Stealth copy protection – where we are now

CPRM on ATA was never easy to explain. Howls of innocence from the 4C members followed our initial story, suggesting that CPRM was only ever intended for removable storage, and heavens no, it would never find its way onto a hard drive. But as you can read to this day, an hour with CPRM’s creator prior to us publishing the first story hadn’t refuted this suggestion. CPRM on hard drives was in its infancy, for sure, but we came away with valuable advice on how to implement corporate backup strategies to workaround CPRM-protected hard drives.

But the CPRM gambit was an early indication that the entertainment industry was deadly serious about removing the free movement of digital media on what has been, for fifteen years, on open platform.

You don’t need to know about command sequences to figure out what these guys want. In August a draft bill called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) was proposed by Senator Hollings (D). It proposed mandatory inclusion of copy-protection schemes for domestic and imported PCs, anything in fact, capable of recording digital media. (There was an opt-out for TiVO players). Hollings, who’s received a number of donations from the entertainment industry, remained elusive