A curiosity, only tenuously related - I just came across a Feb 1994 copy of
Elector magazine, with plans for a S/PDIF copybit eliminator (for SCMS).
Seems people have been defeating copy protection for a while..
I've owned an "Audio Alchemy" SCMS-stripper since 1991, when I bought my first DAT machine. It cost about $99, was about the size of a deck of cards, and stripped the SCMS bits out of the digital bitstream.
A later DAT machine I bought, a Tascam portable pro deck, has the SCMS stripped by default. (It takes in digital signals and writes to the DAT with the SCMS code set to "unlimited number of digital copies allowed.")
Likewise, a professional CD writer I own (HHB) bypasses SCMS. (Not just allowing a digital copy to be made, but making the resulting CD-R copyable freely.)
A friend of mine bought his DVD player on EBay: it bypasses all region coding (i.e., it makes all DVDs "region-free"). Region coding is a different issue, but part of the DRM universe.
Until George W. Bush and the Carlyle Group start putting money into these things and thus discover that SCMS strippers are terrorist tools, such tools will likely continue to be available.
"Use a logic analyzer, go to jail."
--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Nietzsche
