http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

I can't tell if this is good news or bad.

Even if it does attract some unwanted attention I don't see this as a huge threat, as long as EAC keeps doing what it does we should all be happy.

Being a non-techie user of this wonderful program, why would I care that I am no longer able to retrieve the native TOC??

I had understood that the native TOC function was removed a while back... I'm a little confused as to why Andre mentions it in this What's New update...

Anyway, this seems like mostly a bugfix release.

What is TOC anyway? I never used it so I gess I'm ok... as long eac make perfects rips...

TOC standard for 'Table of Contents'. So what that means is the track listing for the cd as written in the CDDA headers at the start of the disc.
The ability to retrieve this in EAC was necessary on certain copyrighted discs which masked the TOC, such that if you loaded the CD in EAC it would only list the data track. Thus without being able to retrive the native TOC, you can't rip the CD.

Now, I wouldn't care if it wasn't for that one copyrighted disc I own.

Funny enough ... Plextools Pro (and Pro XL) still allow you to switch your drive to "First Session Only" mode when doing DAE ...

bad news!
because a lot of my audio cds are copy protected , and i can't rip and listen with my portable audio player without eac

i overwrite my old version , and now i'm not able to find the prebeta 3!

Is it possible/stable to have multiple versions of EAC running on the same machine?

If so, then it may mean that if the TOC is permanently removed from 0.95 beta 4 and above, then many peeps will run two versions: 0.95 beta 3 for the copy protected ones (that require TOC functionality); and the latest version with the latest bug fixes / new functionality.

I might be wrong here, but I would swear that in some countries keeping a copy of a purchased cd (or ripping it for own usage) is perfectly legal. Why shouldn't someone have the chance to use such a function, considering that they don't break any law? Surely EAC is being used outside Germany as well. Wouldn't he be alright if he used a disclaimer mentioning that such usage of the program in Germany might be violating the law?

In most countries, this is probably legal... except when the CD is copy-protected. In that case, it's illegal to bypass the copy protection.

This is how I think it is. IANAL, though...

Guys there are still other options...

1. Download and install the absolutely fantastic AnyDVD which fixes the TOC and other CDDA problems on the fly allowing any program to rip (although EAC seams to bypass AnyDVD and read it's own version of the TOC. So I'd recommend AnyDVD+other ripper)

2. Use dBPoweramp for CDs with corrupt TOC (it has a repair option that you can leave on by default). Downside is that Secure mode is still under development for dbPoweramp so it's very fast burst extraction in the release version. Haven't tried looking at betas.

I have a copy of EAC 0.95 B3 if we are allowed to host it in Rarewares?

Regards,
Mr Liquidizer

>Some of the experts they asked had the opinion that the function of
>retrieving the native TOC is at best working at the limit of legality

I disagree 100%, stick a bought CD into your boom box and it will read the first session only, that is an audio cd player. If you do the same in software you are reading the audio cd exactly as you should (Philips red book, no where in the red book does it say you must read a 2nd session).

That is why there have been Zero legal threats against cd ripping programs, it would be thrown out of court.

I'm not providing links here....
But Google is your friend.
Search for "eac095pb3.zip"

0.95 prebeta 3 (from 11 may 2003) had the follwing options under "Toc Alterations":

• Retrieve Native TOC
• Detect TOC Manually
• Use First Session Only

The last two was removed with prebeta 4 and now "Retrieve Native TOC" are removed with beta 4. Well, I got a copy of 0.95 prebeta 3 laying around if I should ever need it, so this doesn't affect me much....

yeah I'm staying with pb3, too

Andre is probably right, EAC looks like a hobby project and the hassle is just not worth it ..
since it's not open source he can't expect help from the FSF or whatever and copyright lawyers are not cheap

any company can turn your life into a legal nightmare at anytime (even if it's totally unjustified).. thankfully our project was big enough and popular to collect a nice 5 digit Euro lump within 3 days to pay a real good German lawyer, and the "enemy side" dropped the hot iron within hours never to be heard of again

You can keep older versions of the EAC.exe in your EAC directory, and start whichever one you need. I'm keeping the beta 3 one around, just to be safe.

Thanks.
Thought I was being ignored what with your post beign the 8th one after mine.

Well, how illegal can it be to link to a particular page on ReallyRareWares?

Edit: This thread may be interesting for those of you that weren't around when prebeta 4 was released:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=16086&

I'm a bit shocked by this "anticipatory obedience". This is not what i hoped to see.

The article he is referring to has the following wording (translated from german):



I am disappointed that this already prompted him to remove that harmless, yet sometimes useful feature.

http://www.mp3talks.com/archive/index.php/t-67.html

I found this thread to be most informative.

But I could have gone here which is not illegal in my country http://www.rjamorim.com/rrw/files/eac/eac095pb3.zip. I'm not a Lawyer so don't go if it is in yours :-)

Hm ...

André is at the start of his professional career at the moment and I really don't think that he would take any risk to jeopardize this.

