Sony Adds New Copyright Method to CDs in 2003

Natoi writes "Sony is leaving Mac and **nix users out in the cold with their new copyright method called Label Gate CD copyright system. You'd have to be running Windows and use a Sony developed proprietary software to listen to CD's published by Sony starting next year." This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?

everyone loses

[Anonymous Coward]

More important than Mac and *nix users being left out in the cold are the millions who've bought MP3 players to listen to their music collection.

This will just encourage people to go find an analogue->Digital MP3 conversion of the CD on the internet; everyone loses.

I guess I'll never be buying another Sony CD if this goes through.

sony music? sony system.

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems a little extreme to me, since sitting at the computer just to listen to music is stupid. What about car stereos and high-fidelity CD players?
Well, I'm sure it'll be okay as long as you use some suitable hardware [sonystyle.com].
Who wants one market when you can have an entire horizontal?

Re:It plays in Cars and CD Players, too!

[warmcat]

S/PDIF (the optical and copper digital protocol) does have a bit in it which says if the content is allowed to be copied. Do the expensive soundcards pay any attention to this bit? I don't know. Can the bit be forced to '0' by a small CPLD? Yes.

This sure makes me want to be a Sony consumer

[bgfay]

Wow, I sure do want to buy some Sony discs now.

I can't wait for the music industry to implode. An abusive power (whether in goverment (old school) or coporate (new school)) must be subverted. Funny thing. I just went to the library yesterday from which I had ordered eight discs I've been wanting. Spent an hour or so last night ripping copies of them to give to myself as a holiday present.

Am I stealing? Yes, yes I am.
Do I feel badly about it? No, no I don't.
How come? Because the media companies have so far overstepped the boundaries of decency, that I have lost the ability to feel their pain.

Isn't there one executive at one of these companies who has the slightest idea or vision of how this is going to work out?

Finally, I agree with the poster who said simply that this will be hacked. It will indeed be hacked and it's likely that it will be hacked before the discs are widely available. Then the music will be on p2p and the system will continue to dissolve and fade away.

Outrageous

[Nexum]

If we had not become so used to being walked all over little by little by the record companies, this would be strongly and outrageously objected to by the affected communities. Imagine if we had not been introduced to the so far lame and piecemeal anti-copying/playing tech that exists at the moment, and Sony comes up with an announcement like this - there would be wide real-world public outrage!

To ostracise computing communities in this way is nothing short of disgusting - and it should be corporate responsibility to bring all under the same umbrella. Will this be a good thing or a bad thing for Sony? I do't know, but what I do know is that from the moment this technology is used Sony will have lost one CD-purchasing consumer (me) simply becasue of my choice of computing platform (Macintosh). Does this affect me? Well, slightly yes it does, but I am sure that if I want a song bad enough there will be a way for me to get it, but on the whole I'm hoping it affects Sony more than anyone else.

Mac users (and possible Linux users?) are a very media-based group of people, there are so many Mac-based graphic designers, film editors, 3d artists, animators etc. These creative people love music! The two go hand in hand! So what are these people going to do in the CD-store? Are they going to change their computing platform so they can listen to music on their machines, or simply not buy the (Sony) CD?

I simply don't get how this could be a *benefit* to Sony.

We should speak out about restrictive technologies such as these - is there a consolidated action group for such things? If so, where can I join?

-Nex

Re:It plays in Cars and CD Players, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

My card (a Terratec 24/96) does not. I am not even sure whether or not CD players set this bit. After all copying for private purposes is allowed.

Do you people even READ THE ARTICLE

[Anonymous Coward]

This is flatout lying. They are not REMOVING the audiotracks that are currently there. They are adding a SECOND set of tracks with DRM.

Next you're going to publish an article that says "Hollywood removes films, only sells extra stuff" because there's a 4CD set of LOTR.

I may not agree with Sony's copyright protection methodology, but after all, they are THEIR copyrights and they can do any stupid thing with them they want. And I wouldn't post an article here flat out LYING about what their doing, just because i think they are stupid.

Re:high-fidelity CD players

[mindstrm]

Heh.... actually
The CD format was developed as a medium-fidelity format... cheap, easy to mass produce, and good enough quality for the home user.

Only in later years after mass market acceptance did they start calling it "high fidelity"

5 players? One for each label?

