Ryan Mitchley wrote:

MR I remember that some company that made an SCMS stripper got sued and
MR took their product off the market. The basis for the lawsuit was that
MR it had no other purpose other than to assist you in breaking the law.
MR On the other hand, I have one from Digital Domains that's sold as a
MR "format converter" and M-audio sells one, too.

Well, GUESS WHAT . . .?

NEWSFLASH!!!

BLINKING NEON LIGHTS

Any kind of format converter that involves some kind of alleged "reverse
engineering" could soon be
illegal. Doesn't matter whether you created the data stream or not. Doesn't
matter whether your intentions were legal or not. If the manufacturer tells
you not to convert, you shall be legally obliged to obey. You had better
hope that there are enough "nice" companies around or that market forces
prevail, 'cause the law certainly won't be on your side . . .

/BLINKING NEON LIGHTS


This has nothing to do with reverse-engineering. The S-PDIF subcode is
available in the published standard. It's a universal standard that
everyone in the industry more or less followed.

The notion is that the SCMS subcode exists to prevent people from making
direct DAT dubs from CDs or original DAT tapes, and that any box that
prohibits this can be used for making illegal copies. In truth this turns
out to be a non-issue since DAT never made it as a consumer format and
CD-Rs have since totally blown everything up. But at the time many of
the major record companies were up in arms about direct digital copies
being possible, which is why we got saddled with SCMS in the first place
(which was a major pain back in the early digital days when tweaking bits
on the fly was less trivial a task). At least we didn't get the goddamn
1KC notch filter that Columbia was pushing.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."