Here's the teaser lead to a story in today's New York Times.

"The major labels are introducing DualDisc, a CD-size format that contains music content on one side and DVD content on the other and, more importantly, that can’t be pirated."

I'm not going to bother to link to the article, because this claim of "can't be pirated" is not even repeated in the actual story, much less explained or attributed to anyone.

The only other thing of note in the story is that Rob Thomas would like you not to listen to his new solo LP, which makes me wonder why he wasted the time recording it.

Can't be pirated.

I just can't believe someone would be so stupid as to make such a statement in print. The last two "pirate-proof" DRM schemes were defeated with a Sharpie marker and the Shift key.

I'm expecting to hear about the crack from Princeton before the day is over.

Applause to you George for not even bothering to provide a link to that bogus corporate propaganda wrapped in an advert for a musician who is wearing his stupidity on his forhead.

We give the enemy too much press coverage as it is.

Let's "clam up" when it comes to giving links to such obvious RIAA/MPAA/etc promotional garbage (in the same way we ask folks NOT to fileshare RIAA tunes!)

(Did you see our shiney new chatroom?)

I am a traitor to the cause. Last year I did not buy any RIAA music at retail. Bought some second-hand discs and promo copies, tho'. This year I bought the Diana Krall DualDisc, though only because I could get it for $5.99 (including shipping) through a record club. If they can squeeze a profit out of that, it won't be much.

On the plus side however, because of said traitorous activity, I can tell you firsthand that neither the DVD side nor the CD side is unrippable. In fact, I had no trouble at all ripping the data to my HD. I wasn't even aware that there was any attempt to DRM this thing. There's a nice FBI seal on the back, but that did not deter me from exercising my fair use rights on a piece of music/video that I bought fair and square.

Did the slacker at the New York Times who wrote this story actually put a DualDisc in his DVD-ROM drive to test it? Does he/she/it even know what a DVD-ROM drive is? I wonder.

Well, there you have it. The nation's "newspaper of record." Hmmmm..... do tell!

If we want to turn this game around with the riaa and movie industry lets start with the soft ware and hardware people, convence these two to produce nothing that will play anything with DRM. Check

autodidact -- Maybe it would have been harder if you had known you couldn't do it.

The "piracy-proof" claim is just another scam, probably invented to boost the stock price of Sony. Good to know that it is just hot air.

why make a piracy-proof claim, is the consumer going to buy the CD's because of this. i dont see why. who are they trying to impress. may be some pump and dump stock scam

The only people i see buying DRM are parents for their kids just to protect themselves so they don't get sued.

DRM is probably just a good Parental-lock for parents to use, but no adult would want the lock enabled on them.

Parental-lock might have a few customers, but "piracy proof" only says "don't buy me" ...even to the stupidest of the sheep.

...well, EXCEPT those fleece ( almost homophonicaly "fleas") ridden idiots up on the Hill...

Orin Hatch, you ARE the weakest link!

(I think I said that as nicely as I could.)

UTAH, stop being idiots.

I have two words for you..

fair play.

Apple's best and brightest tech wizards built it.. it has encryption, watermarking, AND physical hardware components much like the concept of a tcpa-only program.

It was cracked not just once, but in multiple different ways.

as for the article.. they contradict themselves in only that one quote you published..

If it has a dvd side, then it can be ripped with decss.

i'm more concerned with XCP copy protection.

that's some serious stuff.. it's been out there for a long while in VERY limited amounts on pre-release disks designed for professional review.. and there has been very little movement on that crack.

It could just be that it won't be worth it until the end of this year, when sony-bmg will slap it on everything they can find.. but i have word through the grape vine that microsoft is trying to "do it's part" to prevent that from happening.

I think what they mean, and this would just be a guess, is that real bootleggers, who sell burned CD-Rs and DVD-Rs on the streetcorner for $2 or $4, have no capability of manufacturing a DualDisc. So in that sense, it is an anti-piracy measure.