[Flamesplash]

So from what I can tell, if each of the Big 5 use a similar scheme that means that if I want to play an album from each of them I would need _5_ players, since they aren't going to use an open standard or at least a closed shared one. I think this, more than anything, will turn people off. I do not use anything other than winamp to listen to my mp3's and I don't want to have to install 5 applications and also switch between those 5 to listen to my music.

Re:What you are seeing

[Kragg]

You're wrong. Picture this:

1) Sony [sony.com] develops copy protection that largely works (yes, yes, I know.)
2) Sony develop hardware [mp3daze.com] and software [pcmag.com] (for their other hardware)that supports it.
3) Artists start getting less money because recording labels [sonymusic.com] give them less royalties due to bad sales.
4) ???*
5) Profit. Massively.

Can you guess the blank? Horizontal markets are the way to go. Microsoft supports everything off of Windows sales. Conglomo's [title14.com] time has come. And its name is Sony. or microsoft. or nokia. or maybe samsung at a push.

*A Record label [sonymusic.com] offers them more, because it a) sells more due to hassle factor, and b) can partially support it from hardware revenues.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:whatever.

[jorleif]

Could someone explain to me how these people think? I mean they must know it will be hacked. At least the techies who actually create the products must know it will be hacked. So what's the point? Do they trust stupid laws like the DMCA to enforce their silly DRM systems?

What about ripping from the audio stream, is that illegal too? Does Sony 0wnz your audio output!? If not then this is still pretty pointless. One could of course argue that if it would be difficult enough to actually rip tracks most people would just pay for the music, but this is unlikely since the record labels don't control the distribution channels (the P2Ps) and therefore their distribution will initially be more difficult than its illegal counterpart.

Re:Just Desserts

[bgfay]

Nonsense. This isn't the end of the chain of events, more like the middle. To say that the end result of sharing/stealing music is that the users will not be able to play music on their computers is short-sighted. Of course DIGITAL music will be played on DIGITAL computers. Bits are bits even if they are encrypted, masked, or otherwise blocked by some system. Every encryption system is, to put it in overly simplified terms, a puzzle to be solved. There are those among us who love good puzzles and some of theose same folks like to listen to music while they solve those problems. the system will be broken. Music will continue to be sold for profit and shared/stolen for some time. I can't imagine just yet how the whole thing will end, but I know that it will not end with music being banned from computers. That doesn't fit with my idea of how the world works.

Re:What about the Clie?

[phillyclaude]

you joke, but it pretty much isnt the same sony. A corporation of this size has so many divisions that each has no clue what the others are doing.

Re:whatever.

[entrylevel]

Of course the programmers developing the technology know it will be hacked. The problem is, if they tell management that building a hackproof copy protection scheme is impossible, they might not have a job. "Find someone who doesn't think it's impossible!"

Don't you slashdotters understand yet? The music indsutry is trying to obsolete CDs as quickly as possible so that a more "protectable" format can be produced.

Re:Time to stop buying Sony then surely?

[reallocate]

Dream on. If every Unix and Mac user in the world never bought another Sony CD, I doubt Sony would notice. What would they lose? A few percentage points of the market? The Windows market is the only market they care about.

Re:whatever.

[Mr2cents]

I am also planning to stop buying CD's. I've just put all my CD's on my central fileserver (it's very handy and my dog can't eat my CD's lying around). If they prevent me from ripping, I'll be forced to look for other ways to do it.. No way I'm going back to swapping CD's.

Beat CD DRM for all time.

[dmaxwell]

What we need are utterly stupid CD data drives. The board on the drive will do nothing more than spin the cd, move the heads, and read and write data at the lowest possible level. Absolutely all functions of the drive should be implemented in software. If cdparanoia can control the every tiny thing that goes on in the drive then this sort of scheme is done. It will only take a few days for a new driver to be written every time another one of these schemes comes out. I wouldn't be surprised if EE students don't start hacking existing drives to behave in just this way. Saaaay, that's even better. Hack in an "utterly stupid" mode for direct ripper control.

Re:for once, this actually sounds REASONABLE

[bsane]

If this sounds reasonable to you its probably because you've lowered your expectations too much.

I own a mac which has the perfect music listening/organizing software. Even if (and they won't!!) Sony ports their app to OSX I would still have to switch between iTunes and Sony's app to listen to my music. This doesn't even cover my other legitimate uses that involve iTunes and a CD burner...

On the other hand I haven't bought anything made or published by Sony in over two years, so this won't affect me, yet.

