It was early 1999. The dot-com boom hadn't yet crested. The Dow hadn't yet hit 10,000. Napster thrived. CDs cost "only" $17 on average. And you couldn't be arrested and thrown in federal prison for selling magic markers or wearing a DeCSS t-shirt.

Those were the days.

Now CDs cost $19 or $20. The dot-com boom is, well, you know. Napster's gone. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has survived a legal challenge, which has only encouraged our fine Congress to pile on more onerous legislation.

Granted, none of this is as alarming as the apparent suspension of habeas corpus in the extended detention of more than 1,000 unnamed people in the U.S. since 9/11, but it's pretty darned ominous just the same.

Added to this heady mixture in recent weeks is a new generation of digital copy protection that's been showing up on music CDs distributed by Sony in Europe. Fast becoming known as the case of "Celine Dion Killed My iMac," initial reports indicate that these discs are not only unreadable by computers, but may actually crash them and prevent them from rebooting, necessitating a service call.

Aside from the immediate hardware questions--"Where the !@#$% is the iMac's manual CD eject hole and how the !@#$% do I get to it?!?"--several major questions about this situation have gripped the Mac universe. Here, without further ado, are the Curmudgeon's curmudgeonly answers to the top five. Some are techical, some are legal, some are political, some are a mix of all three.

Dayplanner note: if you already know exactly how CDs and copy protection work and you're pressed for time, feel free to skip right on down to Question #3. That's where things get, as they say in New England, wicked controversial.


QUESTION #1: Why do Macs and other computers choke on copy protected CDs?

When you look at the business side of a normal audio CD, you see one continuous semi-glossy surface that contains the audio information, or the "program". Bracketing the program are the lead-in and lead-out sections, which are the high-gloss rings at the inside and outside edges of the disc, respectively. The CD's audio tracks are not arranged in a particularly orderly fashion on the disc. As Robert Starret explains in an old but still definitive Emedia Professional article:

Red Book [i.e Audio CD] tracks are not files, per se. They are made up of a bunch of data that is meant to stream, and within the stream there is more than music. ... Data on an audio disc is organized into frames in order to ensure a constant read rate. Each frame consists of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits. One of the first things that it is crucial to understand about CDs is that [their] data is not arranged in distinct physical units. Instead, the data in one frame is interleaved with the data in many other frames so that a scratch or defect in the disc will not destroy a single frame beyond correction.
So an audio CD basically contains raw binary data without a filesystem. The reason for the lack of a CD-audio filesystem, as Starret explains, is as follows:

Audio discs were designed to be read sequentially, in real time, with the digital data converted to an analog signal that would be played through a stereo's speakers. There was no need to have data on the disc to pinpoint the exact location of the beginning of a song. It is good enough just to get close. That extra data containing an exact starting address for each song takes up space that could otherwise be used for musical data.
This is why the same "74-minute" CD-recordable disc can hold 747MB of audio but only 650MB of data. Each 2,352-byte sector of a data CD-ROM holds only 2,048 bytes of your data because the other 304 bytes are used as overhead for the file system (specifically, for header information that tells the computer exactly where the data is). An audio CD, by contrast, uses the full 2,352 bytes for each sector. If you divide 2,352 bytes into 747MB you get the same result as when you divide 2,048 bytes into 650MB.

So what a computer sees when it looks at an audio CD is not a foreign language, as when a Mac sees a DOS-formatted disc. Rather, it sees no language at all. There's no map, no file cabinet. Everything's just strewn out on the floor. This is why you can't just double-click an audio CD's icon in the Finder and drag one of the files to your hard drive. (If you do, the copied file will be zero k and contain no data.) Instead, you have to "rip" the file with a special digital audio extraction program or utility that manually searches out and extracts the tracks on the disc. That, by the way, is most likely why the term "ripping" came about. The kind of translation necessary for digital audio extraction no doubt struck many folks as analogous to the process of printing postscript-encoded fonts and images on a printer. Converting postscript to bitmap (so a printer can shoot ink droplets or laser-heated toner dots onto the paper) requires a Raster Image Processer, or RIP; hence "ripping."

Now, the key thing to understand here is that since audio CDs have no filesystem, and therefore no real data files, audio CD players do not need to be able to read data. Any data on an audio CD is ignored.

Computers, of course, come at CDs from the opposite perspective: data is their first order of business. So computers look for--and, if they find one, read--a data track on a CD before they look for, or read, an audio track. Data first, audio second, with each being treated separately.

