BMG's New Copy-Protected Audio CDs

PCB writes "I found the following on www.heise.de: BMG-Entertainment started selling audio-CDs using the Cactus Data Shield, a copy-protection system developed by Midbar and Sonopress which makes it impossible to grab the music from the CD and to listen to it using "an old CD-Player" or a CD-ROM-drive. It is used on the albums "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club. What's worse: the copy-protection is not even mentioned on the outside of the CD-case, and as these CDs are not really RedBook-compliant, they actually don't contain CD Digital Audio. " You'll need use the Fish of Many Languages to translate into your appropriate native tongue.

WRONG WRONG WRONG

It is also a step in the direction of stopping honest musicians from making CDs!

I'm sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about whether or not some consumer hacker type can still copy it or not. I have a problem with the idea of a gradual shift over to formats I CANNOT PRODUCE! I've been going through absolute hell simply getting the ADAT I bought into working order (fortunately all the repairs are being covered by the seller, who didn't check the machine out enough before selling it), and I am not thrilled with the idea of a new generation of CD players made to no longer understand Red Book Audio. What the hell is happening to the world?

If I seem frantic, it's because I am already profoundly committed to pushing MP3s as hard as I can- and hoped to be able to earn small amounts of bread money by selling _master_ _CDs_ of the music that's being MP3ed. I know I can put out quality that's worth getting an 'audiophile' copy, and people who want to 'support the artist' can be encouraged to get that, I don't have to build timebombs into the mp3s or go for pay-by-play or anything psychotically disgusting like that.

Now the other shoe drops, and I find that the industry is quietly shifting the CD format out from under me to some other sort of format that won't play on normal CD players.

Bets that the industry won't phase out Red Book? Anyone?

Bets that the new format will be available to me and my little borrowed CD-Rom burner? Anyone?

What the hell do I have to do, try to make _cassette_ _tapes_ for God's sake, to get a medium with a future? Press vinyl? Actually I could do that very well- but NOT in tiny small runs. And there's the rub.

DAMN it! Anyone who can't see where this is headed is an idiot... and anyone who still claims MP3s are against the interests of artists in the face of this steady 'power shift' is crazy. I don't see MP3 copiers cutting off my access to the public- I see them enhancing it, in a strictly non-profit sort of way. I see the INDUSTRY steadily, subtly cutting off my access to the public, 'deprecating' the media I used to have increasingly easy access to- and I'm freaking out! What the HELL?

This morning when I got up I would not, in my wildest flights of suspicion and paranoia, have dreamed to suggest that the music industry was taking steps to DEPRECATE RED BOOK AUDIO.

What the _hell_? :(

So return 'em!

This seems a simple enough thing to shoot down. The CD isn't redbook compliant? Return it and tell the store it's defective. That seems truthful enough to me.

My CD player happens to be my Macintosh. I choose to listen to my music as MP3's because that's a convenient method of playback for my lifestyle. If they've gone about making sure I can't play back my CD's in what is, to me, a normal method based on the standard format that has been in use for many years, then I simply have to consider their product to be unplayable and defective and demand my money back.

Re:No prevent, but maybe reveal

Everything I've ever read about watermarking indicated that not only was the watermark intended to survive a simple D/A/D pathway but even conversion to and from a (very!) lossy format - like MP3. In fact, surviving MP3 (and its ilk) is pretty much the reason for using such an animal. They can be much more sophisticated than merely twiddling a few least-significant bits. With powerful, modern DSP at one's disposal, I'm sure they could base watermarks on things like subtule (to the ear) frequency-response variations, minor (again, to the ear) inter-channel phase anamolies, and other far more complicated things that I'd never understand. I'm sorry that I don't have a link to more info on this topic. Anyone else?

So if one were to create an MP3 that was made of a cassette recording of a CD, it would still be possible to find the serial number of the source CD in the watermark.

What I've never understood about the watermark system is what good it would do. Sure, you know this MP3 was ripped from CD#1237853, but unless you know who bought that particular CD, you haven't got a lead.

As far as I can tell, the best they could hope for with this scheme would be to do some sort of region coding in the serial number, allowing the authorities to figure that this pirated MP3 was originally ripped from a CD that was sold in, say, Ohio.

To get better info than that, they would have to demand your ID when buying a CD, and keep a database of what CD serial numbers each person buys. And I don't think that would be cost effective, not to mention that it wouldn't go over too well with the general public.

Good thing, too.

It gets worse

This isn't even about stopping consumer pirating.

As another poster mentioned, so the old players can't play these discs? Why get a new player when you can get a DVD player made to handle the new, non-Red-Book format?

