Castrated Lead-Out

Overview

High-quality and properly designed protection mechanisms usually contain two independent levels of protection, operating at the sector and file levels, respectively. Sectorlevel protection mechanisms are oriented towards protection against sector-level copiers, which copy the entire disc. These copiers create an exact copy of the disc. File-level protection mechanisms prevent file-by-file copying of the entire disc, as well as the extraction of individual files.

It may seem that when high-quality sector-level protection is present, file-level protection is absolutely useless ( especially since all file-level protection mechanisms can easily be bypassed even by end- user copiers such as Roxio CD Copier . This isn t true, however! Impossibility to create an exact disc copy doesn t necessarily mean that it is impossible to grab at least part of its contents. Of course, while it s clear that a part still isn t the whole, it is still better than nothing at all. Here is an example. Protection mechanisms for most multimedia encyclopedias (for example, such Russian multimedia products as Nautilus Pompilius ”Diving and Agatha Christie ”Virtual Concert ) operate only at the sector level, but do not prevent you from file-by-file copying of a CD s contents to the hard disk or to another CD. Naturally, the resulting copy is unusable and, when starting the multimedia shell, the protection mechanism refuses to work with the illegal copy and terminates its operation abnormally. Nevertheless, it is still possible to operate with both discs without the shell, because all albums, photos, or video clips are not encrypted and are stored in the WAV/BMP/AVI formats, respectively. Even a beginner can easily extract whatever files from the disc and do with them whatever he or she pleases!

Hence, the conclusion is straightforward: Do not confuse CD protection and that of its contents . To protect a CD s contents, a large variety of methods are available