Extraordinary Claims Require Coherant Evidendence

[JohnDenver]

I know the original saying is "Extraordinary Claims Requires Extraordinary Evidendence", but in your case, you're leaving the rest of us scratching our heads. You're assuming we know too much, so I've listed some questions to help you elaborate.

1. Are you partly saying because Sony manufactures hardware and the copy protection, it will be picked up and implemented?

2. Which SPECIFIC horizontal markets are you talking about, and WHY are they the way to go?

3. If Microsoft supports everything off of Windows sales, are you saying Sony will support everything off thier CD sales???

4. What does your Conglomo link mean? It looks like a fan website. HOW does this tie into Sony?

5. A Record label offers them more? What's them?

6. What's the blank before "Profit. Massively."?

I miss the old Sony

[Ldir]

Sony used to be such an innovative engineering company. They made exceptional products of the highest quality with all the cool features that customers craved. Sadly, they've lost their drive for excellence, becoming just another marketing-driven company churning out me-too equipment.

Their remaining innovation seems mostly directed at dumping crippled products on their customers. They push proprietary "standards" like SDMI and invent new ways to lock up the tripe they press on CDs. And, just like Microsoft, if there's an industry standard, it's a good bet Sony is pushing a competing technology.

Sony still lets the engineers out once in a while, to create products like the Aibo. It has little commercial significance, but it keeps their image polished. In their profit-making lines, they're coasting on their reputation. They still command premium prices, but the value behind the logo is gone. Substance and performance have been replaced with frills and flash.

Like most companies, some Sony products are very good, some are junk, most are so-so. Unfortunately, even the decent stuff may have proprietary bells and whistles that increase costs or limit compatibility. The Sony brand used to top shoppers' buying lists. Now, unless you know a product well, the Sony brand is best avoided.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.

Not to promote piracy but...

[dogas]

All of these cd copy protections could be defeated using a virtual audio cable. [nstu.nsk.su] That's good for me because I like to fit 10-12 albums (that I ALREADY OWN) onto 1 cd for my rio volt player in my car.

already have one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I think this kind of protection already exsists?

recently my gf bought Bjork greatest hits album, with a small sticker saying that it only played on windows PCs and audio CDplayers.
It contains a datatrack with a player.exe , which complains about some missing components when run under wine.
The audio does not play on my newer pc with dvd/cdrom drive, but it does work on my old k6-2 with an aopen cdrom drive. Even managed to rip it to some oggs. Couldn't resist...

As a musician...

[KoReE]

I understand the concerns of wanting to copy protect CDs. The thing that this industry doesn't understand is, the ability to copy CDs doesn't make their records sell less. In fact, I've bought more CDs because of mp3s, oggs, and copied CDs that people have given me, than from any other introduction method ever. However, this is getting rediculous. It's gone away from copy-protection, and turned into a serious violation of fair use. I haven't bought a CD from a national distributor in over a year out of protest of the RIAA. And I plan on keeping it that way. The music industry can suck it. Unless they relax their copy protection, and lower their prices, they can kiss my ass. I urge the rest of you to boycott as well.

Yo Yo Ma

[Anonymous Coward]

Dos this mean that Yo Yo Ma -- Sony recording artist and Apple spokesperson -- won't be doing ads for the iPod?

Major label music suX0rs anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure glad that pretty much 100% of the music that I listen to is either published and released by the artists themselves, is made availiable for download by said artists, or is sold on reasonably-priced CDs from small independent labels.

All of this major label posturing won't affect my music buying or listening one bit, since I honestly can't remember the last time I bought a CD or even listened to an "artist" on a label of Sony's ilk.

PM

Re:This sure makes me want to be a Sony consumer

[sean23007]

Yes, it will be hacked, but the system will not dissolve and fade away. It will continue to get worse and worse and more draconian until the CD as we know it is replaced by something that simply cannot be read by a CD-ROM drive, and cannot be opened in a computer. Then, we would not be able to hack it, and we would all have to purchase new stereos. It would work, because people have been raised to believe that they have to buy new things. As a whole, we are a very small percentage of the market, and they simply do not care about us. Which, of course, makes it interesting that they are spending so much money trying to thwart us, when so many of us wouldn't spend our money on them anyway. Maybe they just need to up their expenses on something they know they won't make money on so they can "prove" to Congress that we the geeks are costing them billions.

+1 Paranoid, -1 Conspiratorial.

Why do they even try?

