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New copy protection on CD's?

P

Powerful_Blaziken88

Well-Known Member
Me and my friend were randomly talking about computer related stuff, and someone brought up CD's. He then told me about some new thing that's being done to CD's to prevent people from copying them. Exactly what is this, and are they really doing it? I went out and bought a bunch of CD's today, and none of them gave me trouble when I was copying them....

P.S. Anyone wanna guess what one of those CD's was? (Hint: look at my user title)
 
T

The Original Celebi

Banned
That never happened to me Im confused maybe pokemon cds
 
Trip

Trip

Former Staff Member
Avoid Sony. And EMI I think.

Basically, it's DRM. Digital Rights Management. One person said that "DRM 'manages rights' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'" Supposed to prevent copying but easily circumvented.

All current schemes rely on your computer using Autorun. So if you hold down Shift while inserting the CD (and for a few seconds after), you're safe. If you find the registry keys to disable it, you're safe. If you are an Apple or a Linux user (like myself) you are also safe.

So when the CD autoruns, depending on which DRM scheme is used, it installs a low-level driver that, whenever a CD is inserted, is checked to make sure that you don't make too many copies. If it's copy-protected with that scheme, you are often only allowed to take encrypted WMA files off of it and I don't think you can make any total-CD copies or there's a limit on the number of copies you can make. Again, it depends on the scheme in use, and there are several.

Also, I have a blog ( http://simplepc.blogspot.com ) where I've written two articles about DRM.

If I can be of more help, say the word.

- Trip
 
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