Natalie Imbrugia copy protected?

I just bought the new Natalie Imbrugia CD (found it sealed very cheap), and as I sit here playing it on my computer at work, it's cutting out every few seconds, in a basic stutter kind of effect. I know that this CD was released in Europe with copy protection to prevent it from being burned, but I thought I had read that it would not be copy protected here in the U.S. What gives? Needless to say, it's damned frustrating trying to listen to a CD on my PC when it keeps cutting out every few seconds. Anyone else have similar problems with this CD? Is BMG trying to sneak one by us by claiming this CD is not copy protected when in fact it is?

 

Those sneaky Pete's!

I don't know for sure, but it sure sounds like it's protected.

 

Mr. Smith,


Tried ripping the CD to the HD? Play it back and see if it sounds normal, or can be ripped to the HD?

 

I'm at work now, but will have to check it out when I get home...

 

You may be able to rip the CD to your HD. For an interesting experiment, also make sure it plays. Many copy-protected audio CDs WILL rip to your HD but will intermittantly stutter in playing back the wav or Mp3 product at the HD.

Friend tried to copy Beatles "1" and found out. Macrovision strikes again! Muhahaha!

The whole complaint suit (that's not doing so hot) is, the consumer has the right to listen to a CD on his PC or even copy it for his own use. The record companies want you totally out of that cookie jar, even for good intentions.

Besides, some people have $80 Panasonic boom boxes, but their computer has a much better sound system. Some people (like my dad) use their CD rom as a musical companion while doing real work.

 

That one is definitely copy protected...

...not only that, but the original disc may not play properly on your CD transport. Talk about being messed up!

 

sound and vision article

i'm sorry for the length of this post, but this is from the sound and vision website:

Access Denied!
How the recording industry’s new copy-protection schemes could keep you from your music
By Stephen A. Booth

If the major record labels have their way, that bright red “record” indicator on your CD burner or personal computer could eventually become as unresponsive as the long-wave band on a vintage AM radio. Some of the labels have already released music discs that prevent you from using your computer to make digital copies on either recordable CDs or the computer’s hard drive. Some of the copy-protection technologies make it difficult for you even to play a CD on a computer. And these discs also make it impossible for you to compress music on your PC for transfer to a portable MP3-type player.

As if that weren’t bad enough, some of these “content management control” technologies won’t let you make digital copies using a standalone CD recorder — even though you’ve already paid for the right to do so as part of the price of the recorder and the blank discs. Even worse, the unpredictable nature of some copy-protection systems makes it impossible to guarantee that the protected discs will play in all home and mobile CD equipment (including DVD players).

Hits and Misses
As we reported last November in “Random Play,” the record labels have been experimenting with five methods of copy protection (see “Meet the Schemes” on page 90), including Cactus Data Shield (CDS) from Midbar Tech; key2audio, developed by Sony’s CD manufacturing arm, Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (Sony DADC); and MediaCloQ from SunnComm. Macrovision, the company whose name is synonymous with video copy protection, offers a system called SafeAudio Version 3 (SAV3). A fifth, as yet unnamed, system hails from the labs of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI), the worldwide record-industry umbrella group that includes the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Some of the record labels’ experiments have gone beyond the lab. Copy-protected CDs have been issued in Europe to an unsuspecting public with little or no warning on their packaging about possible playback glitches in computer drives or in home and mobile audio gear. (Even the record retailers were taken by surprise!) The most obvious public experiments — and foul-ups — have come from Germany’s BMG, whose labels include RCA. The company upset a lot of people in Europe by using copy protection on its RCA releases there of Natalie Imbruglia’s White Lilies Island and Greatest Hits by the Australian boy band Five.

The European RCA discs used Midbar’s CDS protection, which is meant to foil PC copying. But it was the complications it caused with other audio gear that provoked the uproar. Many people thought their hardware was on the fritz only to learn that unadvertised copy protection was responsible for their playback woes. Depending on the hardware, the problems have included outright rejection of the disc, random track skipping, and an inability to play certain tracks. Apparently in response to the firestorm it created, the label has since rereleased both discs sans copy protection.


