In recent years the increased production and sales of CD burning technology has led to massive amounts of software pirating.

Recently, however, some commercial companies have produced protection software to counteract the wave of techno-piracy.

Any CD containing data, including music, movies, games, etc., can be copied using modern CD burners. Many of these burners come standard with many computers sold on the market today.

This is where CD protection comes into play.

Companies such as StarForce have come up with solutions like the StarForce Professional 3.0.

This new system is designed for publishers to protect against professional piracy on an international level.

StarForce 3.0 encrypts both executable and non-executable files; this protects against what is fast becoming a global issue.

A person from one country can swap protected executable files from a localized release of a disc with the unprotected executables of a release in a different country.

Sony has created a system for protecting audio CD's called Key2audio. The system, first tested on promotional releases of Michel Jackson's "You Rock My World" single, alters an audio CD during master copying, making it incompatible with CD-ROM and CD-RW drives.

During glass mastering, several special hidden signatures, similar to a unique fingerprint, are applied outside the music data area. These signatures protect the CD from CD-RW drives as well as professional glass mastering systems.

'NSYNC's Celebrity album was a similar experiment in copy protection on three separate levels.

The United Kingdom release had no protection, while the release in the United States had a minimal security system.

A third release in Germany was given a stronger system that would not even allow the CD to be played using CD-R/RW drives.

Julian Midgley of the UK campaign for digital rights said in the New Scientist magazine, record companies are just using the money from sales to fund these new technologies and bother customers.

The main problem for protection companies is to find a way to make CD's safe from piracy without taking away their compatibility with different technological devices.

Midbar, an Israeli security company responsible for the Cactus Data Shield, which is a newer system that allows CD-R/RW drive compatibly by inserting modifications that only affect the drives during he copying process, producing a file error and a failed copy.

Midbar has sold over one million CD's protected by the Cactus system on the European market.

Regardless of any protection by companies, however, there will always be a way around the system.

Hector Ramos (senior-operations and information systems management) said that despite new protections, "There are software programs that can get past protection."

There are many different companies producing many different kinds of security, so a certain level of adeptness is required to use these software bypass programs, he said.

Ramos, who works for ResCom, also added that through the use of a black felt tip marker on some kinds of protected CD's, protection can be bypassed in a low-tech method as well.

The purchase of a CD isn't even necessary if data pirates have access to Internet.

Programs such as Morpheus and Kazaa can help a user download more songs than any one album contains.

Penn State students can download anywhere from 300 and 500 songs a week under the university's current bandwidth limit.

The market continues to grow as companies continue to find subtler ways to protect against piracy.

For more information on media piracy and protection, visit www.cdmediaworld.com.