You will be able to see this separate treatment in action if you have an "Enhanced CD" that contains bonus data material in addition to the audio program. Sara McLaughlin's 1999 release Mirrorball is one of the best-known Enhanced CDs. Stick it in your Mac and you'll see two separate CD icons, or volumes, show up on your desktop, one for the audio CD tracks and one for the data.

Look on the underside of the CD and you'll see that a very shiny band interrupts the normally continuous semi-gloss surface. This band is the lead-out for the audio disc, which is normally at the edge of the disc. But on an Enhanced CD, there's a second patch of program material after the lead-out. This is the data portion. Now look at a picture provided by German Magazine Chip of the underside of a disc that uses the Key2Audio copy protection technology Sony has employed most famously on the European release of Celine Dion's most recent album. Note the shiny band about 1/4 of the way in from the outside edge of the disc, just like you'd see on the underside of Mirrorball. The material from that band out to the disc's edge is a data track. Unlike a normal Enhanced CD, however, the data track on this CD is corrupt. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is formatted in such a way that a computer will initially recognize it as a valid data track but will not in fact be able to read it successfully. This situation will result in: the computer endlessly trying to read the disc; the computer giving up and ejecting the disc (or asking you to eject it); or the computer giving up with the disc sitting in the drawer, unmounted on the desktop and invisible to the OS. The second possibility is annoying; the first and third possibilities are potentially disastrous.

So computers choke on Sony's copy protected discs because (1) computers read data tracks first, and (2) Key2Audio data tracks are corrupt. Audio CD players, on the other hand, aren't capable of reading data tracks--remember, audio CD tracks lack a filesystem and there are no directories or headers to read. So audio CD players simply ignore the data track, just as they do for normal Enhanced CDs.


QUESTION #2: What's with this magic marker trick to defeat copy protection? Does it really work?

You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.

So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.


QUESTION #3: Is Apple liable for the damage caused to my iMac by these CDs?

The answer to this one as far as the Curmudgeon is concerned is a big fat hairy NO. Before I explain why, I must say that I find it disheartening that so many folks on Usenet and the Mac Web are complaining about Apple in regards to this issue. Yes, it sucks to have to take your iMac to a repair shop and pay something on the order of $250US just to get a stuck CD removed. Yes, it's annoying that modern Macs have manual-eject holes that are difficult to see and hidden behind decorative outer CD doors. But I think the root of folks' complaints is that some Apple machines seem to be damaged more seriously by these disks than most WinTel PCs (largely, from what I can tell, by the aforementioned difficulty in detecting and accessing Macs' manual eject holes). While I don't want to downplay the real expense and misery some folks have experienced, it seems to me that the knee-jerk blaming of Apple comes from a kind of Mac inferiority complex run amok: "Why do Apple machines have to react worse to this than WinTel machines?!? My PC friends are going to rake me over the coals on this one! I thought Macs were supposed to be easier to use and better-built, and yet my PC just let me eject the CD!" And so on.

These sentiments are understandable, but they don't form the basis for a proper understanding of whether or not Apple should pay to fix this problem. Putting aside the question of legal liability for the moment, it's just not right to expect Apple or any computer manufacturer--or any CD player manufacturer whose machines won't play these new CDs, for that matter--to anticipate technology that hadn't been invented when the machine was designed. Early CD players were confused by Enhanced CDs; many home and car CD players still can't play CD-RWs; many DVD players (which are always labeled "DVD/CD/VCD") can't handle CD-Rs. In fact, the different CD formats are covered by different technology standards: Red Book for normal audio CDs, Yellow Book for data CDs, Orange Book for CD-R and CD-RW, and Blue Book for Enhanced CDs. Incidentally, the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are grouped together under a single standard explains why manufacturers are hesitant to certify that their CD and DVD players will play home-brewed recordable CDs: unless a player can handle both CD-R and CD-RW discs, it's not Orange Book compliant.

Now the funny thing is that much of the debate over Apple's responsibility here has skipped over this simple, and to my mind obvious, fact. Instead, the debate has proceeded to another, related question:


QUESTION #4: Are these new Sony discs really CDs or not? Should Apple support them even if they're not CDs?

Here's where the Curmudgeon throws you a curve ball, because contrary to what you've read, it's entirely possible, even likely, that these copy protected discs are in fact CDs.

Of course, Apple's position, as stated in a now-infamous Knowledgebase article is that Key2Audio discs "are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)" because they do not conform to the CD audio format, and so Apple is under no obligation to make Macs work with them.

Sony agrees, having removed the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" badge and logo from discs that use the Key2Audio system.

