Educational CyberPlayGround ®

ADD AUDIO TO YOUR WEBSITE, LEARN ABOUT DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT

Free Music • 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 < • >

 

Rootkits - You Can't Sensor The Internet

Digital Rights Management and Fair Use Is resisting overbroad copyright laws in the moral equivalent of opposing tyranny, racism or slavery. Fight the RIAA, MPAA, DVD-CCA attorneys and Federal Judges who claim that CSS is a trade secret. Use your Jury Rights to stop bad laws.

Dave Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers, including photos of CSS on t- shirts, ties, and even (sigh) haiku:

A rootkit is a set of software tools used by an intruder or illegal hacker to break into a computer and obtain root privileges in order to perform unauthorized functions, hide traces of its existence and exploit its systemwide access.

2010 WHY DRM DOES NOT WORK

You Can't Censor the Internet

2007 DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion.

SlySoft's AnyDVD HD program can apparently be used to rip HD DVD discs that use AACS version 3. A Caribbean firm called SlySoft claims to have broken the copy protection technology used on some Blu-ray discs designed to prevent video content from being copied and pirated. Blu-Ray cracked by Slysoft, rips pouring from air.
The recent massive increase in amount of Blu-Ray rips has an obvious reason: cracked protection BD+. SlySoft has long sold a product called AnyDVD which is a utility that disables a DVDs Content Scramble System (CSS) copy protection technology. Once a DVDs copy protection is disabled, you can copy its content using one of several third-party programs. Now the company SlySoft is upping the DRM-busting ante with a new version of AnyDVD HD 6.4.0.0 ($47) that promises to crack Blu-ray disc copy protection.

May 4, 2007 Digg founder Kevin Rose explained his decision to allow posts containing an HD DVD security code during his appearance at OnHollywood. Rose spoke just a few hours after a user rebellion.

 

 

 

DVD Key Censorship - Readers did not 'dig' censorship. Attempts to gag the blogosphere from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt. The row centred on a 'cease and desist' letter sent by the body that oversees the digital rights management technology on high-definition DVDs. It requested that blogs and websites removed details of a software key that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs. The removal of the information from community news website Digg was a step too far for its fans. The AACS LA's vigilance in trying to keep the existence of HD DVD cracks out of the public eye has backfired in a truly spectacular manner.
As quickly as stories relating to the issue were removed, they were re-submitted in their thousands, in an act described by one user as a "21st Century revolt". Is resisting overbroad copyright laws in the moral equivalent of opposing tyranny, racism or slavery? See Thoreau

HACKER ETHICS

Both the XCP and MediaMax CDs include outrageous, anti-consumer terms in their "clickwrap" EULAs. The suit will also demand Sony BMG remove unconscionable terms from its EULA. If purchasers declare personal bankruptcy, the EULA requires them to delete any digital copies on their computers or portable music players. The same is true if a customer's house gets burglarized and his CDs stolen, since the EULA allows purchasers to keep copies only so long as they retain physical possession of the original CD.

Sony: Dangerous Decloaking Patch, EULAs and Phoning Home

After more than 5 years of trying,
recording industry hasn't shown a workable
DRM scheme for music CDs. Gartner believes that it will never achieve this goal as long as CDs must be playable by stand-alone CD players. The industry may now refocus its attention on seeking legislation requiring the PC industry to include DRM technology in its products. Gartner believes the industry would be better-served by efforts to develop solutions that use DRM as an accounting/tracking tool, rather than as a lock. This approach would enable them to move to play-based business models not tied to hardware, and to track their digital assets without complicating users' ability to move legitimately acquired content to whatever devices they choose." ~ Gartner

The problem is the CD is completely unprotected so the lables will kill it.
 lala.com has got a permanent watermark that connects the track to you. If you buy a track directly from them, it contains a watermark, if you give it to someone else it won't play, unless ownership is transferred to this new individual, and then the original purchaser can't play it. And trying to add DRM to it cost Andy Lack his job. You buy the CD, rip it, and then trade it anonymously on the Net to ANYBODY! By eliminating the CD leak, they force you to either buy non-transferable tracks online or rent them, and piracy is stemmed. It pays to kill the CD and move everybody into the file world, just like the labels killed vinyl, even though it still had demand, twenty five years ago when they moved everybody into the CD world.

