JUST SAY NO TO CIRCUMVENTING COPY PROTECTION

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law enacted in 1998, it is illegal to circumvent copy protection. It has come to our attention that some CDs produced by SONY contain a protection scheme called Key2Audio. Some others have schemes like Cactus Data Shield 100 and 200. Through careless use of a marker, or a piece of paper, people might inadvertently circumvent this protection. Since this would break the law THE UNCOVEROR has decided that we need to warn our readers about it.

If you have a copy protected CD, such a Celine Dion's A NEW DAY HAS COME, It will not play in a computer. It may not work in your car or your DVD player either. You will just have to use a regular music CD player. Why anyone would want to listen to such boring elevator music is a mystery to us, but to each his or her own.

By all means, do not mark it with a marker as shown here. That would be naughty! If you were to look on the CD bottom (unprinted side) for an roughly two millimeter wide dividing line, while you hold the disk to light, and make a mark with a marker covering the dividing line, and part of the outer ring, as shown, but not the inside area where the music is, that would keep the copy protection from being read by a computer, and it would play. People might even be able to rip the tracks and make a custom mix of their favorite songs on their own CD burner. Do not do this. It would be bad. It might violate the DMCA! You wouldn't want to break the law just because you accidentally made a mark on a CD you own, would you? besides, ink marks are ugly.

If you were to let a sticky piece of paper like an adhesive note get stuck on your disc, like this, Then it might come off inside your CD drive, messing it up. Even worse, it would make the outer ring of the disc invisible to the CD-Rom drive. It would keep the drive from reading the disc's table of contents, and it would play just like a regular unprotected music CD. Please do not be so careless. You might get in trouble for the simple blunder of letting something get stuck on your CD, and it just looks so ugly that way!

We don't want any of our readers to go to prison like poor Dmitry Sklyarov. He and his Russian software company, ElcomSoft made a software package that let text-to-speech software read Adobe E-books aloud for the blind. To do that, it had to circumvent copy protection. Dmitry and his company thought this would be fair use, but under the DMCA, there is no such thing! Forewarned is forearmed. Knowing is half the battle. Now you know not to make these little mistakes, and accidentally violate the DMCA thanks to THE UNCOVEROR.

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