This is a list of notable CD and DVD copy protection schemes.
For other medias, see List of Copy Protection Schemes.
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. The first compact disc was manufactured in August 1982, and was first released in Japan in October 1982 as Compact Disc Digital Audio. The CD gained rapid popularity in the 1990s. It quickly outsold all other audio formats in the United States by 1991, ending the market dominance of the cassette tape. By 2000, the CD accounted for 92.3% of the entire market share in regard to music sales. The rise of MP3, iTunes, cellular ringtones, and other downloadable music formats in the mid-2000s ended the decade-long dominance of the CD.
Video CD is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm (4.7 in) optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Greater China, Central Asia and West Asia, superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in the regions until DVD-Video finally became affordable in the first decade of the 21st century.
A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3.
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
ISO/IEC 13490 is the successor to ISO 9660, intended to describe the file system of a CD-ROM or CD-R.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ISO images contain the binary image of an optical media file system, including the data in its files in binary format, copied exactly as they were stored on the disc. The data inside the ISO image will be structured according to the file system that was used on the optical disc from which it was created.
Optical disc authoring, including CD, DVD, and Blu-ray Disc authoring, is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical disc. This act is sometimes done illegally, by pirating copyrighted material without permission from the original artists.
A ROM image, or ROM file, is a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip, often from a video game cartridge, or used to contain a computer's firmware, or from an arcade game's main board. The term is frequently used in the context of emulation, whereby older games or firmware are copied to ROM files on modern computers and can, using a piece of software known as an emulator, be run on a different device than which they were designed for. ROM burners are used to copy ROM images to hardware, such as ROM cartridges, or ROM chips, for debugging and QA testing.
Alcohol 120% is a disk image emulator and disc burning software for Microsoft Windows developed by Alcohol Soft. An edition named Alcohol 52% is also offered which lacks the burning engine. The software can create image files from a source CD/DVD/Blu-ray, as well as mount them in virtual drives, all in the proprietary Media Descriptor File format; images in this format consist of a pair of .mds and .mdf files.
Copy Control was the generic name of a copy prevention system, used from 2001 until 2006 on several digital audio disc releases by EMI Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment in several regions. It should not be confused with the CopyControl computer software copy protection system introduced by Microcosm Ltd in 1989.
A No-disc crack, No-CD crack or No-DVD crack is an executable file or a special "byte patcher" program which allows a user to circumvent certain Compact Disc and DVD copy protection schemes. They allow the user to run computer software without having to insert their required CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. This act is a form of software cracking. No-CD cracks specific to a variety of games and other software distributed on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM can be found on the Internet from various reverse engineering websites or file sharing networks. No-CD cracks have legal uses, such as creating backups of legally owned software or avoiding the inconvenience of placing a CD or DVD-ROM in the drive every time the software is being used, although they can also be used to circumvent laws in many countries by allowing the execution of full versions of non-legally owned applications or time-limited trials of the applications without the original disc.
SafeDisc is a copy protection program for Microsoft Windows applications and games distributed on optical disc. Created by Macrovision Corporation, it was aimed to hinder unauthorized disc duplication. The program was first introduced in 1998 and was discontinued on March 31, 2009.
SecuROM is a CD/DVD copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) system developed by Sony DADC. It aims to prevent unauthorised copying and reverse engineering of software, primarily commercial computer games running on Windows. The method of disc protection in later versions is data position measurement, which may be used in conjunction with online activation DRM. SecuROM gained prominence in the late 2000s but generated controversy because of its requirement for frequent online authentication and strict key activation limits. A 2008 class-action lawsuit was filed against Electronic Arts for its use of SecuROM in the video game Spore. Opponents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believe that fair-use rights are restricted by DRM applications such as SecuROM.
MediaMax CD-3 is a software package created by SunnComm which was sold as a form of copy protection for compact discs. It was used by the record label RCA Records/BMG, and targets both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Elected officials and computer security experts regard the software as a form of malware since its purpose is to intercept and inhibit normal computer operation without the user's authorization. MediaMax received media attention in late 2005 in fallout from the Sony XCP copy protection scandal.
CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors and bad sectors. Many protection schemes rely on breaking compliance with CD and DVD standards, leading to playback problems on some devices.
In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).
IMG, in computing, refers to binary files with the .img filename extension that store raw disk images of floppy disks, hard drives, and optical discs or a bitmap image – .img.
Cactus Data Shield (CDS) is a form of CD/DVD copy protection for audio compact discs developed by Israeli company Midbar Technologies. It has been used extensively by EMI, BMG and their subsidiaries. CDS relies on two components: Erroneous Disc Navigation and Data Corruption.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
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