But I don't think that really settles the matter. Attentive readers of the Mac Web might recall that the first draft of Apple's knowledgebase article stated that inserting such a disc into a Mac constituted misapplication of the product (the Mac, not the disc) and therefore any resulting problems were not covered under warranty. Apple has since removed that portion of the article, no doubt on the advice of legal counsel.

I don't know why that paragraph got removed from the article, but I have a hunch it's because the question of whether or not a Key2Audio disc is a CD has not come close to being settled.

Consider this: while the Sony discs don't conform to the Red Book CD standard, they appear to conform to the Blue Book standard--the one that governs Enhanced CDs. It's not possible to look at the full specs for CD standards without paying Philips (co-creator of the CD format along with, ironically, Sony) quite a bit of money. But available summaries of the Blue Book standard indicate that the standard does not say what has to be on that data track. Philips presumes that data tracks on Enhanced CDs "will in general contain items like disc and track titles, lyrics, and background information on the music," (quoted from here), but the Blue Book spec doesn't actually prescribe specific uses for the data track. The only requirement, as far as I can see, is that the data track be formatted with a known filesystem, typically ISO-9660 (DOS), and/or HFS. Since the Key2Audio system works precisely by getting the computer to "take the bait" by first recognizing the data track, and then confuses it by messing up the actual structure or nature of the data, it's reasonable to assume that the Key2Audio system does in fact conform to the Blue Book standard. (In other words, if the data track was not formatted with a valid filesystem, the computer would ignore it or spit the disc out.) Aside from the obvious marketing nightmare ("Our Enhanced CDs are unique because they diminish the product!") The only difference between a Key2Audio disc and an Enhanced CD is that the Key2Audio CD's data track is used to implement copy protection rather than to provide song lyrics, videos and other more traditional Enhanced CD data content.

Now, you might think the Curmudgeon is splitting hairs here. Who cares if you call it (A) an out-of-spec disc that's not a real CD, or (B) an Enhanced CD with a screwy data track?

It seems to me that there's a huge difference. It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.

Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.

Now, if a court were to agree with my argument that Key2Audio discs are in fact really CDs, then Sony (and Key2Audio) could be liable to lawsuits from computer users who lost time, money and perhaps data as a result of damage done to their computers by these discs. Conceivably, Sony could also be liable to suits brought by computer manufacturers for sabotaging their machines or interfering with their business practices. By saying these discs aren't CDs, Sony hopes to extricate itself from such liability. One can only hope that Sony gets its ass handed to it by the European Union courts--which are routinely more consumer-friendly than their U.S. cousins--before this situation gets out of hand.

This brings us to the second part of this question: Should Apple support these discs even if they're not really CDs? To which the Curmudgeon replies: Heck No! Key2Audio discs do not represent a new technology or a new CD spec. They are a malicious corruption of an existing spec. Without manual intervention by the user on a disc-by-disc basis, it's impossible to design drive firmware or CD driver software that can differentiate between an Enhanced CD and a Key2Audio CD.

That said, it would be nice if drives used in Macs had their firmware updated so that insertion of a Key2Audio disc would generate a normal "This disc is unreadable" message from the OS, allowing for a smooth and uneventful eject procedure.

Even better would be a user-selectable option to "ignore data volumes on multisession CDs" via a CD Preference Pane (OS X) or Control Panel (OS 9). You could select that option and use Key2Audio discs to your heart's content. If you needed to use an Enhanced CD, you could uncheck the option. It would be a bit of a kludge, but that's the best that can be done given the insidious nature of the Key2Audio technology.


QUESTION #5: What about Fair Use?

The much-ballyhooed concept of "fair use" is much more complicated than it seems, and much too complicated to cover fully here. Its value in helping us fight the good fight against Sony is significant but limited.

It is of course true that it's not a violation of fair use to rip a CD and load its songs onto your hard drive or mp3 player, or onto a mix CD-R. The essence of the famous, then obscure, now famous again "Betamax" case (in which Sony was the defendant, ironically, and which was decided by the Supreme Court exactly one week before the release of the first Macintosh) is that it is permissible for you to record or copy copyrighted material so long as it does not deprive the copyright holder of revenue it could obtain if your copy did not exist. So in that sense we all do have a legal "right" to rip CDs.

At the same time, fair use does not obligate Sony to make its music CDs technologically compatible with your Mac, particularly if Sony gets away with claiming that these things aren't really CDs. Technological compatibility is a matter for the market, not the courts: if enough people refuse to buy such discs, Sony will stop making them. If folks buy them, then they'll keep on making them.

The tragedy here is that the market doesn't work like a democracy. Consumers will never have the ability to choose between copy protected and non-copy protected versions of the same CD. You won't see Virgin Records marketing their non-copy protected version of the Celine Dion CD against Sony's copy protected version. It's that old problem of copyright.

