Stardate 20010928.1020 (On Screen): The recording industry's latest great idea for putting the MP3 genie back in the CD bottle is bi-modal CDs. First on the CD would be the classic "Red Book" audio as needed by standard CD players. Then there would a file-formatted section which contained all the same music in a computer-format which had "intellectual property protection" mechanisms built in. They can produce disks like that, though if they do then we're going back to the 40-minute disk, since there won't be room for 70 minutes on a CD this way. But it won't do them any good.
A large number of the CD drives sold now for computers permit access in raw mode, which is a straight block-addressed read that completely bypasses the operating system's directory services. The data which a CD player reads can be retrieved from one of these new CDs in raw mode, ignoring the protected versions entirely. If the data has Macromedia-style errors incorporated, it will be possible to make a pass through the data to remove it. Any error correction that standard CD players can do to remove the crap can be emulated digitally in a computer; it doesn't have to be real-time since you're only doing it once. Then the data could be compressed and redistributed as an MP3 file. It only takes one group to write the necessary software and distribute it, and then the whole world will have the capability. It only takes one person who owns such a hybrid CD to create the MP3 files, and then they can be distributed widely thereafter with file sharing programs. This genie won't fit back in the bottle.
As long as a copy protected CD can be played on a standard CD player, and as long a there exist CD drives for computers capable of raw reads, then it will be possible to defeat the copy protection on those CDs. (discuss)
