From software, audio to video are being illegaly copied and everytime the major brands try to implement some kind of protection. They always claim their protection to be perfect, and yet it is always broken, for it is quite simple:
As long as the intended user has the platform on which he`ll run it in his own possession he can always adapt it in someway to extract the data. Even the best video protection can’t beat making a bypass in your monitor to acquire the image on your screen.
Even protecting something like a DVD is almost impossible. The dvd player hardware and software must be able to read what’s on the cd, and a protection must be able to be read to. Also there must be dvd writers to write a protection. Now all major brands can say they’ll put a protection in their DVD burners to protect from writing to the DVD protection section, but then another brand creates their DVD burners that can write to it and everyone will buy those which the big brands won’t let happen. And even if they got the disk itself truly protected someone can emulate the DVD using software or even hardware.
Also there are things that allow itself to be copied, but the original copier can be tracked; this by putting in every video/song/software a unique signature which can be tracked back to the store which then can track it back to the person who copied it. Sounds great, would be impossible to forge when they use strong RSA like cryptography, just one problem, when inserting random trash instead of the signature someone can know the piece is illegal but cannot track someone, hopeless.
The only, and only way, to stop illegal copying is making buying legaly less of an effort than acquiring illegaly. I hope they will relize this sooner or later for honoustly I`m becoming sick of all those ‘magic’ protections.
In the Netherlands it’s actually not legal to copy-protect music (and I think video). There’s a right you have as the buyer to make a copy of CDs for your own personal use (called “thuiskopie”).
But that one will be eliminated sooner or later in favour of the companies.
I don’t think the intention of copy protection is to make it impossible to copy a CD/DVD, because as you pointed out that is virtually impossible.
However by putting copy protection on the CD/DVD’s you do make it harder for the masses of people to copy a CD/DVD. When you need more expert knowledge to copy, less people will copy CD/DVD’s.
You said: ‘The only, and only way, to stop illegal copying is making buying legaly less of an effort than acquiring illegaly. ‘
I think copy protection does do that, by making it more of an effort to make illegal copies (rather then making buying legaly less of an effort).
The problem is that there are still plenty people willing to break copy protections and put them online for download. Why bother cracking yourself when others have done that for you already.
The companies try to get those people conficted for that.. which is a lot more feasible than trying to confict someone for downloading a video or something for the amount of people that are doing it differs a lot.
Although given the protections existing at the moment it seems that a intermediate computer user still can crack everything himself. (given he is informed properly about that possibility)