Bringing Yourself Up to Speed with AAC, MP3, and Digital Audio - Circumventing Copy Protection May Be Illegal
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Copying CDs for others and sharing MP3 files with others are clearly illegal. But now we come to a strange item: as a result of Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998, it’s illegal to circumvent “effective technological measures” protecting a copyrighted work. There are various ifs and buts (for example, you can circumvent such measures to make another program interoperate with a copyrighted work), but essentially Title I says if someone has protected a copyrighted work with a technological measure that could be argued to be “effective” (whatever that means), it’s illegal to crack that measure. There are heavy penalties if you do so deliberately and for “commercial advantage” or private gain: fines of up to $500,000 and five years’ imprisonment for a first offense, and double those for a second offense.
How the DMCA will pan out in the real world is still very much open to question. Here are some examples for you to chew on:
- In December 2002, the Russian software company Elcomsoft was acquitted of breaking the law by creating a program that enabled people to read Adobe eBook files that used technological protection. As the judge saw it, the crux of the question was whether Elcomsoft had intended the software to be used to violate copyright, not whether the software could be used to violate copyright.
- In January 2003, a Norwegian hacker was acquitted of breaking the law by creating a software decoder to play back DVDs on Linux. No Linux DVD decoder was available, so the hacker took advantage of some unprotected code in a commercial DVD player to create his own DVD decoder. In a decision that was widely seen as sensible, the Norwegian judges ruled that because the hacker owned the DVDs in question, he hadn’t broken into them. The Oslo City Court ruling said, “The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film”—a finding most consumers can easily understand.
- A major retailer has used the DMCA to claim that its price lists constitute trade secrets. (Most people have a hard time accepting this one.)
- Chamberlain Group, a manufacturer of garage-door openers, filed suit against Skylink Technologies, a competitor, under the DMCA because Skylink was offering garage-door transmitters that worked with Chamberlain openers. Chamberlain claimed that Skylink had circumvented its access controls, contravening the DMCA. Fortunately, again, a judge took a sane stance, declaring that “the homeowner has a legitimate expectation that he or she will be able to access the garage even if his transmitter is misplaced or malfunctions.”
Understand Current Copy-Protection Techniques on the CDs You Buy To prevent customers from ripping or burning copies of the CDs they buy, record companies have turned to a variety of copy-protection solutions. High-profile copy-protection solutions include Cactus-200 Data Shield (developed by the Israel-based company Midbar Tech Ltd.; www.midbartech. com) and key2audio (from Sony DADC; www.key2audio.com). Macrovision Corporation acquired Midbar Tech in 2002; you’ll probably recognize the name Macrovision from their video-protection products.
Midbar Tech claims that Cactus-200 Data Shield is the leading copy-protection solution; as of January 2003, more than 30 million discs using key2audio protection have been sold, so altogether there are plenty of these discs out there in the wild. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of these protected audio discs have been sold in Europe, with smaller numbers having been sold in the U.S.
This section outlines how these two copy-protection solutions work, the effects you’ll see when you encounter such protected discs, ways some users have found of using protected discs on computers, and why it may be illegal to do so. But first, I’d like to make sure you’re aware of why the CD has been such a success, and why the record companies are so worried about piracy.
 This is chapter three of How to Do Everything with Your iPod & iPod Mini, by Guy Hart-Davis (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, ISBN 0072254521, 2004). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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