I'd recently read about Arista's plans to start releasing in larger quantities "cd's" with so-called "copy protection" in yet another volley by the Record Industry in the war against fair use.
Meanwhile, and this is one of the details about me that was bound to leak out at some point, I'm a Huey Lewis and the News fan (someday I'll explain further about what this means vis a vis my life...) and I've been participating on a chat board for Huey Lewis and the News fans.
Someone posted that Duran Duran (yes, this was off-topic) had just been signed to Arista. I commented thusly:
Way way back in 7th grade I met one of my best friends because of Duran Duran. I was a HLN fan, and she a Duran Duran fan. We used to ask each other trivia questions about each other's bands. Back and forth... for months! In the meantime we did discover other things to say to each other and became proper friends... But even though I've never gotten all that into Duran Duran, I still have a soft spot in my heart for them because of that.I do not, however, have a soft spot for Arista who plans on polluting the market with copy-protected "cd's". I would not recommend buying them*, not if you believe you should own the music you buy and be able to play it on whatever device you choose, be it a stereo, computer, or any device designed to play media created with the CD standard. Copy protection is not part of the standard, so these copy-protected "cd's" frequently break standards-compliant devices as well as eliminate the fair use rights you have previously enjoyed. And by "break" I mean anything from "not play properly or at all" to "get jammed inside of" to "permanently damage the equipment."
* It's very difficult to tell which compact discs are legitimate and which are the usage-impaired "copy-protected" ones because only some of them are labelled as such. You might want to think of supporting the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107) which would call for labelling all such discs so that you don't get caught buying the wrong ones.
Stay tuned to see how people react. I do think I may need to learn to be more subtle (at least in that forum - I'm probably developing a reputation, and maybe it's not one I would want). On the other hand, Paul Revere was said to have galloped through the village shouting "The British are coming!" and I don't think many Americans would have wished him to have been more subtle in the warning. Sometimes the threats are more real and more urgent and need to be treated as such. The problem is when other people are unaware of the urgency and get turned off by a tone of alarm that they can't possibly believe is reasonable, so they therefore never become informed of just how dire the circumstances are.