How the RIAA Plans to Make CD’s Unrippable

The music industry is escalating its crusade against Napster style music swapping with a plan to place stringent controls on compact discs — including, perhaps, the one you bought last week. Using technology from companies such as Sunnyvale, California-based Macrovision Corp and privately held Israeli firm Midbar Technologies, the labels hope to staunch the flow of CD-to-MP3 copies that made the file-trading service Napster possible in the first place. Although the specific details of the copy-protection schemes are closely guarded, in broad terms the technology exploits the difference between the standard used by consumer CD players, known as RedBook, and the standards used for CD drives in personal computers, known as YellowBook and OrangeBook. “What we do is a modification to the way the CD is placed on the disk that confuses the (computer’s) drive,” said Eyal Shavit, Midbar’s vice president for research and development. The company said it is working with at least one of the major record labels in field tests. Computer CD drives are much more sensitive than normal CD players, which are designed to ignore small errors from scratches, jolts and dust. So by adding small errors, CDs are rendered unrippable and in theory normal listening is unimpaired.