However, since the industry is trying to change the definition of "piracy" to mean virtually ANY unauthorized copying, they are confusing the issue here, because the DualDisc does not hinder unauthorized copying.

They love that word "pirate" but it isn't very accurate -- though it more closely fits what people selling burned copies are doing than people making copies for non-commercial archiving purposes.

awehr -- for XCP, I guess one would at the worst case just have to hook up the stereo out from a standalone CD player to the line in of the computer and record. Maybe I don't understand XCP, but I don't see why that wouldn't work. If you can hear it, you can record it.

They say the red book layer for XCP will be "encapsulated" -- but I don't understand what that means. It can't be too encapsulated or billions of standalone players won't read it.

=) i've got better than that..

I'm on the verge of purchasing a new g5.. those things have digital laser input (and my stereo has the output).

the cd player decodes it and a pure digital stream can be simply copied as if from a hard drive =)

"encapsulated"

I've done a lot of digging on xcp in the past few months since about november.

Basically, they use several measures, including corruptions in the tables of contents and exploitation flaws in computer mounting systems to "hide" the CD session from the end user.

What REALLY sucks about this kind of "drm" is that it really has nothing to do with DRM.. it has everything to do with taking advantage of a bug in either the os, the firmware, or both which once labelled DRM cannot be fixed.

That's REALLY annoying...
Way to go DMCA, thanks to our government now you can't make a drive which reads more accurately and completely. Nice~

"Can't be pirated."


And the Titanic was unsinkable.

autodidact makes a good point. Whether it has DRM or not, the average person on the street can't make a DualDisc product.

Neither can the average independent musician.

The major labels like it when things work out that way. That's why they kept vinyl so long.

the average person on the street couldnt make a 100% copy of a dual layer DVD movie for the longest time either...

street corner pirates will find a way to compensate... whether they just record everything on a dvd or a cd or sell a dvd and cd together, or just leave out some of the extra features or quality like they did before dual layer discs came out.

More importantly, the most prolific pirates out there actually have their own pressing plants already set up; i'm sure it wouldnt be too much of a hassle for them to retool their machines.
My point is, that this is only hurting the law abiding independent musician, while it is gonna have absolutely no effect on piracy...
i'm not one for conspiracy theories, but methinks this may be the industry's way of squeezing out the little guy

Well I for one hope that Sony is right and it is priate proof!!!! Why???? Cause this will help in the future to keep the Riaa crap off p2p and kill the Beast known as major label musak!!!!!

Actually Currently the new DTS audio disks that are being used with Theatres are using a new 500bit+ encryption and are currently uncrackable. This is why lately there has been a shortage of DTS audio Telesyncs for those who follow the movie scene.

As i said currently uncrackable, we'll see how it is in a month or 2 from now from the best programmers in the world.. The scene members themselves.

Goint to wait for dvd John.

I've done a lot of digging on xcp in the past few months since about november.

Basically, they use several measures, including corruptions in the tables of contents and exploitation flaws in computer mounting systems to "hide" the CD session from the end user.

What REALLY sucks about this kind of "drm" is that it really has nothing to do with DRM.. it has everything to do with taking advantage of a bug in either the os, the firmware, or both which once labelled DRM cannot be fixed.

That's REALLY annoying...
Way to go DMCA, thanks to our government now you can't make a drive which reads more accurately and completely. Nice~


If that's all there is too it, it can probably be defeated in a week by one Linux user willing to muck about in the kernel for a while and send the patch to others. Mounting systems, for example, would be totally mutable under Linux, so the flaws could be removed. The music then goes to the P2P networks, and the RIAA is back to square one. That's assuming that neither the marker method nor the shift method work - a rather generous assumption.

And first post!

Dualdisc CD's are crap from what I am understanding. I belong to several music forums where people, who are not boycotting, have purchased these dualdisc CD's. A lot of people are bitching, saying the CD's will not work in all thier CD players, which seems to be the norm for DRM protected CD's these days. Red flags are flying up everywhere by the non-boycotters to not buy these dualdisc CD's.