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More recently, Universal Music Group used CDS for its first copy-protected U.S. title, More Fast and Furious (a sequel to the soundtrack of the movie The Fast and the Furious). But unlike BMG, Universal openly acknowledged the copy protection on both the packaging and an insert card, stating that the disc might be incompatible with some CD players. The label also instructed its retailers to accept any disc returns and to give refunds to anyone who had problems.

It’s not known how many discs have been released with copy protection worldwide. Macrovision claims that the major labels have sold millions of discs that use SAV3 with no complaints about compatibility. SAV3 is one of the more flexible and liberal systems since only computer copying is prevented. Sony DADC says 10 million discs comprising 500 albums have been released with its key2audio system, which prevents PC playback or copying. It, too, claims that complaints have been negligible. Yet key2audio might be responsible for the troubles I and others experienced with last summer’s Celebrity from ’N Sync, released by Zomba Records. That CD appeared in British, American, and European versions, each containing a different number of tracks and using varying degrees of an unidentified copy-protection scheme believed by many experienced observers to be key2audio.

Rights and Wrongs
Rather than unleash a barrage of copy-protected titles here in the U.S. and face a series of stiff legal challenges, the major labels have chosen to fight the early skirmishes in Europe. As of early February, Universal’s More Fast and Furious was the only copy-protected CD released in the U.S. with full disclosure of possible playback problems.

The labels chose Europe as the target for these draconian measures because CDs are much more expensive there, providing an extra incentive for people to make multiple copies on inexpensive computer burners and blank discs. And unlike the U.S., European countries have no legal mechanism in place that authorizes consumers to make digital copies in exchange for a royalty.

Here in America we have the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA). In this compromise between the electronics and music industries, Congress levied a royalty payment on standalone digital-audio recorders and blank media. The royalty, which is included in the purchase price of the products, goes to compensate content owners and artists for the copies buyers are presumed to make.

Although it’s easy enough to use a CD-ROM drive to copy a CD onto a hard-disk drive, computers were not included in the AHRA because Congress deemed them to have “substantial noninfringing uses” under copyright law, such as backing up data. Few in 1992 could have foreseen how the emergence of Internet file sharing and data-compression schemes such as MP3 would encourage many people to use their computers to make cheap, royalty-free copies of CDs. Fewer still could have envisioned the impact all of that copying would have on the recording industry’s worldwide sales and revenue. Not surprisingly, the personal computer is now the main target for copy-prevention systems.


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Profit and Loss
It’s an unfortunate consequence of the recording industry’s efforts to clamp down on computer-based copying that people are now having playback problems with dedicated audio gear. Given that some CD players are 20 years old, it’s difficult for the inventors of copy-protection schemes to know exactly how their systems will interact with the many different kinds of equipment out there. And there may even be problems with newer gear. In an effort to save money by not having to make two kinds of drives, manufacturers are increasingly using CD-ROM drives, rather than dedicated CD-audio drives, in their CD players. And since many DVD-Video players use DVD-ROM drives, similar problems are likely to crop up there. Electronics manufacturers predict that before too long almost all optical-disc players will use ROM-type drives.

Hardware manufacturers are concerned that the spoiler codes in copy-protected discs, which are designed either to foil CD playback in ROM drives or to ruin CD copies made from them, will overwhelm the error-correction circuitry in CD players or cause them to interpolate so much missing data that the sound will become distorted. Since there are no published specifications for any of the copy-protection systems, manufacturers of CD equipment have no way of knowing whether a copy-protected disc will work in one of their players or what effect any given system will have on the player’s performance if the disc does play.

The electronics industry’s concerns over playability and recordability have gotten the attention of at least one high-ranking member of Congress. Just before January’s Consumer Electronics Show and the formal debut of key2audio and SAV3 at a major music-industry gathering in France, the RIAA and IFPI received a scorching inquiry from Rep. Dick Boucher (D-VA), co-chair of the House Internet Caucus on technology matters. He suggested that CD copy protection violates the Audio Home Recording Act.

