This rumor was completely false, of course. The reality of GameCube discs is that they were standard mini DVDs, but they used a slightly different physical fra

This rumor was completely false, of course. The reality of GameCube discs is that they were standard mini DVDs, but they used a slightly different physical frame layout and a different scrambling seed from standard DVDs, so consumer DVD drivers would instantly reject them because the data frame checksums would fail. By patching out the frame checksum verification in firmware, GameCube discs could be read by some consumer hardware, and once the scrambling seed scheme was reverse engineered, they could be freely descrambled and imaged. The second protection was a unique identifier burned into the Burst Cutting Area (BCA) at the center of the disc. Another popular myth is that GameCube discs were protected by being Constant Angular Velocity (versus Constant Linear Velocity) discs - while this is true, and the GameCube drive is a CAV drive, it's irrelevant to protecting or copying the discs as the data is the same either way.