Copycats, your number's up

Industry giants IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba are working together to make the digital copying of audio and video on your PC all but impossible, warns ANDREW THOMAS

Somewhere in a dusty corner of your attic, tucked away behind the Christmas tree lights and the broken tennis racquets, lurks some old technology. Dated it may be, but it could have just been given a new lease of life by a group of IT companies keen to suck up to the global music industry. If your attic is home to a halfway-decent reel-to-reel tape recorder, don't take it to the car-boot sale just yet. Although analogue recording is passé these days, it might soon be the only way to make copies of your favourite CDs for – ahem – personal use.

The 4C group, comprising IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba is proposing changes to the standard for hard disks which would allow copy protection to be incorporated into PCs, set-top boxes, digital VCRs and personal stereos which would effectively prevent the digital copying of audio and video.

The proposed new system, called Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), provides a way of encrypting content so that it can be decrypted only by a compliant playback device. The scheme is also aimed at controlling the limited copying of the emerging high-quality pre-recorded audio DVDs, which offer either two channels of extremely high fidelity sound (24-bit sampling at 192KHz, compared with the existing CD standard of 16 bits at 44.1KHz) or six channels of audio still at a higher quality than CDs.

The owner of a DVD-audio disc will be able to make copies only by using a DVD recorder incorporating CPRM. Under the proposal, all disks will incorporate a unique serial number which is part of the security key used to encrypt the content. If an attempt to make a further copy is made, the serial number of the second disk will be different, and the song won't play.

The involvement of Intel in the group is interesting, in that the chip giant had its fingers badly burned when it introduced unique serial numbers on the Pentium III processor range and was forced to drop them following concerted pressure from privacy groups. One of the reasons cited for introducing serial numbers on chips was to allow software to be registered to a specific PC, preventing illicit copying.

"Intel is pushing CPRM, which would turn your own storage media (disk drives, Flash Ram, Zip disks and so on) into co-conspirators with movie and record companies," says John Gilmore, head of Internet pressure group Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). "[The aim is] to deny you, the owner of the computer and the media, the ability to store things on those media and get them back later.

"If you try to record a song off the FM radio onto a CPRM audio recorder, it will refuse to record or play it," Gilmore explains. "Even when recording your own brand-new original audio, the default settings for analogue recordings are such that they can never be copied, nor ever copied in higher fidelity than CDs, and that only one copy can be made even if copying is ever authorised if the other restrictions are somehow bypassed.

"Intel and IBM don't tell you these things; you have to get to Page 11 of Exhibit B-1, 'CPRM Compliance Rules for DVD-Audio' on page 45 of the 70-page 'Interim CPRM/CPPM Adopters Agreement', available only after you fill out intrusive personal questions after following the link from www.dvdcca.org/4centity/. All Intel tells you is that CPRM will give consumers access to more music."

And this, indeed, reflects Intel's party line. Manny Vara, a spokesman at the chip giant's California HQ, says: "The content in your hard drive is not encrypted by CPRM, which is one of the misconceptions about the technology. CPRM only kicks in when you copy protected content to a removable piece of media like the Flash card in your MP3 player.

"Let's say you bought three MP3 songs from Liquid Audio or another such site that sells protected music content," Vara says. "These MP3 files have a digital signature. Now those files live in your hard drive. CPRM has done nothing to this point yet, since it does not live in the hard drive. Then you copy those protected songs from the hard drive to a piece of CPRM-compliant blank media like a Flash card in a CPRM-compliant MP3 player. When you do this, CPRM kicks in and marries those songs to that piece of blank media and that player.

"If your hard drive dies and you want to get the files from the Flash card back to a new hard drive, you can do this just fine. Since you bought those songs from Liquid Audio, you will be able to copy them back to the hard drive because the Liquid Audio player knows you paid for them from the digital signature in the file itself, so you can bring them back to your hard drive and play them.

"Now let's take songs you did not buy from Liquid Audio," Vara continues. "Let's say you ripped some songs from a CD to your hard drive, then you copied those files to the CPRM-compliant blank media in your CPRM-compliant MP3 player. Then the hard drive dies and you want to get them back for your new drive. You also can do this. Since those files are not protected, unlike like the ones you bought from Liquid, you can copy them as you do today, even if you stored them in a CPRM-compliant piece of media. Remember, CPRM does not kick in unless the files are protected and both the blank media and MP3 player are CPRM compliant. If any of those three components are not there, CPRM does not kick in." Well, that makes it pretty clear, doesn't it?

Intel is maintaining that CPRM only applies to removable media, which seems highly unlikely. The ability to prevent storage media from allowing you to make copies of any sound or video files is just too tempting for the entertainment industry to let pass.

Leading disk drive maker Western Digital is taking a neutral position. "The proposal of this standard is in the early stages," says a spokeswoman. "Our official position is that we are continually evaluating technologies such as those represented by 4C and while we respect the need for content providers to protect their copyrights we will consider such technologies only if our customers demand it."

But rest assured, if the technology exists to protect record company profits, it will be used. Digital recording offers easy, high quality, copying of music and video. But there is a very real danger that this technology will be nipped in the bud by corporate greed before it ever takes off.

Napster itself, once the bête noire of the music industry, has announced plans to charge for membership later this year. Although there are alternative sources of free music, last week's ruling by a Californian court that Napster should shut down completely could signal the beginning of the end for free music on the Web. The message is clear: download every song that you want right now while you still can. Buy a new hard disk that doesn't have copy protection built in, and dust off that ancient tape recorder.