But there’s some question whether the AHRA gives U.S. consumers the “right” to make digital copies even if they’ve paid a royalty. Some copyright attorneys contend that the act guarantees only that consumers can’t be prosecuted for copying — and thus doesn’t prohibit content owners from implementing ways to prevent them from doing so. And the labels might be able to cite 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalizes any attempt to circumvent copy-protection systems as a precedent for that interpretation. This disturbs Boucher, who is preparing legislation to expand consumers’ fair-use rights to digital content. Meanwhile, lawyers for the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) point out that the existing law gives manufacturers the right to make products that evade CD copy protection if it prevents legitimate playback of the discs that use it.

In a statement to the Congress and Administration, the HRRC said it “believes that any encoding of CDs that interferes with consumer recording rights preserved by the AHRA would constitute a violation of that law. Moreover, technologies that would make signals nonstandard should not be considered protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.”

It appears that CD copy protection is at least headed for debate — if not oversight — by the federal government. Boucher has asked the recording industry whether it will permit independent listening tests of the various systems — a move Macrovision has said it will seriously consider.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the government has weighed in on sound-quality issues. Back when most music listeners made copies on analog cassettes, the RIAA proposed that the CBS CopyCode system be included in all recorders and recorded audio media. The proposal was squelched by the government when tests done by Sound & Vision’s predecessor, Stereo Review, revealed that the CopyCode system audibly degraded the music.

As computers and portable compressed-audio players become ever more popular ways to listen to music, and as hard-disk-based music servers begin to proliferate, the issues raised by copy protection will undoubtedly become even thornier. But at the moment, any resolution seems as far away as ever.


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Meet The Schemes

SafeAudio
There are two different approaches to copy protection: main-channel and control-channel. “Main-channel systems alter the way the audio data are recorded on the disc,” explains Peter Newman, VP of engineering for Macrovision Europe. “Control-channel systems alter the data in the subcode channels, which are used for steering and error recovery. SafeAudio is a main-channel system.”

SafeAudio, which Macrovision codeveloped with TTR Technologies, introduces deliberate errors into both the audio data and the error-correction codes in the main channel. The protected CD can still play on a computer or CD player, which interpolate data to bridge the gaps using electronic guesswork, but the errors spoil the sound on any copy.

Macrovision contends that main-channel protection poses less of a risk of incompatibility than control-channel protection, which prevents a disc from playing at all in some existing players. But critics say that the necessary interpolations could have an audible effect because the player is constantly guessing at the corrupted data.

“Not so,” insists Newman. “The uncorrectable errors are so carefully sited, with such similar information on either side of the gap, that there is an accurate way to bridge the gap. The bridging is so tiny, so narrow, and so perfect that the human ear can’t detect it.”

Macrovision claims that SafeAudio discs will play on virtually all CD audio equipment and has opened its lab to demonstrate its ambitious compatibility-testing program. No other copy-protection developer has done so or even revealed how it tests for compatibility.

Cactus Data Shield (CDS)
Midbar Tech has patents for control-channel protection, which it might or might not be using as part of various technologies employed on CDS-protected discs. The company won’t explain its technologies, but every Cactus disc released so far prevents computers from playing the standard audio tracks on a CD by denying access to the disc’s Table of Contents.

In compensation, CDS-protected discs automatically install a software player from EverAd on the computer that lets users play a version of the album as a compressed music file. When you hold a Cactus-encoded disc’s play surface to the light at the correct angle, you can actually see two data areas, separated by a clear band where no data are written. The inner band is standard audio, supposedly playable on all standalone CD equipment; the outer band is the compressed music file.

The CDS system uses either a 32- or 44.1-kHz sampling rate at a 80- or 128-kilobits-per-second data transfer rate for its compressed files, compared with the CD standard’s 44.1-kHz sampling and 1.4-megabits-per-second data transfer. Midbar recently claimed that all known playback problems with standalone players had been resolved in the latest version of CDS, Cactus Data Shield 200.


