Newsmaker: Sounding off on behalf of copy protection

Peter Jacobs faces a daunting challenge: convincing millions of music fans that he's not a policeman.

The 53-year-old former on-air radio personality heads Phoenix-based SunnComm, one of dozens of digital rights management companies aiming to thwart would-be pirates from distributing copyrighted material over the Web. Record labels, including Bertelsmann, have been experimenting with technologies from DRM companies to create copy-protected CDs. Such providers include SunnComm rivals Midbar and Macrovision, and a handful of other companies.

While SunnComm is betting that copy-protected CDs will be the music industry's answer to digital content protection, it's discovering that success stories don't come easy.

In May, SunnComm provided anti-copying technology on a CD release by veteran country music singer Charley Pride. But before the CD was shipped to U.S. stores by Nashville, Tenn.-based Music City Records, free copies of the songs appeared on the Internet. Eight of the 15 songs on Pride's new album, "A Tribute to Jim Reeves," were posted on a private Web page hosted by Yahoo. And later, consumers complained that the SunnComm-protected CDs could not play properly on all devices, such as certain DVD players.

In its defense, SunnComm said the leaked songs did not come from a cracked CD but were likely copied from an unprotected set of 2,000 CDs released in Australia. The company also said it had upgraded its technology to play on DVD players.

Still, consumers have not warmed up to the idea of copy-protected CDs.

One person is suing SunnComm, along with Denver-based Fahrenheit Entertainment, for misleading consumers by failing to include an adequate disclaimer on packaging for the copy-protected CDs. The lawsuit, filed three weeks ago, seeks an injunction against the two companies, preventing them from tracking consumer habits and requiring them to provide adequate privacy notices on the CD case.

SunnComm embeds a technology, called MediaCloq, into a CD to make the CD's directory structure invisible so it cannot be read by a personal computer. For instance, the names of the tracks do not appear on a computer's screen, and as a result, the music cannot be ripped and transferred to a desktop. The CD, however, will still play in an ordinary CD player, according to SunnComm. Jacobs said what sets his company apart from competitors is that SunnComm does not alter the music itself because the company's technology leaves the tunes untouched.

In an interview with CNET News.com, SunnComm's chief executive talked about the DRM business and the importance of protecting copyrighted works.

Q: Many people say copy-protection schemes don't work. If you can hear the music, you can copy it and steal it. What makes your technology different?
A: The technology that we sell is a padlock to music. If you have a lock cutter, a bolt cutter, you can cut that padlock off. If you're determined to steal the music, the music can be stolen. Our technology is not thief proof. What it's meant to do is provide a speed bump to people who don't steal things, and wish to use them in the parameters that are suggested by the artists...If you give people what they want with respect to their ability to copy the music in ways that they think is reasonable, they will not ever attempt to circumvent the technology. Only hackers will attempt to circumvent the technology in order to prove that it can be done. We're not designing the technology for them.

The recording industry wants to make it harder for consumers to directly copy CDs, but one of the hurdles is that any barriers to copying must be "backwards compatible"--meaning the new technologies would have to work on old CD players that don't screen pirated material and vice versa. What is SunnComm doing to overcome this problem?
What we do is we own hundreds and hundreds of CD players dating back to 1983 and forward. Before we release any copies of our MediaCloq product, our CDs are tested on all of those different CD players for playability, sound quality, everything. That's how we ensure that what we build today will work on CD players from 20 years ago.

So if someone breaks your anti-copying technology, are you going to sue?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits users from circumventing copy protection. It's now a crime in America to do that. Having said that, it's certainly up to the record companies to decide how they're going to manage hackers that circumvent the technology in the future. From our standpoint, we are designing the software for the 99 percent of the people who don't want to steal the music but instead (want to) use it for whatever means--for whatever personal use that's allowed by the artist and the record label. The software was designed for those people, not for the 1 percent who are going to take the lock cutters and cut the lock off and steal music in an unauthorized way.

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