The aforementioned article (I have read it just yesterday) does also state that official court decisions upon copyright issues are often characterized by a lack of knowledge and/or uncertainty (due to vague formulations in the german copyright law) among judges and lawyers. Two lawyers - three opinions ... ;-)

You can be sure that EAC/CDEx/etc. are major thorns up SOme compaNY's arse ... and you can also be sure that these companies - once they decide to file a lawsuit and go to court - will play for keeps (meaning they will bring up the best copyright lawyers one can find) ... as a privateer in that case, all you can do is lose a lot of money because specialized legal cost insurances won't even pay your lawyer in case of clearing copyright questions in court.

From that point, I can perfectly understand why André did remove that feature ... additionally, mentioning EAC's "Retrieve Native TOC" feature in 'ct (THE major german PC magazine) didn't help at all - now everyone reading 'ct (certainly including some music business people that didn't know before) will know that EAC has always been capable of 'circumventing' audio CD protections ... guess how André liked that ...

Don't get my wrong, i understood it when he removed the "Detect TOC Manually" function in 0.95 pb4, because that was a more advanced function targeted more at copy protection. But this "Retrieve native TOC" is something different. The german jurisdiction is, like you said, in no way clear on this issue, and the c't article (not 'ct BTW ) leads me to believe that the music industry won't try anything. If they would sue André and lose, it would be a great image loss for them.

Also, i don't think a court case would be a problem for André. He could simply ask for donations to finance a good lawyer, and i'm sure the support would be overwhelming. It has been done before in Germany, maybe you remember the SelfHTML case (german, babelfished: english). They were sued over a disputable copyright violation and got 30,000 euros donation money from loyal supporters to go to court. They used a bit more than 2000 Euros for their lawyer and won the case. The rest of the money was either refunded to the donators or used for other things, when the donator agreed.

I think it is the wrong signal of André to back down before anything even happened. People seem to spinelessly agree with anything the major labels come up with, even by anticipatory obedience. That's why i'm disappointed.

Almost all CD's I rip are not copyrestricted in any way, so I'll just use the latest EAC for most of my rips (it's faster and got more features than 0.95pb3). And whenever the need arises I'll simply use 0.95pb3 instead...

I believe that money wouldn't be the only problem for someone sued by big companies. There's still a risk; and it's easy to loose your own peace of mind until the end of the (long) procedure.


I understand him. He's taking the entire responsability of his decision. He would be the only one to be really annoyed in this story if something must happen. Andre never earned anything with EAC (excepted maybe one of the biggest collection of postcard in Germany) and could be the real looser of this story. Interested companies don't really care about their image.

This also worries me. People treat it like it was ruled illegal. It is perfectly okay to link to it on HA.

But like spoon said:



I don't see where the heightened risk is coming from. The original "CP-breaking" function has long been removed. The remaining option wasn't "circumventing" anything. That's like saying, holding the shift key so that no autostart-rootkit gets installed with certain CDs/DVDs is also "illegal circumvention", ridiculous.

If anything, "Retrieve native TOC" should be made the default behaviour, and then the switch can be removed, for all i care.

Is c't available in other languages than german? English or polish?

No: "Unfortunately we don't publish a magazine in English and our main activity is to create the German issue."

Yes, probably not. But companies have been sued for less than that. Remember that the first MP3 player was attacked by RIAA (iirc), as well as the first DivX players. There isn't anything illegal in these products, but big organisations brought an action against them. Andre is not Kiss nor Rio (was it Rio?). Even if he have the right with him, there's still a heavy procedure to endure, with possible mediatic pressures, possible incidence on his job, etc... And again, Justice decisions aren't always predictible (at least not here in France), especially with "piracy" and "hacking".



"circumventing" is a vague word. Even recording a protected CD or DVD into a simple cassette (analogic) could be interpreted as circumventing a heavy protection system.

There's a Dutch version :-P

No, it can't. The analog copy of copy-protected CDs for private use is legal in Germany, since you don't circumvent the copy-protection. The only act that's considered illegal in Germany is that CP circumvention. Therefore, if an audio CD doesn't have a copy protection, you can make legal digital copies for private use as well.

I don't know the German law system.
In France the law is still in project/debate. I downloaded a recent and official project and the text is very vague. It says that "contourner" the DRM would be illegal. "Contourner" is the french translation of circumventing. It litteraly means "make a detour", find another path. You don't need to break anything (like hacking or cracking does), you just have to turn around (=make a tour, a circle, circum) the protection and paf! you've done something illegal. An analogic copy is bypassing DRM scheme. It could be illegal according to the sense you give to "contourner/circumvent".
But on the other side, the personal copy is still allowed

If protected CD are not rippable by any other application but EAC, no need to say that you could interpret this software as an attempt to break specific DRM scheme. Situation would be different if a majority of ripping programs could handle TOC alteration but it's by far not the case.

