Copy-protected CDs: Anti-piracy or inconvenient?
By James Bickera
Gannett News Service
Last year, Music City Records released "A Tribute to Jim Reeves," a CD from country music legend Charley Pride.
The CD didn't look different from other CDs. But it was the first music CD released worldwide that would not play in a PC.
The disc was manufactured using MediaCloQ, created by Phoenix-based SunnComm. MediaCloQ is among the new technologies aiming to diminish illegal music duplication.
The goal of audio copy protection is to prevent a user from copying or "ripping" songs from the CD to his PC hard drive. Once songs are on the hard drive, they can be shared via the Internet.
While technologies differ, they all try to trick the PC into thinking it is looking at a CD-ROM, rather than a music CD.
CD-ROM devices are digital, so they scrutinize every single bit of data on a disc. If something is not in the right place, it stops whatever the PC is doing.
CD players convert digital information into analog. Analog devices skip over bits of garbage data, so the players keep playing.
The result of the newest technology: a CD, peppered with small errors to prevent copying. It plays fine in your stereo but won't work properly in PCs.
Sony's proprietary format, called Key2audio, has been put in place on about 10 million discs worldwide, showing up on releases by Celine Dion, Shakira, Destiny's Child and Jennifer Lopez.
Another product is SafeAudio, developed by TTR.
The side effects of copy protection are usually benign — gibberish audio or songs that can't be ripped — but they can be more troublesome. Some Macintosh users have said some protected discs freeze their machines.
The European edition of Dion's album, "A New Day Has Come," was made using Key2audio protection. The CD bore a warning urging users not to play the disc in their PC or MP3-compatible car stereo.
"That doesn't necessarily absolve the record label in the consumer's mind of the responsibility for what might happen to their PCs or car stereos," said Aram Sinnreich, senior analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix.
Noam Zur, vice president of Midbar, estimates that more than 16 million copy-protected CDs have been released worldwide.
Record labels seem to be betting that digital audio copy protection will curtail piracy, which they blame, in part, for declining record sales.
But even record industry executives acknowledge that consumers expect to be able to play CDs on a variety of devices. "We want to be confident that any type of copy protection would allow the CD to be able to be played on computers, DVD players, CD players, etc.," said Gary Himelfarb, president of RAS Records and a board member of the Association for Independent Music.
