the 3-mega-watt Distortion Generator bolted in their car. That distortion generator's SPL seems to be powerful enough to shake a freeway overpass. Those people who run their distortion generators at that output level probably could not distinguish the difference between the tone quality of a French Horn and a flat fart. A hearing test I have had came out much better than the average person you find in the age bracket of late teens to mid 20's. I am 63. By the way...how come you can't see the actual wav file (if that is what it is) when the CD is brought up in Windows Explorer? It must be one hellva hidden file......How do I view it if it is possible to view?  |  IP: Logged

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