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key2audio
The key2audio system, from Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (Sony DADC), prevents you from playing a protected disc on a computer, although a recently announced option, key2audio4PC, would let disc buyers download a version that’s locked to their specific machine. A nine-digit serial code on the disc unlocks access to the online files for downloading. You can copy the files to a blank CD — but that disc is then playable only on the computer where the copy was made.
If you send the files to another computer via the Internet, the recipient can’t play them. And if someone else gets access to the key code, he can’t download the files because the Web server knows they’ve already been downloaded.

According to Sony DADC, the music on key2audio discs is purely standard CD audio with none of the built-in uncorrectable errors typical of main-channel protection schemes. It also claims that key2audio discs will play “on nearly all hardware dedicated to playing audio CDs,” including home, mobile, and DVD players and videogame consoles. But the company won’t say if “nearly all” includes standalone CD recorders.

Although Sony DADC won’t detail how the key2audio system works, patents reveal that it uses a variety of methods. These include control-channel protection that modifies the timing data in the Q-subcode, which prevents computer drives from reading the disc. The altered data also provides the key needed to unlock the downloadable key2audio4PC files.

The patents also suggest that key2audio uses the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) employed by standalone CD recorders, and an executive at Sony DADC confirmed this. The presence of an SCMS “flag” indicating (falsely) that an original disc is a first-generation digital copy explains why you can’t make a digital copy of a key2audio title — like ’N Sync’s Celebrity — on a standalone recorder (see “Hands-On with Rogue Discs”).

The company recommends that key2audio licensees “inform record buyers about the use of copy protection.” But despite the company’s claim to have shipped 10 million key2audio discs in Europe, no such advisory has been reported except for the European release of Celebrity, which didn’t identify the type of copy protection used.

MediaCloQ
Patents haven’t yet been published for SunnComm’s MediaCloQ, so it’s hard to say exactly how it works, but computer access works similarly to key2audioPC. The disc itself won’t play in a computer, but it carries a unique identifier that allows the buyer
to download a version for playback on the registered machine. At the discretion of the content owner, transfer of the file to a single portable device is also possible — but the file can’t be transmitted beyond that.

SunnComm claims perfect compatibility with standard CD players, and so far no one has claimed to have any trouble with the single MediaCloQ release to date: Charlie Pride’s A Tribute to Jim Reeves (Fahrenheit). But that disc, the first known to be issued in the U.S. with copy protection but without a specific warning that it won’t play in PCs, is subject to a lawsuit in California. The complainant argues that she wasn’t adequately informed that the disc wouldn’t play in computers (the disclaimer merely said that the disc would play only in CD and DVD players) and that MediaCloq’s online registration requirements violate her right to privacy.

IFPI
This system might never see the light of day, sources at the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) say, for several reasons conceded in the patent. The system uses control-channel protection to upset a disc’s timing codes. The patent asserts that the protected discs would work “in the majority of audio CD players” but would disrupt computer copying. However, the system “also prevents legitimate usage such as the importation of data into portable players developed under the SDMI,” or Secure Digital Music Initiative, which was founded under the IFPI’s auspices. The patent is also frank in admitting that the system would prevent music playback on “high-quality systems such as the Meridian 800 Reference DVD/CD Player.”

Stephen A. Booth regularly covers software copy-protection and related technical and legal issues as senior editor of the industry newsletters Television Digest, Audio Week, and Consumer Electronics Daily.

 

Hi there,
Nice forum btw. Been looking for a place to find info on certain music recordings for ages. This has some great info ..thanks to all contributors. I will try and contribute also.
I feel very strongly about this 'protection' issue. Everyone is talking about wether these CD's play in certain machines, but the key issue should be , 'how does this protection technology effect the sound quality?'
The protection companies are very quiet about this issue...they love all this talk regarding 'no playback' (take it back to the shop)/ 'can't back my copy up'(what kind of argument is this?), because it is dead end stuff.
The sound quality issue is being left in the dark, which is a very bad sign for us guys.
Danny.