Digital Audio Tape copy protection

[tim@toad.com (Tim Maroney)]

There's been a bit of back and forth about DAT here lately, and I was a bit
surprised to find that no ione seemed to have read the recent flurry of wire
service coverage.  DAT has been approved for sale in the United States at last,
but subject to a rather awful copy protection scheme.  It is set up so that
you can make first-generation copies of compact discs, but that any attempts
to recopy the copied DAT will fail.  Some special inaudible tone or something
cognate is put on the tape during the first generation copying; during the
second generation, the recorder notes the signal and refuses to copy.

This seems likely to mean that DAT will never be very popular.  I predict
(along with many others) that when affordable, CD-compatible rewritable
optical technology appears sometime in the next five years, DAT will fall
into a well deserved oblivion.
--
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"Yet another piece of evidence that it's a Communist society which is being
 presented as good, but which we probably would not want to live in."
	-- Ken Arromdee on rec.arts.startrek, on the Federation's Red Menace