Bringing Yourself Up to Speed with AAC, MP3, and Digital Audio - What Happens when You Try to Use a Copy-Protected Disc on a Computer
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When you try to use a copy-protected disc on a computer, any of the following may happen:
- The disc may play back without problems. You may even be able to rip it by using a conventional audio program (such as iTunes) or a specialized, heavy-duty ripper (such as Exact Audio Copy). If you can rip the disc, the copy protection has failed (or your drive has defeated it). You may be liable for five years’ imprisonment and a half-million-dollar fine.
- The disc may not play at all.
- The disc may cause your computer’s operating system to hang.
- You may be unable to eject the disc on some PCs and many Macs. (See the sidebar “How to Eject Stuck Audio Discs.”)
TIP: If your Mac has a SuperDrive, download the Apple SuperDrive Update from www.apple. com/hardware/superdrive/ before attempting to use any copy-protected audio discs in the drive. Once you’ve installed this update, you’ll be able to eject copy-protected audio discs.
Learn Ways to Get Around Copy Protection Customers annoyed by copy-protected audio discs quickly found ways to circumvent the copy protection. In many cases, the most effective solution is to experiment with different drives. Some drives can play audio discs protected with some technologies; others can’t.
TIP: Many DVD drives are better at playing copy-protected discs than many plain CD-ROM drives. This is because the DVD drives are designed to work with multiple types of discs— DVDs, CDs, recordable CDs (CD-Rs), rewritable CD (CD-RWs), and even various types of recordable DVDs, depending on the capabilities of the drive.
If you don’t have multiple CD or DVD drives to experiment with, you might be interested to hear of two crude solutions that have proved successful with some copy-protected audio discs:
- Stick a strip of tape on the disc to mask the outermost track. This track contains extra information intended to confuse computer CD drives. By masking the track, people have managed to obviate the confusion.
- Use a marker to color the outermost track on the disc dark so the laser of the drive won’t read it.
Both of these techniques require a steady hand—and both constitute willful circumvention of the copy protection, possibly exposing those performing them to retribution under the DMCA.
A subtler means of bypassing copy protection made headlines in August 2003, when a Princeton PhD student published a paper that revealed that SunnComm’s MediaMax CD3 copy-protection mechanism could be bypassed by holding down SHIFT when loading the CD on a Windows PC for the first time. Holding down SHIFT prevents the CD from automatically loading a driver used to protect the music. Holding down SHIFT might be interpreted as an active attempt to bypass the copy-protection mechanism. But you can also turn off the Autoplay feature for a CD drive permanently in the CD drive’s Properties dialog box (shown here). Once you’ve done that, the CD3 copy-protection mechanism simply does nothing.
 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.
Buy this book now. |
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
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