So if we leave the fantasy world of economics textbooks and travel to the real world, in which demand is not merely met but created, shaped and channeled, we see that relatively few people--especially children and teens--want or "demand" a non-copy protected CD. What they desire is the music that happens to be on the CD (or the persona, or fame, or body, of the person who makes the music). So the kid hears Britney on the radio or sees her in a video on MTV, or sees her in that Pepsi commercial on broadcast TV, and then goes to the store to buy the music. Upon arrival, our young consumer is presented with a CD. The fact that it costs $18.99 even though it cost Sony about 99 cents to manufacture isn't really relevant. The fact that it's copy protected probably isn't relevant either. The $19 copy protected CD is the product, end of story. There's no other legal way to get the music. Thus, there's no way to gauge the consumer's preference for copy protection, because the consumer isn't choosing or rejecting a content-delivery medium; rather, the consumer is choosing (or rejecting) the music.

So fair use gets lost in the muddle of the market. But we can try to find it again if we take a gander at the reason Key2Audio exists in the first place: online music swapping.

The record industry says that CD ripping and music piracy go hand-in-hand; hence the need for digital copy protection. Yet a moment of reflection yields the following observations:

(A) Most noncommercial piracy these days (i.e. mp3 sharing) does indeed involve ripping CDs onto computers.

(B) At the same time, most ripping does not lead to piracy.

(C) Virtually no commercial, for-profit piracy involves ripping CDs onto someone's computer and distributing them via file sharing. Instead, it is likely that commercial, high-volume piracy involves mass copying of audio CDs via standalone CD duplicators that can copy any kind of copy protected disc as easily as they copy Playstation CDs (which use a similar copy protection mechanism). To stop this sort of pirating, the record companies will have to continue to rely on the same law enforcement agencies and tactics as clothing manufacturers and electronics manufacturers do in their efforts to shut down counterfeit designer jeans plants and "Sorny" or "Sonee" Walkman manufacturing operations.

(D) No more than one successful rip of a song from a CD is necessary in order for it to be disseminated all across the internet. In order to accomplish such a successful rip, a person can spend less than $300 for a standalone CD duplicator or less than $3 for a Sharpie felt-tip marker.

These observations all point to one undeniable conclusion: digital copy protection schemes like Key2Audio will not stop illegal music copying. So not only will Key2Audio infringe on fair use, but that's all it will do.

The "casual" illegal copyer, who rips a CD, makes a mix CD for his or her car, puts another copy on an mp3 player, and gives three CD-R copies of the original CD to three friends, may in fact be prevented by Key2Audio technology from using his original CD to engage in this mixture of legal and illegal uses. But as long as someone, somewhere, has managed to rip the CD, this person will still be able to download the album and make that mix CD, copy that file onto an mp3 player, and make those CD-R dubs for friends. The source material, being in mp3 format, will be of slightly inferior quality, but it will hardly be noticeable, let alone objectionable, to most people listening with most audio equipment.

With all this in mind, a new picture emerges. We no longer see a push-pull between fair use and copyright, or between consumer desire and intellectual property. Instead, we see piracy continuing more or less undisturbed, with fair use being seriously disrupted.

It would be paranoid and silly to think that Sony and other record companies would want to destroy fair use just for the heck of it. There has to be a method to their madness, yes?

Let's return to the Betamax case. There was an equally important, but lesser known, second prong to that case. As detailed on this helpful web page, Sony was sued by two movie studios, not two television networks. One of the studios' major complaints was that Sony's Betamax allowed for the creation of a video rental market, which allowed video stores to buy one copy of a movie on tape and rent it out hundreds, even thousands, of times until the tape wore out, without ever paying an additional dime to the movie studios. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of video rental business was covered under fair use by what's known as First Sale Doctrine, which in essense means that when you buy something you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it's the original, not a copy). That's right--it's legal for you to rent your music CDs to your friends for fun and profit, as long as you're not renting them CD-R copies or keeping a copy for yourself while you rent the original. First Sale Doctrine, it turns out, is what propelled the Betamax case to the Supreme Court: it was the part of the original District Court Decision that was overturned at the Appelate level, enabling Supreme Court review of the entire case. First Sale Doctrine, by the way, is also why you can "license" as much software as your bank account will allow, but you cannot actually buy any.

