IP: Marker pens, sticky tape crack music CD protection

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 18:14:27 -0400
To: declan@well.com, dave@farber.net, Phil Agre <pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu>
Subject: Marker pens, sticky tape crack music CD protection

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25274.html


  14 May 2002
  Updated: 13:20 GMT
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Marker pens, sticky tape crack music CD protection
By John Leyden
Posted: 14/05/2002 at 12:45 GMT

Music disc copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200
and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and
electrical tape, crackers have discovered.

The Blue Peter-style hack, which was first unearthed by a reader of chip.de
works by covering up the outer ring of a copyright protected audio disc.

On copy protected discs this outer track is corrupted, which prevents
copying, or even playback, by PCs but is ignored (at least in theory) by
regular CD players.

Simply covering up the outer track disables the protection, allowing a disc
to be played as normal in a PC or Mac.

The cracking technique seems crude, but Reg reader insomnia skunk tells us
he was able to use it to defeat the copyright protection on Natalie
Imbruglia's 'White Lilies Island' CD, early version of which used Cactus
Data Shield 200 anti-rip technology.

He writes: "The process is pretty easy: I took a bit of electrical tape and
applied it to the edge of the CD, the 'shiny side', - just a half inch of
the stuff - and aligned it with the very edge 'data track session ring'
visible on these copy protected CDs. Took the tape out to the outside of
the CD and put it in my CD Rom."

"And guess what - it played, and ripped, with no problems at all," he adds.

Celine Dion ate my iMac
Record labels are beginning to ship discs with copy protection technology
as a means to tackle music piracy at source, by preventing tracks been
ripped on PCs and posted onto the Internet file sharing sites.

Epic/Sony's release of Celine Dion's A New Day Has Come audio disc this
month, which included copy protection technology from Key2Audio, caused a
furore after online sites reported that attempts to play the disc on a PC
caused computers to crash.

The problem can be even more severe for Mac users.

Not only will the Celine Dion audio disc fail to play on new flat-screen
iMacs but it will lock the CD tray and prevent the machine from been
rebooted properly. This is not something users can fix themselves and means
a trip to a dealer for repairs. An article on Apple's knowledge base
explains the issue in more depth.

Jim Peters, of the Campaign for Digital Rights, which is protesting against
music industry plans to market copy-protected audio discs, said the problem
is caused by labels in creating non-standard and corrupt audio CDs, which
Apple can't be expected to have tested against.

"It is clearly Sony's fault, and their warning 'Will not work on PC/Mac'
isn't the whole truth - it should be 'Will not work on PC /Will kill your
iMac'," said Peters.

The symbol for a corrupt CD should be that used for poison - the skull and
crossbones, he adds. The CDR has set up Web site documenting Sony's use of
corrupt audio discs, aka "copy-protected CDs". ®


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'


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