OFF: Anti-piracy encryption article

[Brian Halligan]

June 29, 1999
CDs To Have Anti-Piracy Feature

By The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The latest round of portable digital music players will
soon be available in stores nationwide, equipped with security features
designed to prevent piracy, designers say.
Members of the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced Monday they had
completed design specifications for the Walkman-like devices they claim will
thwart online piracy.
On a yet-to-be determined date, new CDs released by the major record producers
will be digitally encrypted to prevent piracy, and the digital players will
need to be upgraded to accept the new music, the Secure Digital Music
Initiative said.
``SDMI will enable the future of music and today's announcement signals to
consumers that this future is coming quickly. This future holds the promise
that consumers will have access to vast amounts of exciting new content with a
new level of portability,'' SDMI director Leonardo Chiariglione said in a
statement.
Diamond Multimedia, which makes the popular and controversial Rio portable
digital music player, said it will comply with the new standards. The original
version of the Rio player has served as a focal point for the music piracy
debate because it doesn't require copyright protection to play music using MP3
technology.
New devices, available as early as Christmas, would initially support all
current digital music formats, including MP3. After the new digital standard is
implemented and the machines' software is upgraded, the only new songs that
work on the machines will be ones that are digitally encoded with copyright
protections.
Even with the new protections, the players will still be able to play old music
already illegally copied using the MP3 format, a major concession by the
recording industry.
Future versions of Rio players will be completely SDMI-compliant, said Lorraine
Comstock, of Diamond's RioPort division. A spokeswoman for Milpitas,
Calif.-based Creative Labs said its Nomad digital music player, to hit store
shelves in July, will also comply with the SDMI standard.
Industry members adopted the design specifications at a conference in Los
Angeles earlier this month. They are under technical review and are to be
ratified and made public by July 8.
Analysts said the security features, however cumbersome, were inevitable.
``I think for the traditional music industry to back this, there has obviously
going to have to be some fairly rigorous copyright protection,'' said Clay
Ryder, an analyst for Zona Research.
He suspects computer-savvy hackers will try to find a way around the security
features, but the chore will prove labor-intensive.
``Nothing's 100 percent crack-proof, but you would go through a hell of a lot
of effort to descramble something,'' Ryder said.
The SDMI members include each of the big five record labels -- BMG
Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music
Group and Warner Music Group -- all looking to capitalize on the growing
digital music marketplace while protecting artist and label copyrights.
The Recording Industry Association of America lost a suit earlier this month to
halt sales of the Rio -- a portable machine that carries about an hour's worth
of CD-quality MP3 music on a computer chip.
Comstock thinks the design specifications will help make popular music
available to online consumers.
``For the consumers the SDMI specification is a good thing because today you
cannot buy music online from well known artists,'' Comstock said.
Currently, most of the music available for sale on the Internet consists of
lesser-known artists.