Has Kodak Developed A Truly Uncopyable CD?

In optical storage, this is probably the best idea that never caught on. It was proposed (alas, too late) as a midlife kicker for 3.5-inch MO. And the idea popped up again when CD recorders became affordable, about five years ago: it was called CD-PROM, and it involved putting both read-only sectors and writable sectors on a single disk.

But now there's a 21st Century twist to the CD-PROM concept, which could conceivably stimulate a mass market. The new idea is to make those different sectors work together to achieve an unprecedented level of copy-protection.

Eastman Kodak is the developer of what Rowan Lawson prefers to call "programmable CD-ROMs." Based in Rochester, NY, he's worldwide marketing manager for storage business, in Kodak's digital and applied imaging division. Kodak has signed a letter-of-intent with Adobe Systems under which Adobe could use programmable CD-ROMs to distribute content to electronic books (e-books) in Adobe's Acrobat file format, i.e., as preformatted, typically printable pages, under filenames carrying the familiar .PDF extension.

"It's not a contractual arrangement," Lawson told me, "but it fits in nicely with Adobe's customers' needs." Those needs have expanded recently, since Adobe purchased Glassbook, an e-book software developer whose product involves .PDF files, and announced an agreement with giant bookseller Barnes & Noble to distribute Glassbook-style e-books. "The publishing industry's Seybold Conference in August," Lawson noted, "was the start of a 'war' between Adobe and Microsoft for e-book-reading software standards." But he acknowledged that Kodak is offering its anti-piratical programmable CD-ROMs to both sides. (Incidentally, Microsoft has again co-opted a generic moniker--in the tradition of "Word" and "Office"--calling its e-book software "Reader.")

R&D efforts in piracy and anti-piracy technologies are the software industry's equivalent of projectile-versus-armor-plate in the munitions industry. And the recent international dustup over DVD movie encryption (cracked, at first, only to enable Linux servers to play DYDs) reinforces the conventional wisdom that no software-only scheme is perfect, and that some kind of software-plus-hardware combination is required. But traditional methods involving a "key" plugged into a port are kluges at best, and have not been attractive to users or publishers. A superior approach would be something wholly contained in the distribution medium itself: the holy grail being an uncopyable disk.

So Kodak has been working with encryption companies in the UK, to stamp or record CDs with a unique identifier, and to enable a CD-R burner to subsequently record another unique identifier in a second or third session. (Programmable CD-ROMs, in case you hadn't guessed, are write-once media, not rewritable.) The content publisher ends up with a disk that--so far, at least--can be considered unduplicatable. "I can't give away the secret of how it works," said Lawson, "but at the 'batch' level [of copy protection], the disk is a unique type of disk; and at the highest level there is a unique identity for each individual disk."

A mass market for e-books is still a few years away. Not only aren't there any standards for display and reading software, there are so many hardware options (palmtops, laptops, the Rocket and other dedicated machines, etc.) that publishers can't supply them all economically. And there is competition now from paper books that can be printed on-demand in single or very small quantities, at prices only slightly higher than equivalent mass-produced books.

So the "old" idea of combining read-only and writable sectors has resurfaced to facilitate the rise of e-books, but now it benefits from the new reality that practically every computer has a CD-ROM reader. Users can simply purchase e-books as CDs--and they can be either the conventional 120mm disks or the 80mm "mini" disks around which handheld reading machines can be more easily based. A kiosk or vending machine with a high-speed CD-R burner, drawing upon source material from optical or magnetic media inside (or possibly from a remote database over a datacom line), would take only a few minutes to produce a salable product and collect the fee.

But content-providers need reassurance of security, since any disk that can be read by a CD-ROM drive, i.e., a disk that conforms to the industry's published standards, can itself be duplicated by a CD-R burner. Mike Inchalik, Kodak's director of hybrid media, poses the prospective kiosk developer's dilemma this way: "When a company like Microsoft or Adobe sells a product, they want to press some kind of difficult-to-copy features into that product. It's all about 'rights management.' They want to raise a barrier to copying, and the idea of selling through a kiosk poses a challenge because they want to create each disk individually.

"But with a programmable CD-ROM, you can start with a copy-resistant feature in the very first session, and then add the content that you want to distribute onto that modified CD. Whatever you write to that disk would then be locked to those fundamental copy-protection features," he explained. "The programmable CD-ROM gives you some additional 'dimensions' of copy-protection, some of which, frankly, are under wraps, in order to keep the 'map' of how it's done away from people who would try to break the code. But I can say that it's a step further than mere stamping: that it gives each disk a unique serial number, and that any information recorded on the disk can be unlocked by linking it to that serial number code."

The scheme apparently works well enough to attract Adobe (at least); and Kodak has started manufacturing programmable CD-ROMs in its Guadalajara, Mexico, and County Cork, Ireland, facilities. Costs depend on volume, naturally; also on whether a customer wants branded or generic media; and the extent to which (or the nature of what) the user or the target computer can write to a particular disk. Lawson did generalize for me, however, saying that OEM prices range from about US$1.50 apiece in 5,000-unit quantities down to perhaps half a dollar in million-unit orders.

So programmable CD-ROMs could well be what software publishers and the nascent e-book developers have been hoping for. And more applications will certainly arise as the technology becomes familiar. But a truly mass market for programmable CD-ROMs probably won't emerge until the media can satisfy the biggest slice of the consumer-demand pie. And I'll tell you what that is--and why it's so frustrating--in next month's Storage Watch. (If you think you know, email me at [e-mail].)