CDs with anti-copy technology may become cheaper than those without

Particularly since the alternative as far as the industry is concerned is almost certainly going to be to make everything copy-protected.

Can't wait until these bozos figure out in 2013 that the downloading phenomenon actually helped save their industry.

bk

anyway, it'll be interesting to see how much the unprotected cds cost ($25? $30?), though it's almost a moot point since most of the copy protection i've come across can be defeated by turning off autorun for your cdrom drive or holding down the 'shift' key.

Some countries (e.g. Norway, I believe) used to whack a surcharge on blank cassettes to supposedly somehow compensate the industry for the fact that you'd taped the album you'd bought instead of buying the cassette as well.

Similarly, when audio CD copiers first came out, they were made to only use blank "audio" CD's, which cost a lot more than the ordinary "data" ones.

Wear and tear? How so? Making the error correction perform more interpolations because the data's deliberately corrupted doesn't entail wear and tear. It's not like your PC's gonna wear out because you give it harder sums to do.

Even before any of this technology appeared, it's always been the case that it's technically illegal to make a copy of an album you've purchased.

The key word is technically and I understand the situation may be different on each side of the Atlantic. Aren't consumers (in the US at least) effectively protected from prosecution when they make a CD-R copy for personal use by the Fair Use provision? Come to think of it, this may never have been extended to PC-based burners.

I don't really understand the thrust of the copy-protection technologies - they cripple CDs in order to prevent individuals duplicating them, but surely it only takes one person to make a decent copy in the analogue domain and, bang, it's all over Kazaa or whatever you young people use.

sorry? CDs WITH copy protection lessen the value of the product to the consumer. so why not lower the cost of the protected CD? it's been established that the profit margins are already obscene, is it really fair to make us subsidise an industry that constantly mews about the money they're 'losing' while they've been screwing consumers and artists for over 20 years now? or should we just take every RIAA press release at face value?

Wear and tear? How so?

supposedly something to do with the laser having to do more jitteering and scanning, but i'll have to look for the article later.

as for fair use, yeah, you're allowed to make a backup copy - i think it's taken as read that it applies to cd burners.

You're right. What I really meant is that I'm in favour of both types of CDs being legally available, with a price differential between them. That doesn't necessarily mean jacking up the price of non-protected CDs, it could mean making protected CDs cheaper. Given that, would anyone not be in favour, and why?

- given how much variation there is in prices for new CD's already, how much cheaper than a copy-protected CD would non copy-protected CD's have to be before it made any real difference on people's purchasing?

- what proportion of people would be prepared to pay extra (and how much extra) to buy a non copy-proteced CD, and why?

- what effect would it have if on your decision if one version also had e.g. bonus tracks?

I suspect that there would be quite a fine balance to make it worthwhile for the record companies to produce two different versions of every CD and that record shops aren't going to like the idea much anyway (potentially huge increase in the amount of stock they'll need to cover) so I doubt that it will actually be viable.

1) I reckon it would have to be at least 20%
2) my initial reaction is that I wouldn't - I only VERY seldom make copies of stuff for other people and I don't have anything like an i-pod; however I have already started asking myself "but what if you wanted to buy something like an i-pod later on?"
3) except for a few bands / musicians that I'm fanatical about, I'd buy the cheapest version whatever; for the ones I am fanatical about, the extra tracks would be the first priority.

I'm not a lot of help, am I?

This is the equivalent of a computer shop selling their 2002 systems at a greatly reduced price compared to the 2004 systems.

As music continues to shift into the digital domain, CD's become obsolete. As with computers, you pay for the older model with the advance knowledge that it will become obsolete sooner than the newer model. Hence the cheaper price.

xpost

However, the music industry is different because want they are trying to put the newer model out of business. The computer industry wants you to keep buying the newest product, but the music industry wants you to ignore the newest product (i.e. downloading, copying, etc.). They want you to buy the cheaper CD, convincing you all the while that it is the right and proper thing to do because copying and downloading is immoral. And when they finally accept that money can be made from digital music, they will turn around and say "sorry, we've decided that your copy-protected CD is of limited use after all".