Don’t doubt that RIAA has a team of lawyers squirreled away somewhere working on that one…
Yep. Here’s my rant on that subject. Haven’t purchased, (or asked for as a gift) a CD since.
Check out what Cory Doctorow as to say about DRM (Digital Rights Management):
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
I was enlightened. Cory rocks.
Just download it and burn it 
Then if you like it go and buy the cd. Or send the artist the money, that way they actually get a good amount.
Ohh and to Liberal, the good old days are still around, I buy vinyl and am amassing quite a nice collection slowly. The days of vinyl will always be around.
Did the record every skip because the onion you put in your belt bumped into the player?
Yeah! And we LIKED IT!
They’re a band founded by ex-Nirvana member, Dave Groh.
You had an onion?! Luxury! We had to make do with an underripe radish and we LIKED it!
We used to dream of having an underripe radish. Would’ve sounded like an onion to us.
All we had was a dried up old mushroom!
That was a nice read, kinda long but a very articulately written article that states what I have tried for a long time to say but a lot less clearly.
Its behavior like this that made me switch to getting all my mainstream music from places like iTunes. I still go out and buy the cd if the band is relatively unknown and I think that the CD sales might actually help them out, but otherwise I download everything. Sure iTunes is vaguely evil, but it’s better than the record companies that don’t even try to pretend they aren’t evil anymore.
Also…
A dried up old mushroom! You had it good! We only got to look at the neighbors dried up old mushroom every alternate Thursday, and let them beat us around the head and shoulders with a whiffleball bat for the privilege! An onion indeed!
…LIKED IT!.. <scrrrrp>
…LIKED IT!.. <scrrrrp>
…LIKED IT!..<scrrrrp>
…LIKED IT!..<scrrrrp>
…LIKED IT!..<scrrrrp>
Well, fuck me; it worked. I’d heard that at the time, but just assumed they’d improved their anti-copying tech since then, and this was my first copy-protected CD.
I’m similarly pissed about this; I’m a good little consumer/fan and buy the CDs, etc., and this is how we get treated?
Thanks for that link, it was a long read but very informative and interesting.
I hope Microsoft builds it.
Naah, don’t buy the ‘CD’, that just encourages them to continue producing the copy protected discs. You might - buy the CD, discover you can’t play it, take it back to the shop and complain, and then d/l the tracks if you are so inclined. These copy protected discs are not true CDs anyway IIRC, because they do not meet the Sony Red book standards. I don’t think they they can have ‘Compact Disc’ printed anywhere on their packaging, for example. AFAIK the protection methods also degrade sound quality, but I don’t know if that’s true of all current methods.
I had one of those danged disks that was so ‘protected’ that it would not play in my system.
And of course, the rules were that I could not get my cash back.
Hmmm, I thought, must be a defective disk. Replace it, I told them.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
After disk 15, I had my cash.
I don’t think it’s the sound quality, but the error correction data. That could have an effect on sound quality if your disc has errors that can’t be corrected.
Thus making it more likely people will want to make backup copies and keep the original spotless.
But that’s effectively illegal due to the DMCA, innit? Just sing the song while you suffer from CD paranoia.
There are quite a few reports of copy protected discs clicking / popping on playback - I suppose this could just be related to error correction data. Then again, I have no real idea of how these protection schemes work anyway.
The CD version:
LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI-LI