[defile]

The first download of the electronic key that goes with a CD is free. SME plans to charge about A5200 (US$1.64) per song for the second time onwards, Ide said. Users cannot opt to just decode one song from a CD, but have to purchase the key for the entire CD, he said.

Why are they even trying? Off the top of my head I can get at this data by using...

• LD_PRELOAD: Load a wrapper for write(). If the file descriptor is the audio device, record the data to a file. By far the simplest and most effective approach.
• ptrace(): Attach to the player, capture write() calls to the audio device, saving the raw data to a file instead. Trickier but cooler, I think.
• Load a kernel module which intercepts the write() system call against the audio device. Some of these may already exist for dealing with realplayer, etc.
• Write a bogus audio driver that saves to a file instead of communicating with a sound card. Tutorials on doing this exist and are pretty simple to achieve even for novice C programmers.
• Wait for some h4x0rs to discover how the content is encoded, capture the key as it's sent over the network (I doubt they're sophisticated enough to guard for man-in-the-middle attack, and if so, see above for ways to get at data). Use the key to decrypt the content at your leisure.
• Since smart people aren't working for this cause, their peon programmers likely developed an in-house cipher which sucks ass. Wait for a teenager to crack the cipher and post his/her results.

Oh, what's that? The player is Windows only? That's OK, use WINE to translate the Windows API calls into easy-to-tinker with UNIX calls. Same steps above apply under WINE you know (and why stop there? Think about Counter-Strike cheats)

Hmm, it doesn't run under WINE? No problem, VMWare to the rescue!

Oh, you're not a programmer you say? That's alright. Just hook your sound card output to a recorder instead.

Or put a tape recorder up to your speakers for that retro teenage 80s style pirate action.

Basically, it has been cracked before it has even been released. It is hopeless and will just inconvenience casual users at best. If anything, casual users will now start seeking ways to rip the content, causing them to become better acquainted with how to break copy control.

Dot Mac, perhaps?

[wirefarm]

Maybe Compact Discs as a distribution medium are obsolete.

I've been wondering when the price of a .Mac subscription is going to include access to real music, downloadable into iTunes and iPods.
After all, they have a good deal of the music producing community's loyalty. Maybe they'll team up with a few open-minded artists and do the promotion and distribution that way. Maybe they'll find new artists - who knows?

I use a Mac almost exclusively now, having just given away the last of my Sony laptops. Yet, I don't think I'll be lacking for music any time soon.
I'm certainly not going to buy any more Sony equipment so that I can listen to Sony 'artists' on some POS Sony software. I mean, have you ever *used* Sony-produced software? Utter crap, every program I've ever used of theirs. They do make really nice hardware, though, once you get Linux installed...

Apple has shown that MP3 is a format that is viable for their users though while not totally secure, at least inconvenient to pass around. Sure, there are hacks to let you copy music from a friend's iPod onto your Mac, but few people really do that, IMHO. The thing is, Apple hasn't alienated their customers by making what you buy less accessible, instead, you get a gentle reminder - 'Don't steal music.' It's subtle, but I think it has an effect that reduces theft without making honest people feel like criminals.

How many CDs worth of music a year would it take to justify paying $99 a year for .Mac? 10? What if there were 10 a week? I'd be on it in a heartbeat.
Imagine the .Mac subscription lets you access the album for as long as it's 'featured' on .Mac - if you really like it, you pay a bit more and have it in your 'permanent collection' on their servers.
What if Janis Ian or someone put an album of MP3s and Quicktime clips on Apple's servers and you could play them as much as you wanted, forever for $8? You could copy it down to your iTunes library and listen as you like off-line. Would you even bother to burn it to CD? Well, maybe if you want to listen in your car...

Think what a boon it would be to emerging or forgotten artists. There's a lot more talent out there than just Lil Kim or N'Sync or Aerosmith - a lot of real musicians who actually make their own music and do it on Macs - I bet more than a couple would jump at the chance to sell directly to Mac users. I'm sure they'd be making a lot more money.

Of course, this is all just speculation and wishful thinking...
(Either that, or Steve Jobs needs to change his email password to something other than 'sN@pple'...) ;-)

Cheers,
Jim

Oh, and if you read my site, I have a short bit about returning a copy-protected CD to Tower Records. Please add your thoughts...

Re:Read the article before posting

[mobilityguy]

Portable devices are a whole 'nother thing. You can use them a number of times "set by the music company", as you point out. After that, what? Pay another $20 to freshen your secure key? Move on to the next artist Sony wants you to love for six months, then forget?

