Protecting Digital Audio: Part II

The major labels and their industry trade group the RIAA have been very aggressive in combating the wholesale theft of music since the first digital systems were introduced in 1982. We explored one of the first methods yesterday…known as SCMS (Serial Copy Management System). It was meant to control digital copying from physical CDs to physical DATs. However, what happened next was to present a whole new level of concern within the music industry…but only after the damage was done!

In the early 90s, as CD-ROM drives grew in popularity, users discovered that they could “rip” the digital information from a compact disc and save it to the internal memory of the computer. It didn’t matter that hard drives were very expensive at the time (I paid $8000 each for my first two 650 Meg Hard Drives) and the music industry couldn’t imagine someone copying their music data to devices that expensive. And the thought of transmitting these very large files over the very new and low bandwidth Internet was inconceivable. Boy, how things changed in the next decade or two.

As it turned out, the intersection between digital music disc, computers with CD-ROM drives, compression algorithms and the burgeoning Internet conspired to defeat every attempt the RIAA and music labels tried to stop the stealing of music. A new era in the music industry had begun…and in many ways is still developing.

So they blew it with the compact discs and CD players. The Redbook standard didn’t have any type of copy protection (the SCMS system worked only on the receiving device…the DAT or MiniDISC recorder that you might have). You can bet that when a new physical music format came along that they would be ready with some form of copy protection. And they were.

All during the 90s, a group of smart people gathered about once a month to contemplate how to handle the growing threat from illegal music downloads. This was long before Steve Jobs and Apple had introduced iTunes and iPods. The group was called SDMI…the Secure Digital Music Initiative. I have a very good friend that worked for the RIAA at the time and was included in the SDMI meetings. He told me that there wasn’t a lot of agreement among the various interests and things never really progressed very far.

There were efforts to include a “digital watermark” on all music releases. The labels would embed a small chunk of data interleaved with the music data AND the analog outputs would have a detectable sonic signature that would indicate a track or album was acquired illegally. I actually evaluated one of these methods and found it audible…not good.

As the 90s were coming to a close, the DVD Forum (the group in charge of the DVD format) launched the DVD-Video format…and Sony and Phillips countered with SA-CD (Super Audio Compact Disc). These two formats battled it out for the better part of 3-5 years and eventually both failed as physical formats. It’s true that there were more SACD software releases but that doesn’t really mean anything when you figure that 85% of ALL SA-CDs were transfers of older analog masters and the rest had a PCM past.

Both formats employed copy protection schemes. They were different technologies but tried to accomplish the same thing as SCMS.

We’ll take a look at CPPM (Copy Protection Pre-recorded Media) tomorrow. This was the new method used on the DVD-Audio discs.