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Copy protecting karaoke hard drives

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wiseguy
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Copy protecting karaoke hard drives

Post by wiseguy »

Say your own a karaoke company with multiple rigs and each system has a legally licensed hard drive. How would you protect the hard drive so that your employees could not copy the songs from them while still allowing them to access the songs to run gigs?


mnementh
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Post by mnementh »

PGP will do the job

Freeware and the USA government tried to stop it being released into the public sector as it's virtually unbreakable.

This will stop simple drive to drive copying as the clone drive will be unusable without the PGP key.

However, if you allow them access to play the songs, then there's no way you can stop them copying the songs from one drive to another.

Sandy
mnementh
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Post by mnementh »

Quick addendum to my previous reply.

If your computers are laptops AND you can get all your tracks onto the internal hard drive, then YES YOU CAN.

You can physically block the USB ports on the laptop using these;

http://www.lindy.co.uk/accessories-c9/s ... joAdA#2464

Click the RED "more" link and you'll get a vid showing how they work.

If your PC's are desktops/towers, then you would need to block the ports AND prevent access to the internals of the box. by changing the access screws to security types.

OK, inelegant but do-able.

Sandy
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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

Thanks Sandy. What about the SD card slot? It wouldn't allow for the hard drive to be copied all at once but it would allow for a small number of songs at a time to be copied off the hard drive.
mnementh
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Post by mnementh »

Hi wiseguy,
again, Lindy is your friend;

http://www.lindy.co.uk/accessories-c9/s ... FYAyw#8045

Pretty expensive but I'd check on ebay to see if alternatives exist.

Your only real issue is if any of your operators are really computer savvy.

I'm reasonably sure that if I had enough time and let's face it, incentive, I could figure a way round nearly anything but these "solutions" will stop all but the most determined, I reckon.

SD card copying might give you a serious scare these days. My entire Karaoke collection fits onto a 40 odd Gb drive, so only two cards would be needed to pinch the lot.

Sandy.
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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

I'm sure you're right Sandy. Anyone who knows their way around a computer will figure some way to access the files. The person who asked me about this owns a DJ and karaoke company with several rigs and employees to run them. All his music is on external hard drives.

Perhaps a hosting software that plays encrypted files would be a solution. Or maybe it would be possible to encrypt the files on the hard drive and have a program on the laptop decrypt them and send them to the player in real time.
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