Instead of treating technology companies as an adversary, the media companies should learn from them. Software faced exactly the same copy problems in the 80s. The media was smaller, but so were the files. Microsoft, Lotus and all the rest tried every kind of copy protection that was possible then, including physical lock-out keys and dial-in software authorization. Thanks to very negative consumer response, everyone but very high-end software vendors ended up deciding open was better.

As far as I can tell MS and Lotus didn't waste away, and smaller companies didn't complain about having their creativity stifled by rampant software piracy - at least not unless they were having their clock cleaned by some competitor's product (or unfair trade practice - but that's a whole different kind of crime.)

Of course, they didn't have the DMCA, so they couldn't threaten to put seventh graders in jail for copying 1-2-3.

Here's an idea...

[UncleRage]

What if Rio, Nomad, etc.. included some code in the firmware that refused to play any music distrubuted by Sony?

Think they'd get the hint?

----
The difficulty of a system is only comparable to the ignorance of the end-user.

A little thing called ANALOG IN and OUT

[Monofilament]

Well if everybody is really concerned about making a copy of a CD.. I know its a damn pain.. but how about a little thing called ANALOG OUT and ANALOG IN on most sound cards... I mean there really is no way that the CD can tell that your analog out is not going to a set of speakers... Thus you just port it into another record.. record the songs through analog and some good sound cables and save it as a wav file.. then make your own CD.. all this technology is readily available... I know it sucks to do it this way .. and it sucks even more that stupid music companies think ill thought ideas like this will solve their piracy problems. But really people.. it sounds like a lot of people think these schemes really bring an end to the copying of their CD's of making of MP3's onto their computers from the CD's they buy..

Re:whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder just how long the record labels are going to survive before they figure out that they, not just their technology, are obsolete.

They aren't. Right now they are focusing on the copying aspect of music, but they do not realize that every way of playing music is a way to make a copy. The real problem is not the ability to copy (this has been around for a *long* time), it is the ability to distribute. Essentially, they are competing with non-profit non-centralized distribution networks. They can't possibly compete with free.

What they ought to do is get into the business of providing quality: they sell you high quality multi-channel versions of music. They might charge $5 for the liscence and then $0.60 each for up to 5 copies of the disc, with multiple HQ formats available, as well as extras. These are the sorts of things that p2p networks will probably not provide, and it's where they stand to make some money. It's just not going to be the obscene amount of money they've made in the past.

Evolution

[VB]

So, one big company who happens to own copyrights usurped from artists in exchange for basically nothing with the means to production is trying to protect those rights, still...

• It only runs on Windows, but Linux/UNIX users will crack it; just wait a week, or two;
  
• It theoretically won't affect consumer CD players; just wait for a complaint, or two;
  
• CDs still cost $20 and you only get a decent song, or two;
  

Reality check: Sony doesn't have creative product and thus has nothing to sell. Eventually, artists will start to make money directly from their fans because the industry has made it so damn prohibitive to buy consumer-directed "art" that the consumer just gets fed up with all the controls over their media playback devices and media. Quit buying that shit!

There is so much more quality stuff with so fewer strings attached avaiable by independents that wasting time in Sam Goody's is just that: a waste of time. Give your money to the artist and buy directly from them or via CD Baby [cdbaby.com] or MP3.com [mp3.com]. Quit buying Sony, BMG, Virgin CDs and guess what: CD prices will drop to about $5 for 15 tracks and people will quit stealing it. Worse case scenario is you get to hear something original and the artist gets to eat...

protected CDs and CDEX

[EngMedic]

I remember reading an article on CNN about a week ago (the link is no longer on their page) about "high quality, but unfriendly" CD's....which basically goes along with this topic. They mentioned a few of the DRM techniques that different companies are using, bla, bla, bla... but here's the funny thing. One of the CD's pictured to have a new form of content protection was Linkin Park's "Reanimation", a remix of their first CD. I went out and bought that CD about 3 months ago, came home, popped it in my computer, kicked up CDex, and burned the tracks to mp3 at 320 kbps. took me about 4 minutes. then i shelved the CD. (i was packing for college, and i prefer not to have my CD collection subject to the perils of a dorm :) ) How is that copy protection, again? or does CDex just have l33t skillz?

Re:whatever.

[Jucius Maximus]

"Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?"

There have been some reports of DRM speakers that decode the sound inside the speaker. But I can't find them right now.