With every change in technology there has been an effect on the business model that has to change with it. There is a history of recording technology change.

DEFEAT DRM

You can very easily defeat ANY and ALL DRM
schemes on music CDs with a black (felt tip) magic marker. How does this work? By obliterating part of the data track with a black marker pen. The trick is to identify where the data track starts, not too difficult because of the track gap, so as to not impair the audio portion." It turns out that the marker renders the data track unreadable, forcing the PC to simply skip to the music section of the disc. The copy-protection technology works by adding a bogus data track to the outside of the disc, and since computers always read data tracks from a CD first they will never play the music tracks. The discovered workaround is the computer never locates the data track and so goes ahead with music playback. Blacken the edge of the really shiny side of the disc with a black felt tip marker. The effect is that the copy-protected disc will play on standard CD players but not on computer CD-ROM drives, some portable devices and even some car stereo systems. Some Apple Macintosh users have reported that playing the disc in the computer's CD drive causes the computer to crash. The cover of the copy-protected discs contain a warning that the album will not play on Macintoshes or other personal computers.

Hold down shift & stick in cd.
Disables autorun for that cd.

Neil Diamond "12 Songs" - Columbia
11/21/05 Sales this week: 43,167
Percentage change: -53%
12 songs you can't buy at any price, since Sony recalled all the discs because they compromised computers. More evidence that labels don't care about careers, only the bottom line. Look at the 52 acts whose CDs and careers have been compromised. Their public is mad at them. They look like pansies. Even though under the onerous contracts they signed they couldn't prevent their albums being released in a compromised form. This would have never happened thirty five years ago, when the acts had power.
Wouldn't have happened twenty five years ago, when Tom Petty refused to have his album released at $8.98, a new high price. MCA needed the money, Tom needed his credibility. He didn't want his fans to be guinea pigs.
Neil Diamond's comeback has been compromised by some suits completely out of touch with not only the street, but careers.

"You too can rule the world.
You just have to crush everyone ELSE first!
A little crushing music, maestro..." ~ from the movie, 'With Honors'

Open Media Commons

Sun Microsystems announced plans for an open-source, royalty-free digital rights management (DRM) standard, called the Open Media Commons, to address the increasing number of incompatible download schemes. Through the open-source Common Development and Distribution License, Sun is releasing the code from its Project DReaM (DRM/everywhere available) program. The company is encouraging digital rights holders and device makers to join it in this initiative. There are also other companies and groups making similar efforts.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/22/sun_open_source_drm/

Software

A German research group that developed the MP3 format in the late 1980s has developed a watermarking technology that it says will help curb illegal file sharing. Officials from the Fraunhofer Institute said that their technology is better than digital rights management (DRM) tools in that it does not require special hardware to play protected files and is less susceptible to hacking. Instead, the institute has developed a method of watermarking MP3 files and software to track those files. The result is that rather than identifying individuals who download protected files, the application tracks who has uploaded files that have been marked. According to Michael Kip, a spokesperson for the institute, "If, for instance, you purchase and download a CD, burn a copy, and give it to a friend, and that person puts it on a file sharing network, our system will trace that music back to you." That scenario, said Kip, could result in legal action against the person who originally bought the CD, depending on that person's country of residence and applicable copyright laws.

Opera integrates BitTorrent in upcoming browser


Hardware

Intel quietly embeds DRM in it's 945 chips firmware
2005 Digit Online Magazine, reports copyright holders protection hit at the hardware level. Intel is now embedding digital rights management in the new dual-core processor Pentium D and the 945 chipset found in the motherboard. Furthermore it's enabled and works along side Microsofts DRM model, unfortunately no ones tallking much about it. The new system can theoretically give content holders the option of denying copying and re-distribution of their products. [Intel's Australian technical manager] Tucker ducked questions regarding technical details of how embedded DRM would work saying it was not in the interests of his company to spell out how the technology in the interests of security.'' Intel "dream" DRM system would allow content to be moved from one platform to another on a network, presumably through a check-in/check-out procedure, to make sure only a limited number of (legitimate) copies would be made and in service at any one time. Intel's system also acknowledges, for example, that a high- resolution (e.g. high definition video) copy of a film could be used to create low-res (like Quicktime, Real or Windows Media) versions that could be used in portable video players. Users might even be able to "loan" time-limited copies or be allowed to make a small number of copies, like Apple's Fair Play DRM permits.

