Copying Protected Audio CDs

I have an issue with (so-called) Copy Protected CDs. If I go out and buy an MP3 player, I would like to use it to play files made from my legitimately purchased CDs, and to have record companies attempt to stop you - so you would have to buy the tracks from an online store, covered in DRM and lacking the quality that you would choose, to listen to them on a mobile device - is little short of extortion.

Of course, as has been mentioned before in various forums I can't be bothered to track down at this moment in time (so just trust me), Copy Protected CDs can generally be copied quite easily, and the only barrier it puts up is against some regular CD playing aperatus (like in-car CD players, and my old Goodmans MP3/CD player). So record companies are spending a fortune on a technology that is designed to break things, but is actually (more often than not) a broken technology itself.

Case study: Some Cities by The Doves

I bought this for Jayne, because both the singles from it have been excellent and their reputation for big, sweeping, atmospheric songs was set by The Last Broadcast (their previous album). It's great, and we want a copy for in the car (I have no intention of carrying around a whole load of original CDs in the car). But - uh-oh - there's the black logo on that sticker, saying that it's Copy Protected. Sure enough, as usual, my MP3/CD player can manage about 8 seconds before the errors that they introduce into the audio to try and throw CD-ROM drives results in it locking up, unless I turn off the anti-shock mechanism which means that it will just jump like a bastard.

I start my ripper of choice, CDex, and get the CD info from the free online database freedb.org. Up comes the list of tracknames, so CDex can do the filenames properly. Normally this would be for the ID3 tags in MP3s, or for OGG Vorbis tags (the two formats I use) but seeing as this is going to end up being an audio CD in a few minutes time, this time I go for uncompressed WAVs.

CDex in action. As you can see if you click for the original, so far all the stuff they introduce into the audio stream to try and bugger things up for ripping the CD has failed - there's a big list of 'OK's for all the tracks that have succesfully been extracted.

At the end of the rip... one error has occured, in the last track. As I was watching the entire process of this last track, the error only occured at the very end of the last track, presumably as it was about to swing into the data section for the heavily compressed and DRMed audio that they try and fob computer users off with. So I listened to the track carefully, with headphones on, and you know what? There's no problems on there at all - it sounds perfect.

For reference, the equipment used was an NEC DVD+-RW drive on an Athlon XP PC running Windows XP. I've had similar positive results with Samsung drives, but negative results with Philips and Teac drives, so I'll stick with the drives I know work well. The software used was CDex, which is open source, and I've been using for about 6 years now.

The lesson of this is... well, apparently I've circumvented a copyright protection system, which is a bad thing under the DMCA (the American anti-freedom act), but we don't have that in the UK. And to circumvent a copyright protection system, surely you need to have a copyright protection system that acts like one, rather than the CD equivalent of a Post-It Note saying "My milk, hands off".