Following trough some more links from the RIAA debate page, I found an interesting paper on CD copy protection. Softwares that beat copy protection: CloneCD 4.0 - any copy protected CD on a good drive. Or if you are on Linux, just use the default cdparanoia - moreover the article points out that the current protection uses poor harwdware design as its basis - for instance, a toshiba drive was unable to read the copy protected CDs, while a Plextor read CD on every operating system (well, except win98) without a proplem. It seems that both the hardware and the software side is well prepared for such copy protection - and even softwares that are not, could be made so with minor changes. He wrote: "All the modifications needed should be straightforward for someone familiar with the source code" - after taking a peep at the source code of cdrdao (disk at once mode) and even pointing out what changes are needed.
At the end of the article he has a good chart showing the test results, broken down by operating systems (win98, windows2000 and linux), drive types (toshiba, hitachi, sony, plextor, ibm, etc.), and the programs used (windows: Cd Player, Music Match, Nero, CloneCD 4.0 linux: CD Play, CD Paranoia, CDR-DAO).
its page 12 on:
http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/h..._drm2002_pp.ps