EMI and Sony-BMG revisit CD copy protection

June 23, 2005

GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us about this interesting story at The Register this morning. It appears that Sony-BMG and
EMI are indicating that the party is over for pirates (and legitimate customers
unfortunately) and they intend to implement some annoying new copy protection
"features" to their products.

The Sony-BMG SunnComm system uses a copy manager on a PC which creates a handover to the Windows Media DRM software that works with Windows media player, which then prevents further copying. This used to be easily bypassed, but now Sony-BMG has gone a step further and instead of trying to install the copy manager surreptitiously it tells the consumer it is doing it and if the consumer says no, it ejects the CD.

The Macrovision CDS 300 which EMI has
chosen has been available for about a year from Macrovision and it enables
new CD's to be burned, which themselves cannot be copied. What Macrovision
has done is take its old, rigid copy protection called CDS 100, which was
unpopular because the CDs didn't work with all players and never allowed
any copying, and make those the output of the new CDs when copied. The
copies also will not play on a PC, only the original will play on a
PC.When running on a PC, Macrovision will also add a piece of software
that will run as a copy manager in virtually the same way as the Sony-BMG
SunnComm technology.

This is going to go over like a lead balloon in the
marketplace. As suggested in the article, it could very well cause a backlash
and we may even see CD sales fall dramatically. The labels are caught between a
rock and a hard place until they accept that nowdays the purpose of a
CD has changed. Customers want to take these CD's and use them in a variety
of ways. Hinder any of these uses and it can result in a returned product or a
lost sale, or even a justification for some to download it off the Internet
instead of struggling with the physical product. At the same time, if labels
release products with no protection, then anything goes. Of course we all
know that one way or another, these tracks will hit the net. Tough situation for
them.

Source: The Register