P2P-Zone - Chained Melodies: A Note On Copy Protection

Full article at:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...n/index.html?x

"March 13, 2002 | A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.

Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a pirate. But he did want to play songs from the album on his MP3 player. "I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only hard drives," he says.

At first, his worries proved justified. When he put the CD in his computer and fired up AudioGrabber, a software program that converts CD tracks into MP3s, the CD locked up the program. But after rebooting his computer, he discovered that the protection was easy to thwart. The copy protection worked by introducing a false value for the start time of the CD -- Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero, and then was able to encode the music without a glitch..."

Marius