Cyberattackers can exploit Pentium self-defense
Your computer could hand itself over to cyberattackers when it's trying to cool off. That warning galvanized the information technology security experts gathered this week at the CanSecWest/core06 conference here. Computers with Intel Pentium processors can be hijacked through a built-in mode designed to protect the processor's motherboard.

Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips 6/05
http://news.com.com/2102-1006_3-5731398.html?tag=st.util.print
See Intel's ideas for such a system, and the participation of an entertainment and consumer electronics industry panel called the Digital Home Working Group, on which Intel sits, which has been addressing such a system in this article from February, 2004

Don M. Whiteside
VP Technical Policy & Standards
Intel Corporation
Date: May 30, 2005
The article grossly misrepresents the discussion that occurred. The rights management technology referred to in the article was not a secret DRM from Intel, but the DTCP-IP technology publicly offered by the 5C Entity; which Intel is a Founder. Intel believes that the DTCP-IP technology is an important element in enabling protected transport of compressed content within the home network, and we continue to promote DTCP-IP for this application which enables greater consumer flexibility & use of premium entertainment content.

Steve Bellovin: The DTCP web site says, on its home page, The following are informational versions of the Volume 1 specification documents, which omit specific sections and sensitive information. It is not the complete Volume 1 and should not be utilized for product implementations. The complete DTCP Specification, can be obtained by executing the License Agreement and paying the associated fees as prescribed in the license agreement. The license is about 50 pages long, describes "Confidential" and "Highly Confidential" markings for parts of the technology, and requires an annual payment of $10,000 for an evaluation license which can't even be used to ship products. (If you want to ship products, you owe even more up front, plus a per-certificate fee.) See DeCSS

Music | Digital Rights Management

What are your Fair Use Rights?

"You're not buying music, you're buying a key," says Larry Kenswil, president of eLabs at Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, which offers 99 cent digital singles "...that can be burned to a CD but not copied to certain portable devices, like the Apple iPod. 'That's what digital rights management does: it enables business models.'"

(Fox doesn't object to personal use)
“We have zero objection to anyone's ability to duplicate, to record, to play back and to save any copy- able content whatsoever,” said Peter Chernin, the president of 20th Century Fox. “But we'd be idiots not to be wary of the risks that come with that ability, and of the vulnerability of those of us supplying digitally unprotected films and shows.” Source NYT DRM article by Amy Harmon

Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?

ORIGINS OF FOLKSONGS

Woody Guthrie put the following copyright notice on one of his songs.

Google Video DRM and Fair Use

FAIR USE

DeCss Gallery

Jon Lech Johansen, (famous as one of the authors* of DeCSS, an app that lets you rip copy-protected DVDs) better known as DVD Jon.

* The decryption code was actually written by an anonymous German programmer, from reverse-engineering. " For people interested in background on DeCSS, the best account of the origin of DeCSS is his trial testimony:

