I was over at the DVDRHelp forums and found a thread about the latest attempt to stop people from copying CDs (even for their own legal purposes).
Here’s the website for the company.
What do you guys think?
Hmm, I think it sounds overly optimistic.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
As for what I think of it: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
The music industry is never going to get with the program it seems. Tha’ll be their own death sentence.
The hell? I thought the days of buzzword-based web startups were gone when the .com bubble popped.
I don’t understand it.
it says
but also
How could it run on a “dumb” device if it has to do all that decoding?
Smells like bullshit.
Since 99.9% of all CD copying is not for legal purposes, why is there a problem is the infringement is prevented?
Remember: buying a CD does not in any way give you a right to copy it. If you want to disagree, please bother to read the copyright law first.
While I did not start this thread to debate the legailty of copying CDs, I must ask for a cite for this number.
I will continue to make copies of the media I purchase in accordance with the Fair Use principle. Furthermore, I think the RIAA has already cheated enough consumers by requiring them to pay the same royalty on the various types of media (records, tapes, cd’s, mp3’s, etc). If the goal of copy-protection is to safeguard the royalties of the performer, I must ask, exactly how many times do I have to pay for the right to listen to a cd I purchased legally? If I want to transfer my royalty-paid media to an MP3 file for the purpose of listening on an MP3 player I do not feel that the artist or the record industry has earned the right to charge me a second time.
The reason the RIAA keeps pushing this issue is because they know a new realistic and reasonable model for music makes them obsolete…
Its a moot point for me anyway, since the record labels I patronize are not part of the RIAA.
Reality Chuck Copyright law allows for copying of media for personal use. It also allows the changing of formats (say from analog to digital). It is all part of fair use.
And where the heck are you getting the 99.9% number anyway, can I get a cite on that?
100% of all my copying is done for personal use only, which is 100% LEGAL.
There will never be unbreakable copy protection on a CD. Very little audio quality is lost by playing a CD on a computer and recording it from the computer’s audio stream.
The only way to stop that is to break backwards compatibility with a lot of devices (ie, make a new format.) But even then, as long as the sound is decrypted as it leaves a speaker, people will find ways to rip it.
These attempts to stop CD copying only really stop the casual copier, but they don’t stop the pirates that flood P2P networks with ripped music.
It’s quite simple really.
If it can be heard, it can be copied. No snake-oil technology on earth can do anything to stop that.
I don’t think so. If I can’t hear it (the protection noise), neither can a microphone or an analog line-level connection. And if I can hear it, I ain’t gonna buy no music with no random junk noise, either.
Sounds like it’s all bluff, or someone at that site doesn’t have a clue. Like the people that developed the protection scheme that could be defeated by covering up a track with a magic marker. Don’t hear much about them nowadays, do ya?
Although I’m not sure it’s the same system, there is a technology in the works which can’t be dismissed as easily as some posters think, although it’s use is not to prevent piracy but to detect it. It works by embedding a signature inside the music which is resistant to most forms of ripping and compression while also being indistinguishable to the human ear. I believe it can withstand MP3 encoding up to 128kbps and most analog copying.
**HoldenCaulfield ** makes a very important point here.
The RIAA and the game publishign companies are goign to all this trouble and yet they KNOW that all these copy protection schemes DO NOT stop the pirates.
They also know, that all they do is screw over faithful customers.
People who pay money for CD’s and games and then have to jump through hoops just to make a backup copy of their game, or an mp3 CD out of the music they bought.
May the exec’s responsible rot in hell.
During the Grammy’s last night, some Executive came out and talked about the importance of something ( PETA , I think) but we were like, " If you want our attention, lower the prices on CD’s like you promised 15 years ago. Splitter."
And then what? Even if you watermark music (and wouldn’t it be hideously expensive to do so to every CD you press?), all yuu can show is that CD #1245334 has been ripped and shared.
