BMG has licensed a new copy protection to protect their music CD's.
2003-07-01 23:15:28 News.com
This time they think they found a way to let someone copy the CD three times, and then someone wouldn't be able to copy it anymore. At least not with the build in software on the CD.
The software lets listeners transfer music from a CD to a computer, but prevents them from then distributing that music to file-sharing services. It also allows music companies to include on the disc extras such as artist information, song lyrics, bonus tracks, video clips and special offers.
Songs on a MediaMax CD-3 can be uploaded only three times, and software built into the disc prevents listeners from copying or sharing the music.
The whole article doesn't explain how the copy protection actually works, but as far as I can tell the protection is actually in the software. So if you have a good CD player that can ignore the data-track you should be able to play it with any cd-player software.
As long as someone can play their CD on a normal CD-player though then you can always use the oldest trick in the world: play it on your stereo, put the output into the input of your computer and record everything that is played on the input line of your computer. There you have a great copy (depending on the quality of your stereo and the quality of your sound card) on your computer to play around with.
You can read the whole article here.
It might make someone wonder though, if there eventually will be a record company providing MP3's on the music CD themselves as a CD-Extra feature, People will be able to copy it to their own computer and play it without having their CD in the CD player. It might actually get people to buy more CD's, people wouldn't have to convert it to an MP3 themselves or download the whole album online to be able to play it on their own computer, It would signify that that record company acknowledges that they can't win the fight with copy protections and instead of fighting with all their might, decided to give more features and service to their real customers and hopefully make them happier.
Personally I highly doubt that providing the MP3's to the buyers of the CD would hurt sales, it might actually increase sales. What do you think?
AI