But seriously, I understand what you mean. No matter how hard they try, we can just put a microphone up to the speaker and record it with a slight degradadion in quality and then digitize it and it's good forever.

"I wonder just how long the record labels are going to survive before they figure out that they, not just their technology, are obsolete."

Ultimately, I believe that that is the real point here. They will last as long as joe consumer doesn't realise that old music distribution methods are obsolete.

But they're giving the music away anyway

[NewtonsLaw]

I have a rather nice collection of music tracks (on MP3) and music videos (in MPEG) that I've collected over the past couple of years.

I have all the latest top-10 tracks (that interest me) and lots of other less mainstream stuff as well.

And guess what -- I haven't bought a music CD for years.

Nor have I ever used a P2P network for getting this stuff.

Nor have burned copies of someone else's CDs

Just how did I accumulate this wonderful collection of music and videos?

I recorded them from free-to-air broadcasts, that's how.

Given the fidelity limitations of MP3, an FM stereo or stereo TV broadcast is more than the equal of most CD rips.

Now, if the recording industry want to sell public performance rights to broadcasters, and if the likes of Sony want to sell me the gear I need to record from these radio and TV broadcasts -- how on earth can they complain later that I don't buy their CDs?

Just throw a TV/radio tuner card in your PC and you too can quickly accumulate a great music collection at no cost -- and without the hassles of circumventing CD copy-protection or getting caught file-swapping over the Net.

So what's the recording industry going to do about it? Make recording radio/TV transmissions illegal?

I don't think so.

Let's face it -- people have been recording music (and movies) from FTA broadcasts for years. Maybe they're just starting to realise that any business model which relies on selling something people are already getting for free might be fatally flawed.

Re:Copies vs originals

[Jucius Maximus]

"This days i trust the printed (legal) cd's better than the copies. They are usually better material quality and they play everywhere. But with all this crap they are pushing into the printed cd's, it is going to be a good policy to just avoid them and trust the copies. If you come across a copy of a music cd, you know that the person who copied it made the effort to remove the restrictions placed on it. Therefore in the future, there will be less trouble with copies than with original discs!"

That is abolsutely right. My mom just bought a Univeral disc and lo and behold it was copy-protected. (All universal discs have been like this for some time.) The first track had a bunch of static at the start. I knew she would bring one home sooner or later.

What do I do? I put the CD into the stereo, play the thing, and pipe the output into my machine and record a clean copy.

Now how often do you think we listen to the original?

VMware won't work

[yerricde]

If you use a product such a vmware, it's a simple matter to start up windows in a virtual machine with a virtual sound card i.e. vsound.

Recent versions of Windows Media running on Windows ME and Windows XP will not play copy-restricted audio over unsigned drivers [pineight.com]. The driver for VMware audio is not signed.

"So apply to get the driver signed." Microsoft won't sign a driver unless it turns off all cleartext digital outputs when playing copy-restricted audio, which means that the virtualizer would have to open a Secure Audio Path on the host operating system.

"Then just use an older Windows OS." And risk newer versions of WiMP not installing.

"Then just use an older WiMP." And lose support for new proprietary codecs such as Sony's, which is (knowing Sony) probably based on MiniDisc ATRAC3.

"Then try something else." And risk doing several years of hard time in prison the next time you step into the UK or the USA, both of which have banned circumvention of access restrictions.

Re:Read the article before posting

[MattCohn.com]

So, they give us a disk with normal, unencripted audio and some audio locked down to only playing in their system. Hmmmm.... I don't know about you, but I'm sure there is gotta be a way to play the NORMAL, UNENCRIPTED audio over the PC. And once we have that, there is a way to rip it to ogg/wav/mp2/mp3/whatever. Sony, you are trying to lock out the computer savvy audience using methods developed to keep the 'average listner' from burning/ripping. Well, 'average listners' DON'T burn/rip. COMPUTER SAVVY listners burn/rip. And COMPUTER SAVVY people are not only going to not accept this, they are going to break it. And once that is broken, all it takes is one rip to open it up to EVERYONE for downloading.

(In short) Sorry. Nope.

human ears

[yerricde]

Only in later years after mass market acceptance did they start calling it "high fidelity"

However, mass market acceptance wasn't the only factor in calling 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo "high fidelity". The field of psychoacoustics advanced greatly at that time, and it became apparent that DC-22 kHz frequency response with 110 dB dynamic range and 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio (the difference is due to noise-shaped dithering, which was also developed around that time) was enough to fool the best of human ears.