I need to burn about 20,000 emails and 500 Word and pdf docs. onto CD's to provide to lawyers for a lawsuit I'm involved with. I'd like to prevent the other side in this case from being able to make copies of the CD's, although they will be able to inspect the contents on the originals. Problem is, the only supplier of a 'copy prevention' approach is Hexalock: they supply a line of 'blank' CD's that are called CD-X's with the copy prevention material already burned in. So: this is great, but they only make these CDXs for PC's not for Macintosh. Here's my question for any of you out there: can I transfer all my Eudora emails and my Word, Pdf documents from my Macbook to a PC, then use the Hexalock approach? (The lawyers and the court will inspect my data on their PC's, undoubtedly not Macs). The part I'm concerned about is whether or not the Mac-based data will remain properly formatted when and if transferred to a PC.....my mind gets all fogged up when I try to grasp what might happen here. Will this work?
From another perspective, if I were to provide my Mac-based CD's full of Mac-formatted data, assuming no transfer to a PC-formatted CD, the viewers of this data would have to use a Mac to do so, right? Or would my Mac-burned CD's of my Mac-based data be somehow viewable on a PC? Maybe I just need to make some test runs with non-copy-prevention CD's and try them back and forth between my Mac and a PC to see what happens. (Eudora has a PC version, and of course Word and pdf docs are universally viewable on PC or Mac.) Hmm......look forward to any shrewd advice! Regards to all, Bob.
Mac Specs: Macbook Pro Santa Rosa 15" 2.4Ghz, 8600M GT 256MB Gfx, 2GB RAM
As with all copy protection, there is almost always an (easy) way to get around it. Maybe you should forget about copy protection and just encrypt all the data, but then anyone who has the password can of course pass it on at will.
Or would my Mac-burned CD's of my Mac-based data be somehow viewable on a PC?
This is the case. It doesn't matter if you burn it on a Mac or PC, both systems can view the files. So, DO NOT assume that you are safer just by burning it on a Mac.
I agree with Ge64, I would encrypt the data BEFORE you burn it. How you do that (on a Mac or PC), I have no idea.
Burning CD's with built-in Copy Prevention
