Sea lion Dye-one 1:CD-ROM unit 0

Any Celine Dione fans out there? Don’t try playing her latest CD on your PC – not without sticky tape, marker pen and some luck.

The Canadian songstress, she of once crooked teeth and the execrable signature tune from Titanic, is signed to the Sony label – and don’t forge that Sony makes CD-ROM units and CD-RW units. That’s quite important, in the scheme of things.

More to the point, she’s got a new silver platter out. On the Sony label. It’s called A New Day Has Come – and I wouldn’t have the thing in the house.

Now, that’s not because I don’t like Celine Dione’s singing (I don’t particularly enjoy it, as it happens) but because I like to listen to the odd CD while I’m working at my PC, and Sony, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to copy protect this one. No problem there, you might think, but in so doing, it’s actually stopped the thing from playing on the very devices it sells into the PC market – you’ve guessed it – CD-ROM and CD-RW units.

It seems that Sony is a little troubled by the idea of people bunging CDs into their PCs and ripping MP3 versions of tracks to either squirt onto their MP3 players or, horror of horrors, to share with the world and his wife over the Internet.

As far as the latter is concerned, that’s almost fine by me. I don’t agree with copyright theft in any way shape or form – the likes of Napster and other music sharing networks left me cold from day one. Given that my living depends on my copyright, you can quite understand my attitude, I’m sure. Likewise, I make tracks my band performs available via our website (www.strange-brew.com) – it’s not as if I’m against giving things away.

But as far as squirting tracks I’ve bought legitimately onto an MP3 player (or even a backup CD) goes, I can see no legitimate reason why I should be prevented from doing that by some weird form of copy protection. I’ve paid my money, and I want to listen to the tracks, when I want, and where I want. That Sony has decided to prevent me from so doing is, I think, not a wise move on their behalf.

How it works

It turns out that Sony has used corrupt data to create its anti-piracy measure. There’s a duff track on the very rim of the “playable” portion of the CD. If your CD ROM unit sees that, the whole disk, effectively, does not exist. So it won’t play, you can’t rip tracks off it, you can’t copy it, and, if you’ve got an iMac, you may end up sending your machine in for emergency repair (there are more details on this here).

However, it seems that couple of German hackers have got round the protection system by – would you believe – obscuring the track with a chunk of sticky backed plastic. The same thing can be done with an opaque marker pen, it would appear.

This may not be the only CD which could cause the problems. A number of CDs from Sony-owned companies such as Epic and Columbia may also pose a threat. These include the soundtrack for Star Wars Episode II and discs from Shakira, Jennifer Lopez and Destiny's Child. The CDs carry a small warning stating 'Will not work on PC/Mac'.

Well, that’s cold comfort – how many people use their PCs for producing superb sound via a 5.1 system complete with sub-woofer? Loads, I’d reckon, way more than you might think. (Actually, I do have a good handle on this. A few years ago I was engaged in providing support for a mate who had a small PC making company. You’d be amazed at the number of calls I got purely because he and his technicians had a habit of forgetting to connect the CD unit to the sound card, and folks couldn’t get their Deep Purple CDs to play).

So what next?

I think Sony has dropped a clanger here. Bottom line is that folks will do their level best to find their way round any copy protection techniques that they may decide to use, and they’ll find that the more knowledgeable hackers and hackerettes will make their methods widely known. Otherwise anti-pirate folks will end up using these techniques to get non-protected versions of their legitimately bought CDs onto a format that they can use in any of their equipment – including their MP3 players. I’d be very surprised, also, if iMac users didn’t have something to say about it.

The real irony is that, according to reports, Celine Dione is an iMac user herself! Forgive me while I fall about laughing…

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David Dorn