CD copy protection company SunnComm Technologies said Wednesday said it has agreed to buy another firm to help move music antipiracy efforts to a new level.

The company has struck an agreement to purchase the United Kingdom-based Darknoise Technologies, which claims to have technology that can guard against people copying CDs in even the most old-fashioned ways.

Unlike existing CD copy protection, which tries to make CD music files invisible or unreadable to computers and other copiers, Darknoise actually modifies the audio of the songs slightly. If those songs are then copied--even by holding a tape recorder in front of a stereo speaker--the formerly inaudible Darknoise addition becomes audible and makes the copy unlistenable, the company claims.

"This stuff works," SunnComm Chief Executive Officer Peter Jacobs said. "The science is real. You can't hear it when (a piece of music) is being used properly, and you can do nothing but hear it when a song is copied improperly."

Complete Story

Do these guys never learn or what? Here, let me make it clearer:

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A WAY!!!

Macrovision worked for a while. Now I can get a VCR and a DVD player that will strip Macrovision off and give me a nice clean signal to record to a VCR. Same thing will happen here. Especially today, thanks to DSP. A piece of computer software will be able to filter out the song from the noise.

The key is not to prevent people from making unauthorised copies, but to give a good enough incentive not to.

There is no possible way you can keep it from recording if you hold a tape recorder up to the speaker! These people have lsot there minds!

There is no poosible way you can keep it from recording if you hold a tape recorder up to the speaker! These people have lsot there minds!

fine i wont buy it anyway so do what you want with it. if you want me to buy music it better be untampered with not tamper proof

I agree ShinGodConvoy. I cannot see how that works. but if it does there will be a way around this. nothing is full proof.

In other words, they are admitting to changing the music that was originally meant for the recording. Adding noise to it. Ok, first they amp it up so there are no highs and lows, then they add more noise to it...yep, gonna go buy me a brannew riaa produced cd, so my ears can bleed and I can go deaf...

Hey, doesn't a tape recorder reproduce what it hears? If the tape recorder "hears" the noise, couldn't our ears hear it too? Whatever, I'll still bypass their crap. The hackers will give us the tools.

Key word in that statement is improperly copy it. There is nothing they can do to keep people from finding a propure way. So to mention I really don't think people will like this.

Darknoise??? What kinda science fiction is that. Noise that you can't hear but a tape recorder can. That makes no sense what so ever. If it was outside of the human ear's range but not the recorder it would be recorded as the same range on the recorder, and we still wouldn't hear it when we replayed it. I would defently not buy any of that crap. I doubt many other people would either.

"Key word in that statement is improperly copy it."

That one jumps out at you. I don't see how such a trick will have much affect on raw identical CDs being made form it. Its interesting how thier flagship example is for a recording method no one in thier right mind would ever use to day. Totaly absent is any talk of direct coping which it will be up against. As for the people that think such a couldn't work at all I would have to disagree. It would most likly be simmilar to the affect of trying to watch a recording of a TV. Where the frams catch durring redraws and have clashing sincing. Causing all sorts of odd visuals. Same could be true for sound if done right. Although I bet there are a few people that could notice the noise in the original copy and they might not be hot on buying a flawed product

"This stuff works," SunnComm Chief Executive Officer Peter Jacobs said."

And would you all like to know why it works so well boys and girls? Because no one will buy it.

Morons.

why do those idiots gets so excited about a product sceme that has about much worth as the music it's put on, I can't for the life of me understand any company that puts as much effert to keep consumers from their product as possible would be in business.
I thought when your in business of making products for consumers you want them to buy it right why the he!! do they insist on making it so people don't buy it. Oh well on with the boycott it just gives us more incetive to.

Darknoise appear to have introduced white noise to the recording which when resampled using a lossy codec combines to form audible noise. This would be particularly effective when targeted at a single compression algorithm. However i cant see it having any effect on an analog recording device.

"why do those idiots gets so excited about a product sceme that has about much worth as the music it's put on, I can't for the life of me understand any company that puts as much effert to keep consumers from their product as possible would be in business.
I thought when your in business of making products for consumers you want them to buy it right why the he!! do they insist on making it so people don't buy it. Oh well on with the boycott it just gives us more incetive to."

Its like a man/woman who is convinced their spouse is cheating and will soon leave them. After a time of heavy questioning, following, acusations the spouse does leave. You can create what you fear. They think just because people can leave them for free music, that people will leave them. So the spend all this time and energy trying to kill off the reason for thier fear. In the end they are no longer selling something we are willing to buy. When the average consumer leaves them in the cold it will be their fault.

Organizations in the their death throes keep losing people until all they have left is lawyers. RIAA sees the coffin at the end of the tunnel.

analog out, digital in, game over.

Unfortunately not smoreop, the white noise forms an integral part of the audio. I believe this protection is primarily aimed at hampering P2P file sharing and the stopping the transfer of music to MP3 players etc. I don't think it will even have any effect on uncompressed music recoded at the same or higher bit depth and sample rate.

