Here is a good illustration of how easily copy protection schemes can be cracked. Sony Music, which has taken an aggressive stance against what it sees as rampant piracy of its music, went all out to create the "Key2Audio" disc copy- protection technology. After shipping more than 11 million discs "protected" with this system, the entertainment giant has now discovered that it has been defeated by a felt-tip marker.
Internet newsgroups have rapidly circulated the observation that simply blacking out the outer rim of the shiny side of the disc breaks the Key2Audio copy protection. Sony's copy protection system added a track of data to the disc that computer hard drives are programmed to read first thus blocking the playing of the actual music. When the discs are played on Apple Macintosh computers, they cause the entire computer to crash.
But evidently Sony didn't count on a simple, low-tech physical hack. Sony engineers had their eyes on the computer drives of alleged pirates, not on the disc itself. This felt-tip pen discovery will, of course, allow music fans to easily burn the Sony discs on to their recordable CDs and hard drives and freely share them with file swappers.
Can other copy protection systems used by music labels be defeated in the same way? Probably. Certainly Apple Macintosh users must now be happy that they can now play Sony music without crashing their machines. But who would want to? The contents of these discs will now rapidly make their way to file trading sites unimpeded.