Posted by John in Detroit on 11/17/78 11:45

That was, in fact, part of the point I was trying to make

And it is THESE pirates that are costing the industry billions of
dollars, not the folks who make a copy or two so they don't have to mess
up thier originals.

Sony's assorted anti-copy measures only affect the little guy, not the
big timers.

Though in some respects, I would not mind hearing of how a big time
pirate who cloned one of Sony's nasty disks was forced to do the modern
equivlent of walking the plank after his customer's got bitten by the
root kit.

Alas, if the pirate is good though... The customers will blame Sony, not
him, so again, it does not good for sony to be doing this s**T

Brendan Gillatt wrote:
> 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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