Description Of all the Record Labels Sony have been the most aggressive in pursuing anti-piracy strategies. It was not surprising then, that theirs was the first CD copy protection technology to be targeted by crackers. The solution however, is surprisingly low-tech.
Sony and Universal Music have already begun selling the copy protected CD's and have mainly focused on Europe, where audio CD piracy is said to be rampant. The main feature of Sony's proprietary Key2Audio protection is that any audio CD carrying the technology will not be playable on a PC. Sony have included a track containing "bogus" data which confuses a PC since PC drives read data first. This renders the CD "unplayable" on a PC and even causes some Apple Macintosh computers to crash. In that way, Sony believed they would prevent the transfer of music from an audio CD to a PC's hard drive.
They felt so strongly about it that they were willing to ignore the fact that many car stereos and some portable devices would also not play the CD's.
According to recent newsgroup and forum postings however, it is extremely easy to circumvent the copy protection. Using a felt-tipped marker, or even some sticky tape, the bogus data track, usually located in the outer rim of the CD, can be covered thus allowing any PC to play the disc and even to extract the audio from it. Reuters actually tried this method on Celine Dion's newest release "A New Day Has Come," which comes embedded with Sony's Key2Audio technology. They found that the reported method works.
Having already shipped more than 11 million copy-protected discs in Europe and having invested millions in developing this copy-proof technology, Sony now find themselves in a muddle. They certainly cannot abandon their investment but they will most probably try to use their method in a different way. It is evident however, that now that the "cat is out of the bag" it will become increasingly riskier for any record company to invest so much in developing any anti-piracy technology.