It also largely depends on the drive, not only on EAC. But nobody sued the drive manufacturers yet, and why would they? The drives that can read CP CDs are just ignoring some invalid data, they behave more "true" to the standard of what an audio CD player should do. And EAC is also not designed to break a CP. It has a function which could be interpreted by a biased lobby as an aid for CP circumvention, but that is quite far off. That option alone wouldn't do much if the drive wasn't helping as well, and the option only helps to read audio CDs in the intended way, and is not designed from scratch to circumvent a CP (as we know, there would be much more effective tricks for that). Therefore, like i said, it should be the default behavior of EAC and people should stop nodding their head to every far-fetched interpretations coming their way.

It's funny how (seemingly) none of these companies were interested when it was all analogue, and just CDs... but now we have digital media not on a CD, like in a PC on a HDD or on someone's DAP, they start getting much more interested. The whole copy protection issue is a load of steaming poo if you ask me. Sure, prosecute people if they make money from selling copied audio/movies, but to prosecute people that make the tools to get the audio from one source onto another for their own pleasure... and then share those tools with 'us' (EAC for example), is ludicrous. Evil companies

rant over.

There's been some interesting debates today in this thread: it's been an enjoyable read so far


EDIT: and I know no company has said they'd prosecute Andre, but the threat of is enough. And I too understand that. But it's a shame. Cos ultimately the Govn'ts/companies will win even if we all grouped together against these copy protection rules --> thinks about this issue in the grand scheme of things, i.e. life, and it all seems rather farcical

I guess that's precisely what gives ground to Andre's decision. In this case I'd really understand him. I wouldn't take such risk myself. Would you?

If nobody takes any risks, everything that the lobbies devise will sail straight through. Do you want that? This current event isn't even based on existing verdicts, it's based on the sketchy possibility of a threat whose success seems unlikely, judging by the very same article. Plus the original offending function was removed many versions ago. You don't assume that law is on their side because they have expensive lawyers, do you?

CiTay,

keep in mind that in germany there is a legal construct called "Abmahnung" (not sure, what the correct english legal term is, the verbal translation is "dissuasiveness").
This could cost you thousands of Euros even without going to court.
I wouldn't take that risk myself either.

Edit: typo
Edit: Missunderstandable expression

That would also be easily solved with a donation. I once got an "Abmahnung" (cease & desist letter with a fee) myself, so i know what i'm talking about.

In your answer you admit that a risk exist. Should Andre run this risk alone? Should he run alone the risk to pay an enormous fine and go in jail just for the sake of bravery and consumers liberty? He answered to that, and not many people would act differently.
Ask to Apple, Nullsoft, Microsoft or Nero to implement such tools. They have much more strength to defend themselves against possible attacks than Andre have. But it's unlikely they going to take themselves such risk and would rather stick to usual ripping engine.


That's called caution, carefulness, safety. I guess that Andre wouldn't wait to be the first one to be sued.


Unlikely doesn't mean impossible.
Ask Roberto who removed DVD-A ripping tool even when he knews that Brazilian laws were on his side. He wasn't really peaceful by hosting something legal but annoying for big companies and choose to NOT fight against them.


A good lawyer is very helpful, otherwise the entire concept of "good" or "bad" lawyer won't make any sense. Law is human, thus imperfect. It wouldn't be the first time that people thinking that law were clearly on their side were sentenced and were obliged to appeal against a decision. Justice can't be fully transparent nor totally predictible. For a single (thus weak) person a big procedure is sufficiently painful and stressful by itself whether the final decision is positive or not, whether he had money enough or not.

If not even the programmer is sure that this function could be classified by someone as a "copy-protection circumvention", and neither are the lawyers, this is clearly a sign that he didn't implement it specifically for that circumvention. That it can help against certain CP is merely a side-effect, and EAC has much less to do with it than the drive. This isn't at all the same case as for instance AnyDVD, a tool only for CP circumvention and nothing else, which is illegal to use in Germany. So i don't know where you have your penalties from, "enormous fine and jail"? That would be outrageous.




Again, those tools were designed to specifically break an encryption/CP. But EAC is a normal audio grabbing tool. The function is not there to specifically break CP. It's good for enhanced audio CDs with data, accidentally broken TOC or whatever.




I think the procedure can be very liberating and empowering if you know that hundreds or thousands of supporters got your back. If there really was a lawsuit at one point and André made it public, he could be sure of a great deal of support. He is not alone and weak.

maybe EAC should ask at startup what country you are from, and if in germany, disable, if not, enable.

EDIT: also ask at download time.

The whole stress would be for Andre (in case of legal action) not for the thousands supporters.
Now what you can only expect is that other developers or companies will implement similar features.

But wouldn't people obviously want a feature enabled rather than disable it if they knew it was "useful"?

Plextor aint located in Germany and the German laws is a 'bit' extreme. Plextor is an company located in Belgium

I'm afraid the laws don't differ that much, see Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. You will find more or less contradicting laws about this in all of Europe.

but then the users would be violating the law, no andre.

So far you don't break any law by using (or implementing) that function. A broken TOC alone is hardly an effective means of copy protection, therefore you can't classify that function as a CP circumvention, therefore it's not illegal under german law. If they want to sue anyone, they also have to prove that a broken TOC by itself is an effective CP. How do they want to show that? Then tools like IsoBuster, CDmage and many more would be illegal as well. That's irrational.