Hello there.

You all know me well by now. I like music, or some kinds of music. I have talked before about the music industry. Sometimes I get a little carried away, sometimes I don’t. Today’s chapter is an update on the efforts of the industry to prevent CD copying. The particular focus is on CDs that you buy from a music store, you take home and stick in your comuter and make a copy. Well, you do now maybe, but you won’t be doing that in the future, mister. Nosirree. The music companies are hard at work thinking up ways to prevent you from doing just that. This is to prevent you from stealing music, or rather from getting music from other people that stole it. And this is all because the music companies say that CD sales are way way down due to theft. But here’s Harvard University smart people saying that ain’t true. Huh.

So anyway, back to the story. They are all spending lots of money from their slumping profits to figure out ways to make the CDs we do actually buy a lot suckier. I’m thinking (in my own limited selfish way) that this is punishing the people that buy CDs in order to make the people that don’t buy CDs feel ashamed and sad. That’s it, isn’t it? So who do you think is paying for the fancy new technology on CDs? You don’t think that they might just pass that cost along to…. oh, the people that buy CDs? These guys do.

So, that just leaves us with wondering how long it will actually take from the time a music company releases a CD with copy protection to the availability of a “utility” that will circumvent that copy protection. I’m betting on less than a day, in most cases.

I like to think that I’m not one to flog a dead horse, but come on guys, what’s the point here?