From the product’s website, at :
[quote]
Q-Spoiler works by modulating specially chosen inaudible frequencies with the original audio file. These embedded and indelible frequencies cause an audible ‘spoiling’ effect if the audio file is:[ul][li]Recorded from an analogue broadcast[/li][li]Digitally re-sampled[/li][li]Ripped from a CD-A to an MP3, WAV or a WMA file.[/ul][/li]
…
Why can I hear Q-Spoiler on a copy of the original audio file?[ol][li]When a copy attempt is made, the embedded sound causes an induced harmonic resonance in the audible range, which spoils the original audio file. [/li]
[li] technology forces the lossy codec, or re-sampling process to ‘Alias’ (a stroboscopic effect), and ‘Beat’ (where a 2 components produce a 3rd component) producing a background noise, which renders the quality of the audio useless.[/ol][/li][/quote]
This sounds similar to the Macromedia copy protection used on laserdiscs and DVDs. It doesn’t totally prevent conventional copying, nor does it “tag” the copied data in some identifiable way to let you know that a (possibly illegal) copy has been made – it degrades the audio quality whenever current copying methods are used.
It sounds reasonable that such an effect could indeed happen when the signal is recorded to analog, or “resampled” by being rendered to analog and then sampled digitally. However, I can’t imagine that their claims about it ruining .mp3 ripping have any merit, provided that .mp3 files allow exactly the same 44 kHz sampling rate and 16 bits-per-sample that the CD Audio format uses.
Then the RIAA will simply bribe their local Congressman to pass a law outlawing the sale of any MP3 players that don’t detect and refuse to play watermarked songs.
This actually is not true. Most microphones have a frequency response both above and below the average person’s audible frequency range. Inaudible frequencies are picked up by mics, recorded, and reproduced by your home stereo.
After reading through the linked site, it sounds like they are inserting audio artifacts at frequencies outside of the audible range, and counting on digital encoding schemes and shortcomings in AD/DA converters to sum those artifacts with the audible audio signal to produce noise in recordings. This sounds plausible to me, and I’ve done a fair bit of research into recording technology for my hobby (I record promo CDs for local bar/wedding/festival bands as a side job), although I am far from a professional industry-level recording engineer.
Note that this doesn’t prevent any form of copying that doesn’t require the audio to be encoded digitally. Nowhere on the website does it claim to prevent creating an analog copy (recording to cassette) – what it frequently refers to as “plugging the analog hole” is digital recording of an analog source. It also wouldn’t prevent a direct CD-to-CD copy, as just moving bits from one location to another wouldn’t require any encoding.
A few notes:
While you can’t hear the artifacts inserted on the audio outside of the audible frequency range, your home stereo speakers are working to reproduce them, and they are designed to clash harmonically with the audible signal when being digitally encoded. A case can probably be made that this is gonna put some extra wear and tear on your home speakers.
During discussions about how many bits are optimal to store audio sound, some very experienced professional audio engineers have claimed that what you can’t hear can affect your listening experience. They claim that cutting inaudible frequencies from a recording will change your perception of the music in a way you won’t be able to put your finger on, but that sounds “less real”. Some also claim that boosting inaudible frequencies can lead to increased listening fatigue, basically meaning your ears will get tired faster. These points are highly debatable, but not without merit. If true, then that would mean that inserting artifacts in the inaudible frequency range would not be entirely transparent to the end user of a recording.
Although our ears may not be sensitive enough to respond to signal in the inaudible frequency range, the compressors employed by major radio stations most likely are. A compressor is an audio processor that tames the dynamics of a sound signal. If the inserted signal on copy-protected CDs is fairly constant, it could result in the dynamic range of broadcast music to be squashed more than it already is. The average consumer rarely notices the compression on an audio track, but if you already can notice that a song played on the radio doesn’t have quite the same dynamic range as the same song played on your home stereo from a CD, you might be looking forward to further over-compression from radio broadcasts.
Crazymonkey, of course mics, speakers and ears are not handling sounds in exactly the same way. But they are all working in the same spectrum, and filters, both analog and digital, can be easily used to tailor any recording.
If you are claiming that this scheme works by inserting, say, a 30Kz tone or tones, nominally beyond human hearing, speakers are reproducing it and mics are picking it up, then a simple, hi-Q low-pass filter set to 15K or so will handle that problem just fine either in the playback or recording pipe.
And if the scheme is based on the principles in Tracer’s quotes (“beat frequencies”), it sounds like they are counting on an resampling rate at exactly the same as the original digital signal. This can be defeated with negligible loss by converting to analog and resampling at a slightly different rate. Or even playing an analog version slightly slower or faster and sampling at the standard rate.
Doesn’t sound like a foolproof scheme to me.
I agree. In fact, I don’t think a foolproof scheme is even possible. I also fully agree that filters can be used to defeat such an idea, and that there will probably be other ways devised to defeat it as well (probably available for download within a week).