Q. Who wrote DeCSS?
A. I and two other people wrote DeCSS.
...
Q. Mr. Johansen, what did you do next towards making DeCSS?
A. We agreed that the person who I met would reverse engineer
a DVD
player in order to obtain the CSS algorithm and keys.
Q. Who was this person that you met on the Internet?
A. A person from Germany. I don't know his identity.
Q. Okay. What happened next?
A. About three days later when I was on line again, he messaged me and told me that he had found the CSS algorithm. He also sent the algorithm to me with the CSS authentication source which are written by Eric [ed: this is a mishearing of Derek] Fawcus earlier. He also sent me information on where inside the player he had found the algorithm, and he also sent me a single player key.
Q. Thank you very much. Now, you testified on direct that a German person, I think, had reverse-engineered the Xing DVD player, is that correct?
A. Yes, that is correct.
Q. And that person goes by the nick Ham?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. And it's Ham who wrote the source code that
performed the authentication function in DeCSS, is that correct?
A. No, that is not correct. He did not write the authentication code.
He wrote the decryption code.
Q. He wrote the encryption code?
A. Decryption code.
Q. Decryption.
A. Yes.
Q. Ham is a member of Masters of Reverse Engineering or MORE?
A. That's correct.
Q. And are you also a member of MORE?
A. Yes.
Q. There are other members in Germany and Holland, is that correct?
A. Well, the third member is in the Netherlands.
Q. And it was Ham's reverse engineering of the Xing DVD player that revealed the CSS encryption algorithm, am I right?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. Reverse engineering by Ham took place in or about September 1999?
A. Yes, I believe it was late in September of 1999.
Q. And you testified that it was this revelation of the CSS
encryption algorithm and not any weakness in the CSS cipher that allowed MORE to create DeCSS, is that correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. You obtained the decryption portions of the DeCSS source code from Ham, correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. You then compiled the source code and created the executable?
A. Well, in the form I received it, it was not compatible.

See also:
http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/decss.html and
http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/dvdtruth.txt

RELATED INFORMATION

2010 Subpoena Defense Resources
A new entity called the US Copyright Group ("USCG"), ostensibly operating on behalf of several independent filmmakers, has filed lawsuits against thousands of Bit Torrent users in a federal court in Washington, D.C.. The defendants, all currently unnamed individuals, called "John Does" in legal cases, are accused of having uploaded and downloaded independent films such as "Far Cry," "The Hurt Locker," "Steam Experiment," and "Uncross the Stars" in violation of copyright law. CNET's News.com has put together a "Frequently Asked Questions" piece that explains the litigation campaign in more detail.
The USCG has obtained IP addresses it alleges are associated with infringement, and has received permission from the court to issue subpoenas to Internet Service Providers ("ISPs") to obtain the name and address of subscribers associated with those IP addresses. News reports suggest that, unlike the RIAA lawsuits against alleged mp3 downloaders, the attorneys bringing these suits are not affiliated with any major entertainment companies, but are instead intent on building a lucrative business model from collecting settlements from the largest possible set of individual defendants.

RIAA Mass Litigation Strategy for Making Money

Essay, "Digital Music: Problems and Possibilities," by Professor Terry Fisher of Harvard Law School

Statement of Roger McGuinn Songwriter and Musician Formerly with The Byrds on “The Future of Digital Music: Is There an Upside to Downloading?”

Robert Raisch on Digital Rights Management and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing restrictions.

After all we have seen and experienced, have we learned nothing? Tell any reasonably sophisticated hacker they cannot do something and they will find more ways to get around your restriction then you can (not) imagine.
Oh, you allow text messaging traffic on your network, but not P2P? How about P2P applications reconfigured to share songs and movies over the same ports used by AOL's AIM? Or the Web's HTTP? Or email's IMAP/POP? Think you can recognize P2P transmissions by their unique sequence of ones and zeros? How about scrambling those bits using cryptographic transformations you would need several super-computers to crack?
Without examining every bit traversing the network and understanding its state, within whatever context or conversation it is a part of, you cannot hope to control what your users do. This is the tyranny of information complexity turned on its head and reinvented as a crushing weight placed on the shoulders of those who would seek to control others.
The biggest "problem" here is not P2P or file sharing or DVD ripping or podcasting it's the simple, unalterable fact that we've come to a time where any "intellectual property" is easily, trivially taken out of the container we've traditionally relied upon to control its use. Books, vinyl records, cds, celluloid film, video tape, DVDs....these are archaic prisons of rigid matter, atoms purposefully constructed to diminish what we can accomplish, rather than clouds of electrons, indeterminately located, impossible to measure, and so, impossible to control. We are beginning to see the affect of the Internet Age's Uncertainty Principle: information wants to be free...and it has little to do with cost or payments or money, and everything to do with power and control.

