Sony to start copy-protecting US CD releases from early 2005

December 17, 2004

Sony is set to start copy-protecting its music CDs early next year following experiments with an anti-copy technology by First 4 Internet. They have successfully used this technology on recent prerelease discs.

Sony has
been aiming to copy protect all its music for quite a while now, but have
decided against it until they got a solution that is compatible with all
playback equipment. On the other hand, Macrovision and
Sunncomm have copy protected various discs without fully considering playability issues, thus resulting in consumer backlashes when a few CD players could not play their discs. This new technology by First 4 Internet aims to give universal playback on both PCs and regular CD players while still preventing any ripping or copying.

First 4 Internet started working on disc protection technology since 2001 and its technology claims to protect the disc content with strong encryption while still giving complete playback to standard CD players. They claim that high profile CDs using the protection in the review / demo stage have not had their protection broken. ThunderJon used our news submit to send in the following
news:

A new kind of copy-protected music CD will likely hit U.S. shelves early next year, as record label SonyBMG experiments with a technology created by British developer First 4 Internet, according to sources familiar with the companies.

Several major music labels have already used a version of the British company's technology on prerelease compact discs distributed for review and other early-listening purposes, including on recent albums from Eminem and U2.

The releases for the retail market, expected early in 2005, will be the first time the Sony music label issues copy-protected CDs in the U.S. market, although the company's other divisions have done so in other regions. BMG, Sony's new corporate sibling, has been more aggressive, with a handful of protected CDs released last year.

CEO, First 4 InternetA SonyBMG representative declined to comment on the plans. First 4 Internet Chief Executive Officer Mathew Gilliat-Smith confirmed that his company plans to release a consumer version of its technology with one major label in the United States, but he declined to identify the label.

Gilliat-Smith said his company has been waiting to improve its technology. Better-known companies Macrovision and Sunncomm have seen sporadic--and sometimes controversial--use of their products on CDs released around the world.

"We're not keen to rush," Gilliat-Smith said. "We have always focused on a high level of protection, but we've waited until there aren't any playability issues."

Read the full story here.

It is not clear how they could use strong encryption on the music tracks while still offering playback to standard CD players since there is no encryption supported in the CD-Audio standard. On the other hand, it seems like they use some sort of mutlisession tweaking to hide the CD audio and have DRM audio tracks in the 2nd session for PC playback.

Finally while they claim complete playback, I doubt these discs would work too well with CD players based on CD-ROM technology. For example, some new Hi-Fi's, car stereos and portable CD players support MP3 discs as well as multisession discs. If the disc does use malformed sessions to hide the audio, then these players would likely give issues. However, if the disc relies on an autorun executable to automatically hide the audio session, then they would be susceptible to the 'shift' key attack.

ThunderJon wrote: If you can play it... you can copy it. When are they gonna realize that audio CDs just are not secure?

Feel free to discuss and find out more about copy protection measures in our Copy Protection Discussion Forum.

Source: C|net News - Music