CD Copy Protection comes up again...

This will be fun to watch:

http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?1004

Note that this article contains a paragraph describing a German company's attempt at it:

The trouble with copy-protected CDs is that they don't play in every machine they are put in. In Germany last year, BMG issued Razorblade Romance by the Finnish rock group HIM, only to find that music fans were returning the discs with complaints that they wouldn't play. Tel Aviv's Midbar Technologies, which developed the copy-protection scheme, had reportedly tested it successfully on every type of CD player available at the time. Buyers found otherwise, and BMG had to recall 100,000 discs.

And I would like to quote my statement from a year ago...

If they alter the formatting of the CD, there will be some audio CD players that will refuse to play the discs. I know a little bit about the way these things are formatted. Some players are more picky than others, and there will always be players that won't tolerate a disk with goofy formatting. No record company in their right mind would publish a CD that won't play on consumer equipment. Can you imagine how pissed the record stores would be if their customers kept returning the latest Ricky Martin album because they thought it was defective?

/me invokes his right to say "I told you so".

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Tony Fabris

And I would like to quote my statement from a year ago...

I think Rob Schofield made one of the best posts ever put on this bbs in discussing copy protection. Take a look here and see what you think.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I just heard some rumour about some foil, which can copy a CD's pattern on it.
You should stick it to an existing CD, let it sit for a couple of minutes, then pull of the foil and stick it to an empty cd. After this you should have an exact copy of the original disc...
Anybody heard some facts about this?

Frank van Gestel

I just heard some rumour about some foil, which can copy a CD's pattern on it.

This kind of trickery works with audio tape. I've never tried it, but apparently you can make copies of any magnetic strip by pressing blank tape to the thing you want to copy and then ironing at low temperature (otherwise you melt the plastic).

As to a CD, I really doubt this works. A generic CD begins its life as a flat piece of plastic. This is then pressed with a master disc, creating all the little bumps. They then spray on a thin layer of aluminum to make it reflective, and finally top it off with clear varnish and then print the CD label on top.

While it's conceivable that some piece of "foil" could maybe copy the bits from a CD, I don't see how it's going to get into the next CD. It's much easier to just use ye olde CD burner to read the bits from one CD and write them to another.

I just heard some rumour about some foil, which can copy a CD's pattern on it.

Although I think it sounds farfetched (extrememly farfetched, actually), wouldn't it be funny if all this digital copy protection was circumvented by old-fashioned means?


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Tony Fabris

That is how CD's are made, but not CD-R's.... so, maybe by applying this film and PLAYING the CD, the beam reflecting back would leave an imprint on the film...?

Or how about a cheap clone via cd-burner?

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