How does CDROM copy protection work?
There are several possibilities; as yet no developers have come forward and announced what they’re doing (for obvious reasons). One possible implementation, given sufficient control over the reader and mastering software, is to write faulty data into the ECC portion of a data sector. Standard CDROM hardware will automatically correct the “errors”, writing a different set of data onto the target disc. The reader then loads the entire sector as raw data, without doing error correction. If it can’t find the original uncorrected data, it knows that it’s reading a “corrected” duplicate. A less sophisticated method is to press a silver CD with data out beyond where a 74-minute CD can write. Copying the disc would then require special CD-R blanks, moving the data and hacking the disc to compensate, or pressing silver discs with the pirated data.