You'd be surprised how quickly it'd become possible to deprecate Red Book so thoroughly that the newest DVD players WON'T PLAY RED BOOK any longer. Only the copy protected version! But that's okay, because you can buy the music all over again... I mean, because you had it all MP3ed anyway! So who does this hurt?

Musicians. The artists. We are seeing the end of an era where, for the first time in history, you can master the preferred audio format (I'm not counting cassettes here) ON YOUR DESKTOP. You don't have to be signed to anywhere to produce the media. You can burn Red Book Audio CDs! The media becomes accessible to anyone with a CD burner!

We are seeing the first attempts to take that power back- and fussing about how expected new non-Red-Book-playing DVD players 'harm the consumer' is accurate but a horrible trivialisation of the real damage here. (And who wants to bet that the industry will preserve the rippable, uncontrolled, unwatermarked, publically-accessible Red Book Audio format? Who really thinks the industry wouldn't turn their huge collections into useless coasters?)

This story freaks me out worse than any DVD-oriented story I've read- because I had subconsciously trusted that Red Book would always be there for me, that the plain old audio CD with all its obvious faults and clear limitations would at least be a public media format I could count on. I mock the audio CD- I think it is no sort of audiophile wonder- but I trusted it to stick around, to remain hugely popular and common.

I can't say that anymore, in fact I can identify several plausible means by which the industry can deprecate it and shift popular audio onto something strictly industry-controlled- and I'm scared shitless, as Red Book was the media I hoped to use to sell to people who wanted a little more than mp3, which I intend to make lots of and give out freely.

I see the industry saying, "So you like MP3s, do you? Let's see you sell them!" and taking away the audio CD (which I hadn't thought possible), returning me to the days in which you couldn't produce popular media without going through the industry channels. This time, mp3s are likely to remain widely popular through sheer user saturation- but who the hell is going to sell them? I don't even WANT to try and sell mp3s! I think of them as radio, you should be able to listen to all the mp3s you want and only pay if you want to buy your own nice copy of something! And the day may come when indy musicians (again) can no longer produce any of the DVD-hosted, corporate-encrypted public media, without getting signed and spending huge amounts of money and time for the privilege of releasing public media.

This will happen through the deprecation of anything people know how to produce, such as cassettes and Red Book CDs. MP3s may well remain a huge ghetto of underground music- but it's technologically possible to relegate such musicians to only the (freely exchanged) MP3s and deny them access to any new popular media that people are used to paying money before. And that's how it will be done... and ten years from now, today's 'nice' Red Book-savvy CD player is going to look awfully old, most will have broken by then, and it'll be taking up space needed for the new DVD player which also plays the revised CD format, just not the old Red Book format...

I wish I was sleeping, so that this could be a nightmare :( I can't believe this is already starting to happen. And for anyone who doesn't think the industry can make you throw away all your old media and buy the music all over again- remember the CD?

Ok no cheating this time

Ok no cheating this time, get yourself a copy of the cd, load your fave debugger and get cracking. A nice clean reverse enginearing is what is needed here, none of this debuging xing to get the details wus boy cheating (joke!).

Last one to crack+wideband buys the beer!

Re:Isn't this illegal in and of itself?

You have the right to make archival copies, and not be prosecuted. It's legal.
This in no way implies that anyone has to provide you with a method for making said copies, it just means that if you DO make copies, you are within your rights.

IANAL, but this is fairly obvious.

Not Quite

The article stated that there was a 2 year old Phillips CD player that wouldn't play the protected CD's. More than 1.5% of all CD users must have CD players that are more than a few years old. Especially since (non-portable) CD players don't wear out and there really havn't been any major advances in technology since the CD changers. If you bought a 5-100 disk changer CD player with remote control 5-10 years ago, malfunction would be the only reason to replace it. The number of non-compliant CD players must be at least 10%.

If new but really cheap CD players won't play them either, then maybe Wal-Mart will refuse to sell the protected CD's, "Hey, they piss off our el cheapo CD vendors", and then BMG will be really really sorry.

Faulty product legislation

I wonder if these people are liable under faulty product legislation for representing as CDs things which aren't Red Book compliant.

I've often dreamt of suing Microsoft for their so-called TELNET programme which actually doesn't. (It violates the protocol, or at least the Win95 version did).

AP- South Florida Hacker arrested...

AP- South Florida Hacker arrested for breaking music copy protection and publishing it on the web.

"Really, I dont understand it.. I was just telling people how I use the digital output on my new CD deck to input the audio into my computer so that I can run it through nwfiir to make it sound better.. and all of a sudden the cops were kicking in my door."

