Get your filthy hands off my CDs
By Tony Smith
Posted: 05/12/2001 at 16:55 GMT
By the middle of next year, the music industry will have put the controversy of BMG's bungled attempt to prevent Natalie Imbruglia's While Lilies Island CD from being copied behind it and will have thoroughly embraced copy-protection technology. Major labels and independents alike will embrace products like Macrovision's SafeAudio and use them to control how fans listen to new songs.
So says one of the minds behind such technology, Marc Tokayer, CEO of TTR Technologies. TTR developed SafeAudio in 1999 and more recently partnered with Macrovision to promote the system to the music industry. However, SafeAudio only became known to music fans when Macrovision and one or more record labels - Tokayer won't say who - released copy-protected CDs on an unsuspecting Californian public.
That release, designed to test whether real music buyers could hear what SafeAudio does to music encoded on CD and how likely their audio equipment would reject the protected disks, was arguably the first inkling most listeners had that the music giants were serious about preventing PC users ripping songs to their hard-drives and - worse - sending those tracks to other users via the Internet.
Sure, the major labels' hired muscle, the Recording Industry Ass. of America, had pursued - and effectively killed - Napster, and MP3.com was a shadow of its former self. But the action taken against these pioneers of online music, like the lawsuits slapped on their successors, KaZaA and MusicCity's Morpheus, were intended to take out the networks that permit the distribution of unauthorised copies. Until the SafeAudio test was announced, the industry's intent to once again tackle piracy at source.
Deja entendu
It has tried before, in the days before the Internet, PC-based CD-R burners and portable MP3 players, but they never took off, largely because they relied on the support of the equipment makers and the consumer electronics industry has never been happy with anything that put customers off buying new toys - well, until its leading players started buying content companies, at any rate. Other techniques, designed to protected CDs directly, failed because too many people could hear imperfections in the playback.
Consequently, hi-fi buffs rose up as one and damned copy protection, and the music and consumer electronics industries decide the time wasn't right. And audiophiles were among the first to criticise the new wave of copy-protection technology, like SafeAudio, Midbar's Cactus Data Shield and SunnComm's MediaCloQ.
They needn't worry about audio quality, says Tokayer. Their listening pleasure won't be compromised, he claims, and, thanks to the enhancements made to SafeAudio in the light of the California test, nor will PC users' desire to maintain archives of songs on their computers, whether they're played back straight off the hard drive or downloaded to portable players. Only those who seek to distribute or copy what they haven't paid for need worry, he believes.
Bad Music Glitch
After the BMG cock-up, he'll forgive PC owning music fans for their scepticism at that claim. BMG, one of the world's Big Five music companies, tried to release Natalie Imbruglia's latest album without warning customers that they were getting a copy-protected CD. Only a Midbar copyright declaration, buried in the small print on the back of the case, gave any indication that there was more to the CD than met the eye. Complaints that the disc wouldn't play properly in some CD and DVD players and drives forced BMG to re-release the album minus the copy-protection. Customers with unplayable discs were given the opportunity to have them replaced.
Tokayer concedes that the music industry does have an issue it must resolve before it can back the widespread adoption of copy-protection technology. The Californian woman suing US independent record label Fahrenheit Records for covertly including copy protection on a disc, thus preventing her from copy songs to her hard drive, has a point, Tokayer says. Consumers have a right to know what the CD they're about to purchase can and cannot do, he says.
Of course, the corollary of that, that all discs simply ship with a 'cannot be copied' label on the front, isn't the solution that most punters want. But Tokayer - who comes over refreshingly free of that rabid hatred, seemingly common among music industry folk, of PC users, who clearly just want to copy songs and not pay a cent for the privilege - reckons he has the answer: CDs that tie into rights management software. That feature, incorporated into SafeAudio's most recent version, 3.0, will let "honest" PC users make personal copies of their CDs and transfer them to their MP3 players.
Like the issue of disk labelling, Tokayer is happy to leave the decision of what music buyers should be allowed to do with their discs to the recording companies. Just because SafeAudio can permit users to make personal copies doesn't mean the record companies will enable that feature
theregister.co.uk
Marc Tokayer interview - part two
By Tony Smith
Posted: 05/12/2001 at 16:57 GMT
Back to page 1
Up to scratch?
But it's not just the freedom to make personal copies that worries CD buyers. Since SafeAudio intentionally corrupts the music data stored on an encrypted CD, surely that reduces the lifespan of the disc? CD players incorporate sophisticated error correction algorithms to eliminate the noise introduced by scratches and muck on a disc's surface. But beyond a certain level of noise, such mechanisms cease to work. Adding noise, as SafeAudio does, would seem to bring that point closer.
Tokayer claims not. SafeAudio changes the music data at the bit level, flipping a fraction of a disc's billions of 1s and to 0s. That "very subtle" degree of data corruption, while enough to block an attempt to copy a track onto a hard drive, won't affect the quality of the playback or affect the disc's physical playability. The noise induced by dirt and scratched easily drowns out the noise inherent in the copy-protected data.
And he's quick to point out that the number of discs taken back to stores during last summer's testing in California was no higher than labels would expect from unprotected CDs. That said, no one knew which discs were protected, and behind Tokayer's comment that some listeners tend to hear non-existent audio artefacts and so reject discs they know have copy-protection there's a real sense that it might be better to keep users in the dark. That may not be Tokayer's view, but it's not hard to imagine his customers coming to that conclusion.
Double bypass
If they do, a legion of hackers will attempt to bypass their restrictions. That's already happening. As we've reported before, some users have utilised CD drives' Raw mode, which permits pure bit-by-bit copying of the data on a disc. SafeAudio ensures that files copied this way still contain the data corruption, which then prevents them being copied again - back to a CD-R, say.
But there's little the technology can do to scupper the efforts of apps like CloneCD, which is said to copy a track to memory using Raw mode, then convert it to WAV format. That conversion may contain the corrupt data, leading to a file that can be copied by contains sufficient hiss or clicks to render it not worth copying, but it can only be a matter of time before the conversion process incorporates noise elimination algorithms.
There are, after all, some clever coders out there, as the cracking of the DVD copy-protection method, the Content Scrambling System (CSS), proved. Not surprisingly, work leveraging the technology enshrined in SafeAudio to protect DVDs is already underway at TTR. Tokayer says the company has its eye on the music download business too.
This work is designed to take advantage of content industries' desire to block illicit duplication at source. Tokayer, the CEO of a business that takes a 25-30 per cent cut every time Macrovision sells SafeAudio to a record label, admits that the music industry hasn't embraced copy protection as quickly as he would have hoped - it's a conservative business, he says - but he claims there is a real interest in the technology, particularly in Europe, where the labels seem far more bothered by copying than their US counterparts appear. Perhaps that's because CDs are rather more expensive over here, we suggest.
Right now there's a lot of testing going on, and for every Natalie Imbruglia CD there must be many more out there that are slipping by unnoticed, preventing anyone ripping them but not spoiling the listening. Then one day, they'll all be made this way. And, if Tokayer's right, we won't have long to wait. ®
theregister.co.uk |
