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Monday, January 5
Christopher's Kerfuffles And Miscellaneous Adventures With Cactus Copy-Protected CDs (DIE WARNER BROS., RIAA)

So...


...For Christmas I received, amongst other things, the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album (not the greatest fan but I'll listen to some of their stuff).

I look at the CD... And am utterly disappointed to find that it's a Cactus-protected Warner Bros. DISC (cause it doesn't technically qualify for the Compact Disc standard as it doesn't meet the internationally-standardised Red Book criteria etc)... And I then set about to copy the disc.


I met with a few problems - namely that my DVD burner likes to crash my PC after trying to access the disc (strike one), my plain DVD drive just picks up the first two tracks as audio, the rest as data, and thinks that all tracks from track 3 are 1minute 36 long AND stops playing track 1 and 2 after about 20 seconds (strike 2)... By this point I'm starting to get juuuuuust a little annoyed. If this was purchased legitimately, don't I have a right as the end-consumer to protect my (or my Mum's) investment by making a copy for private purposes to avoid irreparable damage to the original? I copy ALL of my albums to my PC so I can keep the originals nice and neat in their jewel cases without scratching them all the time - and you're telling me that the record company is denying me this RIGHT to make sure that money isn't wasted (more than it is)?


Utter cobblers I say. The record companies should go to hell I say, because I wandered around the house for a few minutes and then decided to try the disc in my Dad's laptop, which has a fairly good combi-DVD/CDRW drive.


In goes the CD, up loads Exact Audio Copy, and up comes the tracklisting - entirely correct, with all the tracks, tracklengths and indices in their right places. So ok, I had a few problems with the initial copying (I had to tweak the EAC options to avoid a nice gap in the audio where the Cactus error correction codes are deliberately corrupted to fool PC disc drives), but after enabling the good old Paranoid mode in EAC, the tracks were being ripped fine and I'm now listening to MP3s of the first 6 tracks on the album - only another 10 to go.


The record companies have a problem - ironically, older disc drives (and some drives which are made which can intentionally ignore these corrupted subcodes on discs and just read off the audio as normal) will always be able to bypass whatever corruption that Cactus comes up with. They can't go so far as to stop people listening on their normal CD players, becuase then even less people would buy the albums than at the moment. So they're scuppered.


Long Live Fair Usage. Also, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation site, which has news, updates and insight into issues just like this. Digital Rights Management, the DMCA and filesharing are more hot topics investigated and discussed on this site run and contributed to by volunteers... A recommended bookmark in your collection.


Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 1/05/2004 03:33:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 107331678240713787·
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