This is stupid. If you can play it, you can copy it.

Useless plastic

95% of my CD listening is at a PC. If I can't use the CD in a CD-ROM, it is just a useless hunk of plastic, little better than an AOL disk.

I'd say this calls for a boycott, but why bother? They're products are useless. Obviously, no one is going to buy a useless product.

And looking around the office, and seeing the number of headphones hooked into computers, I'd say that they've grossly underestimated the impact of this. And we're not talking about just techies, either.

Anyone got an e-mail for BMG so that I can inform them that they are starting to produce products that are useless to me?

Their web site

It's made by Cactus Data Shield, which can be found over here [midbartech.com].

They sell a device which goes between the data source and the mastering equiptment, so it can't be fiddling with the format too much. I would guess that they screw with the formatting information that gets written (such as the block headers and whatnot)

From their web site:

Simple to install and operate, the CACTUS DATA SHIELD is a one-station, stand-alone automatic device that is installed in-line between the data processing station and the LBR mastering system.

Transparent to the content provider, there is no need to modify content or its delivery systems. In addition, CACTUS DATA SHIELD does not affect the pre-mastering process or require production machinery modification.

The CACTUS DATA SHIELD can also be seamlessly integrated with commercial mastering and production equipment.

I can't imagine it would take too long to crack it. :-)

They've been reading /.!

We've spent the last few months going on how about if you can read / play music / video, you'll always be able to make a copy. The response from BMG?

A music format no-one can read!

The piracy merry-go-round...

1) People copy off copyable media.
2) Companies get angry, include simple copy protection.
3) Crackers defeat copy protection.
4) Companies get even more angry and start including protection at the cost of pissing off honest consumers.
5) Crackers defeat copy protection.
6) New read only media comes out with no writable drive.
7) Companies migrate to new media, and relax protection measures.
8) New writable drive comes out.
7) GOTO 1...over and over and over...

People NEVER LEARN.

Return it, Return it, Return it.

I say exchange it as many times as possible to make a point, until returning it.

The situation would be like when I bought a crappy VHS tape years ago from Best Buy. Not only did the movie suck, but they recorded at low speed on low quality tapes. I tried to return it, They said "it's open, we can't let you". So I explained that the tape was defective. They said "ok, exchange it". I said I would be fine with that, but the next one is most likely defective also. I explained that I would probably exchange and return every copy in the store. Ok they let me return it.

If an audio CD I wanted to buy was written in the encrapted format, I wouldn't be so easy on them.

Buy the CD,
Hey it's broke, it doesn't play on my CD player(made in 1989).
Exchange it.
Hey, this one's broke too.
Exchange it. Wow, must have had a bad batch.
Third ones broke too.
Best Buy "Exchange limit, sorry, something wrong with your player?"
My cd player plays my other 100 cd's fine.
Ok, refund.

After a few thosand people return these things, they would have to at least sell them as a separate format. So then only Circuit city would sell them in the CIVX section.

I've seen such disks a few months ago

They cannot be played on a CD-ROM drive since it cannot read the table of contents. You can still rip the actual data but you need to know the block offsets and modify your ripper to ignore the error when reading table of contents.

My guess is that CD players and CD-ROM drives use the CD subcode channel differently. These disks probably trash the parts used by CD-ROM drives.

A simple modification to the CD-ROM firmware can probably fix it but I don't believe CDROM manufacturers would be inclined to do that.

My suggestion to the owner of the disk was to use the S/PDIF output of a DVD player and hook it to his S/PDIF interface card. Within 20 minutes of my first encounter with this scheme a perfect digital rip was made. But I guess that people outside the audio and music industry usually don't have access to an S/PDIF interface card.


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Store return policies

A lot of stores have strict return policies - if you open the CD then you can't return it. At most, you can exchange it with an identical album.

The rationale is simple, and compelling in college towns (such as where I live) - the store is trying to prevent students from buying a disk, ripping it to tape (or MP3 nowadays), then returning the album for a full refund.

Of course, that policy will *not* work if a label starts defrauding the public by using an incompatible format without clearly labeling it as such. The obvious solution which other people have suggested - filing criminal fraud charges against the record store and label - are unlikely to go anywhere because no DA will prosecute a case where the loss is the cost of a CD. Individuals will probably win in small claims court, but that's a hassle and BMG will continue to rake in money from the public -- and harm the reputation of its artists.

The only way to stop BMG sppears to be a class action civil lawsuit (hmm, is fraud = breach of contract and subject to treble damages?), a successful boycott, or sending the Norwegian police to arrest the president of BMG for "economic crimes."

