Back Cover

This book is a practical guide to protecting CDs against unauthorized copying. It is oriented toward a wide reader audience, including advanced users and application and system programmers.

It is not necessary to have expensive specialized equipment or be a security expert to create strong, inexpensive, and reliable protection. All that you need to achieve this is a low-end CD recorder and a couple of evenings free from other work. This book provides a detailed description of CD structure and will let you in to a lot of secrets known only to security experts (and not even they know them all), explaining all this in simple language, without higher mathematics and practically without Assembler language. This is the books main unique feature!

While reading this book, you will learn how to invalidate the disc format in order to make it readable (that is, playable ) on most CD-ROM drives , but practically impossible for any copier to copy, and how to bind to the physical disc structure so that copiers are unable either to reproduce or imitate it. Youll also learn about the physical and technical limitations of low-end recorders and how to use these to achieve your goals.

Also covered will be the control over CD drives and recorders at a low level and how to get the maximum control allowed by specific drive models over CDs. All circumstances being equal, a disc protected using high-tech drive cannot be copied by all other drives. The book provides detailed information on the differences between drive models and which characteristics deserve the most attention when choosing a drive.

The book also discusses practically all commercial CD protection packets available today. It lists their implementation errors, thanks to which the copying of protected discs is still possible. The author also suggests several protection mechanisms that take into account his own bitter experience and that of his friends and colleagues. These protection mechanisms cannot be copied using any of the copiers that exist today.

With regard to copiers, here youll find detailed description of the most popular protected CD copiers: Clone CD and Alcohol 120%, which, according to their developers, can copy practically any protected disc, provided that the right combination of CD-ROM and CD recorder is chosen . The author demonstrates , using practical examples, that this is not actually the case, and suggests some protection mechanisms that cannot be copied by Clone CD and/or by Alcohol 120%.

Finally, the book explains how to create a protected CD copier on your own, making the replication of protected discs a much easier task.