How to "rip" a scene from an entire movie on a DVD?

CDs to Digital:
ripdigital.com
getdigitalinc.com (I used them and they were great!)
awetechnologies.com
moondogdigital.com
riptopia.com

LPs and Tapes to Digital:
digitize-it.com
cassettes2cds.com

RESOURCES

Educational CyberPlayGround: FUTURE TRENDS IN COMPUTING
and service calls. - - DRM technology and policy There appear ... will happen with DRM protected data in 100 years ... documents? Otherwise all DRM protected documents, movies and films
Educational CyberPlayGround: Copyright, Copyleft, IP,Fair Use, Research, Citation is a bubble many "DRM" proponents would like to burst. The term "DRM" is the same sort of deception. ~ Seth ... play it later. Some DRM systems try to make this impossible.

Educational CyberPlayGround: Copyleft and the Creative Commons License digital rights management (DRM) standard, called the Open Media ... its Project Dream program. DRM DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGMENT

Educational CyberPlayGround: Security - TOOLS
Kids' page. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT DRM Peer to Peer Technology peer-to-peer computing is ... copying or use of work DRM goal -- their products let publishers control every use

Educational CyberPlayGround: Radio Station, Ham Radio, Crystal Radio kits online!
DRM is all about preventing UN-VIABLE ... restrictions-management systems (DRM) as the solution.

 Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings NewsLetter
How to avoid DRM spyware Hacker software will protect everybody Hackers Use DRM To Plant Massive Amounts Of Spyware

 P2P Public Education
and P2P Ripping and EnCoding CD Audio DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGMENT - DRM ABOUT DeCSS and DVD's

Embedding and adding sound to web pages.
COMPOSITION Ripping and EnCoding CD Audio DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGMENT - DRM EMBEDDING SOUND

Music Deals, Music Contract Law, Copyright Law, Free
Ripping and EnCoding CD Audio DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGMENT - DRM ABOUT DeCSS and DVD's K12 Classroom

FREE MUSIC DOWNLOADS EMBEDDING SOUND INTO YOUR SITE
LYRICS FOR EVERY SONG PUBLIC DOMAIN COPYRIGHT FREE COMPOSITION DRM FREE SONGS - Digital Rights Management Everything About DeCSS A program that cracks the code designed to protect

RINGTONES FROM
YOUR OWN MUSIC

It turns out it's fairly easy to install new ringtones on your phone. If your phone has bluetooth, you can pair the phone with the computer and just upload the MP3 with the song on the phone. No bluetooth? no mp3 support then look into a format called SMAF/MA-2.

Songs bought from the iTunes Music Store, are encrypted - read more about this below.

  • Get WireTap Pro. This program will record the sound sent to your computer's audio output by various programs, including iTunes. With this program recording, play the portion of song you're interested in.
  • When you're done recording, open the resulting .aifc file in QuickTime Pro and convert the file to a .wav file or find a free AIF to WAV converter.
  • Once you have the WAV file, open it up in Audacity and select the exact portion from the song you want to become the ringtone. Then save it as .wav under a new name.
  • Convert this final WAV file to a SMAF/MA-2 file. Download the Wave to SMAF Converter from Yamaha, and convert the file. You'll end up with a .mmf file. For the file to be recognized by the Samsung E315 phone, I had to rename it to have a .mid extension. Also make sure the file is under 40Kb or so, and it has no more than 20 seconds.

    The WAV->SMAF converter allows you to choose either 4KHz or 8KHz as sampling rate. Both will work on the phone, but the sound for the 4KHz version is just terrible, so I ended up using 8KHz. This reduced in half the length of the ringtone, compared to the 4KHz version.

  • Once you have the .mid file, upload it on a web site in a known location (you do have one, don't you?), and send the phone an SMS message containing the link to the .mid file. For T-Mobile, I just send an email to phone-number-digits-only@tmomail.net containing the link.
  • Once you receive the message, follow the link and download the ringtone. If you get error messages like Bad Gateway or something else, the file might be too large, or the song lasts too long. Experiment a bit with the sizes and see which ones work for you.