Isn't this illegal in and of itself?

We have a legal right to make archive copies of the media we purchase. It would seem that this technology is infringing on that right. Say that I purchase a CD, and it gets stolen with the hundreds of others that are stored in my car. Say that I purchase a CD, then it fals off the coffee table and the cat takes off playing with it, scratching it to hell and back. Wouldn't it be great if I had already made a perfectly legal copy of my own media?

I know that a number of lawyers read /. regularly, am I off base on this one?

Good questions! Why would a new CD player play it?

If its not Red book compliant, why would any CD player be able to play it? What about it prevents only "old" CD players and PC CD players from playing it?

Tech. info anyone?

It is interesting that "newer" CD players can deal with these mangled discs at all. Have manufacturers been trying to sneak protection into a new CD non-standard standard or is it just luck that they work at all?

Technical details very lacking at Sonopress - http://www.sonopress.de/sononews /15-99/protect.htm [sonopress.de] is about all there is.

Of course as a copy-protection method this is utterly hopeless -

c't Labs are currently testing whether the copy protection also prevents playing CDs through the SP/DIF digital output. It is possible that the product could fail to qualify for the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" label due to non-conformace to the Red Book standard. When consulted by c't, BMG admitted to being aware of difficulties with the scheme. Until these are cleared up, no further protected CDs will be released

- even if somehow the digital interconnects are disabled - which would seem to implicate player manufacturers in the protection scheme - it will still always be possible to save any sound a device can play back at us.

The music industry wants us to keep paying for the same music again and again, on new formats, or as old media wear out (yeah - I've got CDs that won't play properly any more already, but that's no problem once they're MP3d), or simply through making us rent all music. But since CDs the cat is already way out of the bag, and clumsy attempts like this - and DVD-Audio - to stuff it back in just won't work any more.

Oh quick, more news coming in...

Useless Third sues Rest of World

California, 25 January - A group of lawyers today issued writs against society in an attempt to preserve the livelihoods of their clients.

Moschops Ankleduster, attorney for the useless third of the population commented, "My clients feel that it is unfair to deny the vital importance of the Useless sector - those jobs that are neither productive nor creative."

"Industry bodies and bureaucracies must be permitted to make great sums of money from the work of the artists who create the products and the workers who physically create them", he continued, "and we will fight for the rights of all those upstanding citizens - ourselves included - who contribute absolutely nothing to the world".

Asked whether existing modes of distribution were still viable in a rapidly-changing information-based society, Ankleduster commented, "Fuck off".

Douglas Adams was unavailable for comment.

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This comment was brought to you by And Clover.

Uh oh!!

The fish sez: So far the albums " Razorblade Romance " of the group of Him and " My private ones are were concerned " the former Independent Heroen Philip Boa & The Voodoo club.. Man them krauts are kinky. They have a group called "My private ones were concerned"? Kinda makes "Limp Biskit" look silly doesn't it?

According to the fish, "The copy protection prevents [...] a playing on all D-CRcOcM-cDrives"! How will I listen to it?? I play all my music through my 26x D-CRcOcM-cDrive!

The fish also tells me that "Possibly also the seal Compact Disc digital audio is not entitled to the product". Ok, well that may be fine for "Compact Disc digital audio" but what about my pet seal Lenny? Is Lenny entitled to the product? (Man those germans have wierd names for their seals).

Ah, fun with babelfish [altavista.com], it never gets tiring. For those of you who haven't tried it, try a modern day version of "telephone". Write a simple paragraph into the box, translate it to german, translate it back to english, translate it to french, translate it back to english, and so on until you've done all the languages... then compare your original paragraph with the translation.

Copy protection from CD's

There's been a lot of talk bandied around here about "if you can play it, you can copy it." This is true, but not in all cases.

This new CD format, I'm guessing (and I really am guessing - I can't get decent info about it), uses some kind of audio watermarking process. This would mean that they have applied extra information to the signal in a way that is masked by the music or whatever. This would create some distortion, but if they do it right, only audiophiles will notice. This may also screw up some older CD players if the process assumes some kind of reconstruction scheme that they are too old to have is used for the D/A conversion. Doing a bitwise copy of the music (using CDParanoia or cdda2wav, for example) and writing it to a CDR will result in a copy that is playable on any CD player on which the original is playable.

The "protection" comes into play when the track is converted to MP3. MP3 encoders remove a lot of information from a track in order to get the high compression rate they have. The trick, though, is that they only remove information that you're not likely to hear. If the watermark is somehow cleverly designed to stand out when this extra information is removed, then any MP3s made from the protected disc will be of poor quality. The solution would be to to remove the watermark in the encoder, but this would extremely difficult. No one would know how the watermark is generated, and that even if one did figure it out, the record companies could just switch watermarking methods every second or so.

