The Hindu Business Line : New rules in this pool

CD copy-protection technology has not been foolproof. The market too doesn't take very kindly to any attempts to make it so. It seems like a losing battle for `secure digital music'.

THE old market place is dead. A new one in which new classes of devices that can not only play but also manipulate digital media rule is emerging. Technology analysts are coming around to this view. Especially after the merging of CDs and MP3 with other forms of content in what has been described as a `giant pool of digital media'.The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), announced amidst much chest-thumping by the industry in 2000, has proved so ineffective that people are embarrassed to talk about it anymore.

But then, it never had a chance. And here's why...

In June, 2000, SDMI accepted the final proposals for the audition of anti-copying technologies - proposals which rested on the premise that most of the music traded on the Internet comes from CDs which can be copied or "ripped" as MP3 digital audio files. According to analysts then, CDs represented by far the most significant vulnerability in the music industry's campaign against online piracy. Obviously, a strategy to combat online piracy would have to include a technology that would make it almost impossible for people to copy CDs. However, most of the analysts were also of the view that the SDMI group was trailing the labels - the Sony Music Group, EMI Recorded Music and so on - in this regard and that it was still a long way from resolving the technical issues involved: Backward compatibility, for instance, which would allow the new technology to work on old CD players) as also the legal issues involved.

But the SDMI constituents decided to go ahead anyway.

At that point of time, SDMI was working on installing digital `watermarks' on CD tracks that would permit copyright holders to track down illegal copies and to create devices that would not play rip-offs. SDMI had selected a watermark system created by Verance Technologies as the global standard and the Big Five record labels — EMI, Sony Music, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, Seagram's Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — had licensed the Verance watermarking system.

While all this was going on, some record companies adopted their own copy-protection strategies. Some went with DRM (digital rights management) technologies that allowed a content provider to set the usage parameters, including the number of copies that people could make as also the number of CDs they could burn. Analysts were sceptical about DRM technologies. Their reasoning was simple: If music companies were going to set the cops on people, the market wasn't going to like it.

The market didn't.

To make matters worse, DRM technologies threw up a bunch of compatibility problems.

And then, in October last year came the hilarious Shift key episode.

A Princeton University Ph.D. student, John Halderman, published a paper on his Web site containing instructions for disabling the anti-copying measures that were then being tested by BMG on CDs. The instructions were simple enough: Hold down the Shift key!

In his paper, titled "Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System," John Halderman set out the flaws in the MediaMax technology made by SunnComm Technologies and used by BMG Entertainment on an Anthony Hamilton CD.

The SunnComm technology, it must be said, was an interesting one and, by far, the most flexible CD copy-protection technology to come into the market. It involved, among other things, the inclusion of pre-ripped versions of the songs on a CD that could be transferred to a computer and burned to CD several times. The software on an album was supposed to load automatically on to Windows whenever the album was run on a computer's CD drive to prevent mass copying or MP3 ripping. However, John Halderman found that by holding down the Shift key, he could stop Windows' AutoRun feature loading the copy-protection software... leaving the album wide open!

Both BMG and SunComm Technologies confirmed that Halderman was right — and added that they had known all along about the Shift key business and that copyright management technologies were basically meant to work like speed bumps, dissuading the average person from the bulk burning of content.

The SunnComm CEO, Peter Jacobs, clarified that the technology would be improved - and that, in his opinion, it was a good one for record companies to use. His argument was that the very act of holding down the Shift key in order to enable copying, however simple, made computer users aware that they were doing something unauthorised. And then again, computer users had to hold down the Shift key at exactly the right moment, for quite a stretch of time, to prevent the anti-piracy software from loading.

As for BMG, the company said it had "made a conscious decision to err on the side of playability and flexibility," summing up the situation that all music companies face when they try and walk the line between protecting copyright and annoying the market.

The show of insouciance notwithstanding, SunnComm had initially condemned John Halderman's paper as "at best, duplicitous and, at worst, a felony" and had threatened to file a civil suit against him under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even while persuading the US federal authorities to indict him on criminal charges.

Subsequently, the firm had reversed its position with the Suncomm CEO saying that "... the long-term nature of the lawsuit and the emotional result of the lawsuit would obscure the issue, and it would develop a life of its own."

John Halderman, for his part, said he was certain that his paper did not violate the DMCA and that he was "glad they've decided to drop the matter."

The funny thing is that record labels still haven't figured out that intermediation by a bunch of suits more interested in fudging their expense accounts than in identifying and promoting musical talent is very much a thing of the past. Disintermediation is what the current technologies are all about.

And now they're set to make complete fools of themselves all over again by coming out with hybrid CD/DVDs — CD on one side and DVD on the other — as a means of fighting online piracy. According to a Reuters report, the music industry perceives "DualDiscs" as the next generation product which marries the booming market for DVDs with declining CDs.

Dream on... .

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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