Felt-tip pen defeats Sony's audio CD protection system

As it turns out Sony's protection is built into the first couple of tracks

near the outside rim of the audio CD. Simply drawing a circle around the outside

area of the CD will render Sony's high-tech protection useless. The development

of an extremely low-tech way to get around the "copy-proof" system

represents both a major embarrassment for Sony and a big problem for the music

industry.

Already major music labels, including Sony and Universal Music, have begun

selling discs deploying Sony's "Key2Audio" protection scheme.

Key2Audio is supposed to prevent consumers from copying, or "burning,"

music onto recordable CDs or onto their computer hard drives, which can then be

shared with other users over file-sharing Internet services such as Kazaa or

Morpheus MusicCity.

After blackening out the edge of the shiny side of a Key2Audio disc, the disc

will play and record on a PC hard drive with little trouble. Key2Audio adds a

"dummy" track to the copy-protected disc that contains bogus data.

Computer hard drives are programmed to read data files first. Key2Audio will

cause the computer to try to play the bogus track first. But because that

attempt is programmed to fail, the system never gets to play the music tracks

located elsewhere on the compact disc. Standard CD players will not recognize

the first track and play the regular track of the CD. But after blackening out

the first track, the computer will skip right to the legitimate first audio

track.