It can be done.

bp

My Ultimate Solution

Here's what I think about all this...

The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?

Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...

You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...

Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.

YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.

The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?

OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his "WWF Smackdown" movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...

Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?

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GooseKirk

This will *encourage* unauthorized copying

Going this route is an unbelievably stupid move on the part of the labels.

They can't stop people from using the MP3 format, but they are in their last and best position to influence the basic ethics of CD ripping and MP3 use. Products like the RIO and other standalone MP3 players are not going to go away. If anything, they are going to gain wider and wider acceptance.

Take for example a law-abiding, honest person. Let's make this person the "music listener of the future." He buys CDs, but he has a large collection, and he can't really lug it around, because he's on the go too much, and wants his music in walkman format. When he wants new music, he goes to the store, purchases a CD at retail price, rips it on his computer, and downloads it to his walkman-sized MP3 player, so he can carry it around with him.

Life is good.

He would never think of going to the web to "steal" MP3s from pirate sites. His conscience is clean. He has broken no laws, and hasn't even skirted any laws. He's paid for his music, and is engaging in perfectly legal use of the software.

Now, the music industry begins distributing CDs with copy protection that can't be ripped. This person, following his usual routine, goes to the store, and unknowingly purchases a copy protected CD. Now, he takes it home, tries to rip it as usual, but can't. Now he's mad, because he just paid $15.00 for a CD that appears to be defective. He goes online to find out what is going on. He discovers that he can't rip the CD because it's copy protected.

Someone suggests that he look for an MP3 of the disc online.

After all, this scheme doesn't prevent EVERYONE from making MP3 copies. It just raises the bar -- now in order to make MP3s you need special equipment.

At first, this person hesitates ... he's heard a lot about "MP3 pirating" and how it's so wrong to deprive the artists of their money ... but then he realizes, what's the difference between ripping the CD himself, and downloading an MP3 of the CD? He's already paid for the music. If he had the proper equipment to rip the CD, he would wind up with a bit-for-bit duplicate of the online MP3 file anyway.

So he downloads the MP3. In the process, he notices that the same site has lots of other interesting stuff that he doesn't have. Maybe he doesn't download them, but eventually, as more and more new releases are copy protected, and he finds himself going to the web again and again to obtain MP3s of his own CDs, he realizes that there is no point in buying the CDs anymore, because he is just going to have to go to the web to download the MP3 so he can listen to it.

Now this person either keeps buying the unusable CDs, and starts to feel like a sucker -- used and abused by the record labels, or simply stops buying the useless CDs, downloads the MP3s instead, and suddenly has a lot more free cash to spend on other things.

The RIAA says that copy protection "keeps honest people honest." Instead, it's primary effect is, has always been, and will always be, to turn honest people into criminals.

DON'T buy these CDs EVER...

I'd say the thing to do is order these protected discs TODAY

No. Absolutely not. If you buy them at all, you are telling BMG (and everyone else) that they can make money by producing an incompatible format which obsoletes your present hardware, stamps out many of your current methods for playback and deprives you of fair use.

The way to kill this thing is to make it cost money. Make sure BMG eats all their production and promotional costs, without getting a return on them. If you buy one of these discs by mistake, return it for refund. This also costs the store, and they may stop carrying such discs. Without retail channels, BMG will have to drop the format and go back to regular CD. Kill it the same way we killed DIVX: stay away in droves. It's the only way.
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All copy prot fails so long as we can hear and see

It must just pain these movie/music execs that they cannot force humans to upgrade their eyes and ears so they can view and listen to encrypted content which is not descrambled until the BMI/MPAA/Borg approved implant embedded inside your nervous system decrypts the data and makes it understandable.

If I can hear it, I can record it.

If I can see it, I can record it.

NOTHING CAN CHANGE THIS TRUTH.

Get it, now?

Re:Isn't this illegal in and of itself?

IANAL, but from the other material posted it sounds like you can still make archival copies by reading the block device.

In a true irony which I hope the BMG executives consider when deciding whether to keep the bozo who conned them into this scheme, the only way most of us will be able to listen to this music is to read the corrupted data from the block device, run a repair program on it, then burn it to CD-R. Unlike DVD, the original disk is worthless and millions of consumers have CD-R burners. And those of us who use ours for data archive, not CDA mastering, will make an exception in this case - a CD-R is *far* cheaper than a new CD player.