TheRegister has an interview with the CEO of TTR Technologies, that has developed SafeAudio for Macrovision. The technology that should prevent consumers ripping their CD's to MP3's files is not widely used yet, but according to the CEO this could change in the future.
Not very much intresting information in this article, but it's always fun to read how these people try to justify their technology.
But it's not just the freedom to make personal copies that worries CD buyers. Since SafeAudio intentionally corrupts the music data stored on an encrypted CD, surely that reduces the lifespan of the disc? CD players incorporate sophisticated error correction algorithms to eliminate the noise introduced by scratches and muck on a disc's surface. But beyond a certain level of noise, such mechanisms cease to work. Adding noise, as SafeAudio does, would seem to bring that point closer. |
Tokayer claims not. SafeAudio changes the music data at the bit level, flipping a fraction of a disc's billions of 1s and to 0s. That "very subtle" degree of data corruption, while enough to block an attempt to copy a track onto a hard drive, won't affect the quality of the playback or affect the disc's physical playability. The noise induced by dirt and scratched easily drowns out the noise inherent in the copy-protected data.
And he's quick to point out that the number of discs taken back to stores during last summer's testing in California was no higher than labels would expect from unprotected CDs. That said, no one knew which discs were protected, and behind Tokayer's comment that some listeners tend to hear non-existent audio artefacts and so reject discs they know have copy-protection there's a real sense that it might be better to keep users in the dark. That may not be Tokayer's view, but it's not hard to imagine his customers coming to that conclusion.
Source: TheRegister