They are a rip off as well, as the industry is using them as a ploy for you to pay more for an album. A great example is the new Judas Priest album. You can buy the dualdisc version, which has the DVD footage, but it is a cut up non-complete version of the real bonus DVD. You get a little over half of the real bonus DVD, and it (the CD and or DVD side) may not work in all of your CD/DVD players, for the normal overinflated price.

A lot of the dualdisc CD's have a collectors edition CD version, which will come with better packaging, and the complete version of the bonus DVD on a separate disc (Just as the new Judas Priest album did). They claim they're limited, but as with everything limited these days, it seems stores never run out of stock. These CD sets are jacked up to $20 or more at the cheaper chain stores. Hate to see the price in a mall shop.

The labels have to know the dualdisc's are piles of shit, and that most people will buy the "collectors" version, due to the fact that the word will get around that dualdisc CD's suck ass. They leave out half of the bonus DVD on the dualdisc, so they can get everyone to pay more for the collectors edition.

I find it funny, that these "collector" CD's cost so much, but you can get a concert DVD with a audio CD included for $5 less. A great example is Anthrax's DVD 'Music of Mass Destruction'. It's $14.99 at my local Best Buy. You get an entire concert film, and a bonus CD of the show for one low price. Why is it, when you see a DVD concert with a CD, it is a lot cheaper, but a CD with a bonus DVD that is labeled "collectors edition", is always priced higher. It makes no sense!

The major labels have no clue at all.

Allow me to take the time to welcome you to Boycott-RIAA, Fafnir. It is always good to see new members come join us. Your first post was rather informative. Keep up the good work.

"Actually Currently the new DTS audio disks that are being used with Theatres are using a new 500bit+ encryption and are currently uncrackable. This is why lately there has been a shortage of DTS audio Telesyncs for those who follow the movie scene.

As i said currently uncrackable, we'll see how it is in a month or 2 from now from the best programmers in the world.. The scene members themselves."

but that is in theatres.. in this case the encryption is designed not to keep the end user from accessing his own content.. but to prevent end user eavesdropping on communication between the cinema and the movie company.

i would suspect that any cd's which have this encryption could be easily cracked by copying a silent section of the encrypted stream (or a black section with DVD's), thus giving them a base line when the data stream is all zero's to apply as a decryption mask to the rest of the disk.

I would also submit that anime fansubbers had a similar problem with heavy encryption being applied to japanese HDTV.

They solved it through a custom program designed to turn the internet into a distributed supercomputer... at least 25,000 people volunteered CPU time and it was cracked about a week after i first installed the program on my machine.

yea right.. if they ad it to dvds.. my ates t updates from dvdshrink will help me out^^
thast not the only decrpter i have^^
they waste billions on illega anticopy software.. we only waste a few weeks o free time and 0 dollars to come up with a crack for it....
video and audio does not work chaotically like software does. basicall audio and video is basically read only...
as long as it is a read only disc.. it can be copied..until theya dd movies to small hddisks there iwll be no anti copying software that cannot be cracked..
there will alwasy be true free speech techs that will kill that billion dollar incryption.. they foget whos in control, not them.. it is us.. if it wasnt for the people they wouldnt exist..
so lets bury these riaa/mpaa asswipes into the grave of financial ruin.. they wanna play litigation and break rackettering laws then we willlegally crack tehir software,,, free speech is golden no?? well it is so haha riaa please do waste more money on encrypters.. it will only take us 1/1000th the time to crack it in the time it takses to make it...
never piss off your funds base...
thast what you riaa/mpaa fucks get for messin with us...

raiders757 offered a great line here: "They claim they're limited."

Artificial scarcity has always been the cornerstone of the music and movie industries. Disney is the greatest master of it.

You know, there was this big ol ship, and people said she couldn't sink. And then they found themselves treading water.

Nothing is unpirateable, if you can play it, you can turn it into a digital file.