Fighting the pirates

Everyone's at it. Male, female, young and old. I'm talking about home copying, of course.

A recent report from market research company Understanding & Solutions (U&S) puts hard numbers on the extent of the problem. But what the U&S report on home copying does not show is how the people at the suffering end are often their own worst enemies.

U&S surveyed a thousand homes and found that 60 per cent had copied something. Of these, 97 per cent had copied CD-Audio, 15 per cent copied PC games or software, while only 10 per cent had tried to download movies from the internet.

But office workers are now using company broadband connections to download during the lunch hour. Jim Bottoms of U&S says: "It is not just students that are ripping and burning. Older people do it because the culture is ingrained from cassettes."

This creates an opportunity to win over people who can afford to buy but don't because, although CDs cost 10p to press, they still cost £15 to buy.

Instead of making the price lower, and putting across some moral arguments against copying, the record companies punish us with copy protection that interferes with legitimate playback using Rom drives.

Princeton University (which previously discredited the music industry's Secure Digital Media Initiative and its plans for watermarking and internet copy control) has done a similar demolition job on CD protection.

Check out the paper written by John Halderman of the Department of Computer Science. He argues that "the concept of audio CD copy-prevention is fundamentally misguided", and that "instead of combating copyright infringement, these schemes harm legitimate record owners".

Halderman's paper is useful as it analyses all the CD systems currently in use and tells how they all use the same basic 'multi-session' idea and can be defeated by tricks like a felt pen smear near the edge.

A conventional music CD has an electronic Table of Contents (TOC) at the beginning which electronically indexes all the music. A home-recorded CD has several TOCs, with a new one written every time a new 'session' is added.

Each of these TOCs points back to the previous one. CD-Rom computer drives then read the last TOC first and work back; audio CD players read only the first TOC.

The copy-prevention systems index the music correctly in a first TOC but then add dummy TOCs with deliberate errors. Audio CD players should read only the first TOC and play the music normally, while computer Rom drives look at the last TOC, get confused and play and record nothing.

Obviously manufacturers of CD players and computer drives need to make them play all CDs, and only "relatively simple modifications" are needed, either by internet download or Rom upgrade. The side effect is to make equipment "resistant to these copy-prevention techniques even before they have been widely adopted".

Record company Warner has been promoting DVD-Audio (the variant of DVD which carries super-hifi audio) because it has much tougher digital copy-protection than music CDs or regular DVDs. But now the DVD Forum, under pressure from Warner, has agreed a standard for hybrid DVDs.

These are two-layer discs, with one layer playing on a DVD player and the other playing the same music on a CD player are much like a hybrid Super Audio CD, which plays either on an SACD player or CD player. So Warner is kissing goodbye to the tougher copy-protection from DVD-Audio.

And of course any digital protection system, however clever and tough, can be defeated simply by making an analogue dub.

U&S estimates that 4.5 million homes in the UK now own both DVD and VHS video hardware. Those who connect them to dub make an average of 11 copies from VHS in a year and 13 from DVDs.

So far the copies are onto VHS tape, but with DVD recorders already down to below £500 and heading for £100 in a few years, that will change.

Jim Bottoms says: "The good news for the movie industry is that of the people who tried to copy and failed, nearly half went out to rent or buy. Although Macrovision copy protection can be defeated it slows things down."

Macrovision obstructs analogue video copying by distorting the picture sync pulses so the original recording plays on a TV set but upsets a VCR or DVD recorder.

Columbia Tristar failed to use Macrovision on its new Superbit DVDs. These use twice the normal data rate to deliver the best quality video yet seen without a high-definition system.

Marek Antoniak is Columbia's MD and Chairman of the British Video Association (BVA). He recently called on the BVA for more money to fight piracy.

I asked Antoniak how he reconciled his call for cash with his failure to spend the couple of pence per disc it costs to use Macrovision.

He said: "Columbia Tristar use a number of ACP devices on our content and it is not our policy to divulge specific details of these arrangements. We are currently working with a number of vendors in the creation of further devices to enhance content protection for the future."

Whatever this means, the fact remains that the best way to make a pirate copy of movies is from one of Mr Antoniak's Superbits.

Nice one Marek. Any more ideas as good as that?

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