Thursday, October 09, 2003

Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System

Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System: "MediaMax CD3 is a new copy-prevention technique from SunnComm Technologies that is designed to prevent unauthorized copying of audio CDs using personal computers. SunnComm claims its product facilitates 'a verifiable and commendable level of security,' but in tests on a newly-released album, I find that the protections may have no effect on a large fraction of deployed PCs, and that most users who would be affected can bypass the system entirely by holding the shift key every time they insert the CD. I explain that MediaMax interferes with audio copying by installing a device driver the first time software from the CD is executed, but I show that this provides only minimal protection because the driver can easily be disabled."

How to break the law...with knowledge.

No comments: