[vorbis] Re: Copy protected CDs (off-topic)

[Kenneth C. Arnold]

According to David Mitchell (sometime around Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 11:35:18AM -0700):
> Chris Wing wrote:
> > 
> > This is moronic. Among other things, everyone who went out and bought USB
> > speakers for their computer will be unable to play these-- USB speaker
> > software as delivered on Windows, for instance, requires digital audio
> > extraction because the speakers are basically D/A converters with a USB
> > interface.
> 
> Ironically, my Sony CD player is pre-1995. So, I may be forced to
> rip these CD's to Vorbis files to listen to them.
> 
> Most likely, I will never encounter a CD with this "technology".
> Doing a Google search turns up but a few press releases having
> more to do with "SunnComm" buying "Desert Winds" than any
> specific technolgy. One press release does state the the
> technology works on CDs DVDs and downloads. This from a

For _any_ downloaded music, the pseudo-soundcard trick works. On Unix
you often don't even need to go that far; on the slow side a
[s|p]trace on the running program will provide all the information you
need, and a pseudo-soundcard could be nothing more than a tiny kernel
module.

For DVDs, I highly doubt the ability to modify the stream to
"copy-protect" it any more than CSS does (heh...) without making it
unplayable on existing players.

I think the CD protection is vaporware, or soon will be considering
how it'll break any sort of computer playing.

> BusinessWire article that was found on a Portugese DVD site: I
> tried to find the original on businesswire.com, but failed.
> 
> ---quote---
> 
> Jacobs further commented that, "These technologies will allow
> media companies to distribute their content on disk or over the
> Internet without fear of piracy. A shrink wrapped CD or DVD
> purchased off-the-shelf which was manufactured using this
> technology cannot be 'burned' onto another disk or copied to
> other storage media. Internet content down-loaded to a computer
> disk, once burned to a CD cannot be re-copied to another disk or
> other storage media."

Laughing. Out. Load. Once you burn ANY audio data on a CD, you or
anyone else can always rip it back off. Unless this program is also
providing a CD-R driver for you, and then there are a bunch of
hardware issues and I still don't know how you'd go about burning an
unrippable CD in any case.

> Whatever. I'll believe this when I see it. It is quite possible
> that Fahrenheit Records will boost their sales as lots of people
> buy the CD's to take up the challenge, and then deal with record
> numbers of returns when everyone takes them back as defective.

And they are.

There is a big problem of trust with trying to restrict any sort of
use, unless you allow only controlled entrance into a private viewing
area, handcuff the viewer to prevent video recordings of movies (they
do indeed do it; I didn't believe it until I saw it...), and erase the
viewer's memory after viewing ... and even then someone would find a
way to circumvent that (like an eye-mounted camera). With any other
method of viewing there is always the possibilty of capture and
redistribution, however difficult it might be to do this. So trying to
restrict use is beyond treading the "fair use" rights (whatever that
means), it's futile. "Your intellectual property will be assimilated."


-- 
Kenneth Arnold <ken at arnoldnet.net> / kcarnold / Linux user #180115
http://arnoldnet.net/~kcarnold/



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