I bet they mean you can't hear the difference in the same way you supposedly can't hear the difference between a 128k mp3 and a 16 bit CD audio track.

could it have something to do with playback? Just a thought, but what if the scheme is like.. play at 93kbps, nothing happens, but played at a higher rate, of say 128kbps, and the white noise appears? Or the other way 'round.. so the sound can ONLY be played at 128?
I'm still agreeing with almost every post here. People WILL find a way around this.
However... isn't being so vocal about it a bit weird? I mean, this is whole boycott is about getting the music we want, how/when/where we want it. Some of these statements seem IMHO to be almost daring the industry to try again. And again. Ad infinitum. You come off just the sort of person this "copy protection" is supposed to be written for.
I'm not going win any popularity contests for saying this, but sometimes I get the feeling that for some this IS about free music, about "beating the man" or at the very least "sticking it to the industry". That's not why I signed on. I signed on to combat the RIAA in my own little way, because I see some irregularities in the system. I see artists not getting paid, I see the same old shit different dog every other week in a lot of pop music, and I see an industry that is beating the life out of musicians and consumers alike.
Back to the topic tho..
If this can be beat, then it'll be beat. No way around that. I only hope that someone at Darknoise will realise that, and possibly USE that as a source of enlightenment to say "maybe we shouldn't write crap, maybe we should work to PROTECT instead of LOCK UP"
just my two cents
ttmmm

guys stop discussing this crap.

"This stuff works," SunnComm Chief Executive Officer Peter Jacobs
(comment looks like directed to smoking pot)

. "The science is real. You can't hear it when (a piece of music) is being used properly, and you can do nothing but hear it when a song is copied improperly

does this make any sense, define improperly.

I have no idea what he is smoking , probably the good stuff

Am I missing something here? If I make a connection from my computer's audio out to the audio in on another computer and record the data as a wav file, the computer will record what would be the analog output to the speaker. Maybe there would be degradation of the signal but I've tried it with my line-out from my DirecTV to my computer and it sounds fine to me. How do you embed something in the signal that isn't detectable to the ear only to become detectable after you record it ? I think these record nutzos will soon be selling blank CD's to us and tell us to imagine what the music sounds like. At 25 bucks a pop. Oops, I hope the RIAA isn't reading this, they may think this idea is their salvation. On the other hand, 72 minutes of silence sure beats some the crap they are spreading around.

Darknoise....This cant be...no, they wouldn't...


Oh, they would. Its a VLF modulation technique of some kind! It probably wont work, it just might with some equipment, or it could fry your equipment. Sunncomm experimented with VLF modulation before, in an early version of CDS, but abandoned the idea because it could damage speakers.

Well, just rip the audio and run through a high-pass with a sharp cutoff at around 20Hz. That should deal with it.

"This stuff works," SunnComm Chief Executive Officer Peter Jacobs said, just before releasing copy protection that was bypassed with a Shift key.

"This stuff works," said Sony when introducing the "copy-protection on the edge that can be blacked out with a Sharpie."

"This stuff works," said Sony when introducing the CD as a medium which could not be pirated.

"This stuff works," said Microsoft when introducing their latest "security" update.


"This stuff works," said Microsoft when introducing Windows 2000.

"This stuff works," said Microsoft when introducing Windows 98.

"This stuff works," said the Mafia strongarm, introducing his line of jukeboxes, while pointing at the battered machine next to the bar with his baseball bat. "Yours doesn't."

"This stuff works," said the recording industry when they stamped "Not For Broadcast" on records to prevent them from being played on the radio.

I think they are trying to exploit the fact that tape recorders and other recording devices typically pick up a db range higher and lower than what humans can hear. What I think they are trying to say is they'll put up alot of rf interference in the cd so if a tape recorder collects the sound it will be very staticy. Needless to say any of these additions may be removed digitally. So it works-- as a pointless, easily bypassed device.

Nice guess, but wrong. You cant put higher than human hearing frequencies on a CD. The highest it can possibly take is around 20KHz. Since people cant hear any higher, the Cd format just wasn't designed to allow anything better. 44.1KHz sample rate.

As far as I can tell, its some kind of modulation technique. It inserts noise. High-frequency noise, somewhere between 10 and 20KHz, but audible. This noise isn't actually in the audio itsself directly, but added by modulating the audio somehow, through an unspecified process, so that only resampling will reveal the noise again. The frequencies are changed every few seconds so they cant be easily filtered, and the precise timing and frequencies used can encode a traceable watermark.

The weak point here is that unspecified process. Every law of audio says it should be completly impossible. There should be no way to do it. Its right up there with perpetual motion and time travel on the "impossible invention" scale. There are three possibilities:

1. Everyones lying. Its really a bodge job, some form of pathetic AM moduation that doesn't work except under laboritory conditions, but the management dont know that.

2. The technology is real, but is nothing like that described in the undetailed press releases, and is really just another form of watermark.

3. Its a beat frequency modulation. That would meet all the specs and match the boasting press releases, but only if every stage is samples at 44.1KHz. Up- or down-sample and its defeated.

I'd like to see them sued after someone buys a CD and it fries their stereo. Can we spell "class-action"?

If it was true, an audio analyzer and a few audio filter circuits will take care of darknoise. Then its back to copying.