Copy protecting the CD-R after burning.Is it possible?

[pranav81]

Dear friends,
hi there.I want to know that is it possible to copy protect a CD-R after burning it using Roxio or Nero?I mean is there a program available which will protect the CD-R so that it would not be possible to copy the CD using conventional CD copy programs?
Waiting for some posts,
Thanks in advance.

Pranav.

[cfitz]

You can't protect a disc after you have burned the disc, but some protections are apparently possible when done as an integrated part of the burning. I haven't done anything myself, but some links to resources can be found in this thread:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic. ... 8423#58423

Good luck,

cfitz

[pranav81]

Dear cfitz,
thanks for a fast reply.I want to write a copy protected data CD so that my friends will be able to read the CD on their machines but will not be able to copy the whole CD on other CD.
If some type of copy protection is possible using Nero 5.5.10.15 or Roxio EZCD 5.3.4,because I dont have enough money at this moment to buy CDRWin,please help me out.
Thanks once again,
Pranav.

[cfitz]

I think all the links in that post point to free tools. In particular, this is free:

http://tzcopyprotection.cjb.net/

I haven't investigated any of these with any rigor, but I don't think they require CDRWin exclusively. Although many of these techniques seem to require setting up and burning from .cue files, which are native to CDRWin, Nero can burn from .cue files as well (although perhaps not with the same facility depending on what obscure features are invoked). Anyway, I see that some people are using Nero on that site. Another free alternative for burning from .cue files is burnatonce:

http://www.burnatonce.com/

Try some experiments and see what works.

By the way, why don't you trust your friends?

cfitz

[CignaXI]

Maybe for the same reason records companies and everyone that uses cd media don't trust us (or anybody with a CDRW)

[pranav81]

Dear cfitz,
trusting friends is not a question.The problem is that my friends may also have some friends of their own.They may/will distribute the data with other people.I accept that they may share it using HDD's,but that is not easy as CD's.
Anyways I think I will let the problem die out,and as you pointed out,I will trust my friends and ask them not to distribute data.
I wanted a easy to implement copy protection scheme which I think is out of my reach now as I dont enough time at this moment to reasearch through different software programs.
Thanks for the reply,though,

Pranav.

[Nerva]

http://www.star-force.com/products/cdr30/index.html

[cfitz]

http://www.star-force.com/products/cdr30/index.html

Interesting, but requires that you use their custom CD-R's which have special physical characteristics not found in regular CD-R's. Apparently these characteristics encode the key used to decrypt the data on the disc. And yet they are still compatible with regular readers (that is one of their selling points), and these characteristics are detectable with a regular reader, but not copyable because they are not part of the data stream at all (including sub-channels). I wonder what they are doing?

However, this product is neither free nor quick and easy to implement, so I don't think it will be of value to pranav81. It is still interesting, though. Anyone have any experience with it and comments on whether it works as advertised?

cfitz

[CignaXI]

Someone should implement the technique used in mission impossible, after five minutes the media explodes.