Posted by Brendan Gillatt on 04/18/06 11:57

John in Detroit wrote:

> It is Sony's lame attempt to stop piracy that brought about all this
> SCMS and DRM idiocy on their systems. Now, "private" pirates, IE you
> or I making a copy for safety, are not doing damage

The fact is that with any data disc the actual disk surface can be
copied directly. This means that any pirate with suitable equipment
(around $500 up or so) can copy ANY disk with or without any sortof copy
protection. Basically it records the exact pattern of bits on the disk
surface and puts them exactly back on another disk. (This of course
doesn't allow the video to be digitally transfered and ripped to a DivX
movie) Even with copy protection the disk player can't distinguish
between a legit and copied disk. It used to be a popular way of people
distributing Floppy disk images in the days of Doom and Wolfenstein but
is much harder now because floppy readers can be put into a raw data
read mode whereas most CD ROMS have error correction and the likes built in.

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