It is First Sale Doctrine, rather than the more well-known "personal copy" rule, that is ultimately under attack by the record industry. For what reason could there be to prevent you from ripping your own CDs, except to offer you the "opportunity" to purchase multiple versions of the same music so you can listen to that music in ways that currently are defined as fair use: a CD for your stereo; an mp3 for your hard drive, and a "secure digital" copy for your record-industry approved portable digital music player? With a CD priced at $19, an mp3 at $5 (which would include a royalty to counteract the inevitable hard drive-to-hard drive copying), and a secure digital version priced at $2.50, that'd be $26.50 for one music album. No doubt you'd be able to buy all three togeter in a package deal for "only" $25. Or maybe you could license all three formats for the low, low price of $9.95 a year, for the rest...of...your...life--remember DivX DVDs?

Key2Audio is the first step in a dreadful double perversion of Fair Use. The first perversion is the idea that by making a copy of music for yourself, you are depriving the copyright holder of the ability to obtain revenue from selling you additional copies of the same music. The second, linked, perversion is that by destroying your ability to exercise fair use, the record company extends its copyright power beyond the content (the music) to the delivery medium (the CD).


There's no doubt this will all be fought out in the courts. And a recent New York Times article indicates that tech companies might finally be waking up to the threat posed by Hollywood and the RIAA.

But more than that, this requires grassroots action by all of us. As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Key2Audio isn't the worst threat we face by a long shot. But it's ominous as one more little indication of the broad threat to notions of freedom and privacy that are crucial to the quality of life in our country as we know it.

For more information, or to get involved, try The Campaign for Digital Rights at http://uk.eurorights.org/, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/, or the ACLU at http://www.aclu.org/.

We have nothing to lose but most of our rights.

great article ^_^

I have a Apple G4, im not sticking any audio CD in there now oO

Can you imagine the furor that would be caused if, for instance, this cabal of multinational entertainment interests decided to market "protected" CD's almost exclusively in neighborhoods with high minority populations or predominantly populated by certain ethnic groups while "non-protected" CD's of the same music were marketed towards affluent white neighborhoods? There'd be cries of "racial profiling" from here all the way down to Antarctica and back again, certain prominent civil-rights leaders would condemn the RIAA as "racist" and urge a massive, across-the-board boycott, and all you-know-what would break loose -- in short, nobody would stand for it. But what the industry is in fact doing, by rigging the technology to always assume the worst about the consumer with the most regressive elements possible, is very much a more insidious form of profiling. It goes hand-in-hand with their belief that "fair use" is only a privilege, not a right, as has been elaborated before by this author, as well as their discriminatory, exclusionary agenda of disenfranchisement and demonization. In short, a modern-day, digital-age form of "Jim Crow," taken to its (il)logical extreme.

One other thing: I've heard a lot of different comments about Céline Dion's, er, style of singing (one famous comment that's stuck in my mind was -- and I may be paraphrasing -- "She doesn't sing a song so much as upholster it"), but THIS?!

gah, so long

good job

This copy-protection has gone to far. It's actually crashing computer of innocent buyers. And all the Labels say is "This disk cannot be played on computers". That Bull, They know what can happen if it's stuck in a computer they are just afraid of sticking that on the label. Is this a violation of Red Book Standards? Oh, well. I don't care if Sony wants screw their consumers that pay $20 for a piece of plastic that crashes their hundred dollar computer but not to label the dangers clearly on the CD should be illegal.

Hail Mp3!!!

Sad to say, the industry's paranoia about piracy is such that they've obviously adopted the ol' ends-justify-the-means mentality in terms of this evidently intentional violation of CD audio red-book standards -- very similar to the type of behavior we've seen from the Watergate cast of characters in the 70's, from Oliver North in the 80's (remember Iran-Contra?), and other similar high crimes and misdemeanors.

very nice ryan!!! I shopuld own a majic marker factory..... and never allow the riaa to come in..... I'll say the kids are busy coloring..... and I'll tell them not to dusturb the kids!!!!

lol.. i sure do want a sorny walkman!

you know.. serves them right for wanting to listen to celine dion. ugh. w-b, that upholster comment is classic! defines her singing to a T.

lucky me, if i ever do buy a key2crap cd, i know where the manual eject hole is on my g4.

careful CDC.. the RIAA might want a piece of the action for the muzak you're playing...
This is all bunk. What's happened is that the money is being put ahead of the person, and that's fundamentally flawed in SOOOOOOOO many ways I don't even have time to go there.
Sony needs to remember that the consumer is the ultimate end user here.. and THAT should be the ends.. not the money in their pockets.
I'd actually pay 19bux for a cd.. if I thought more than 1.5% of the money was actually going to the ARTIST..
nuff said??

i always knew that bitch wasn't good for anything

;P

does this apply to only imac and apple users? and has anyone actually tried the marker technique?