This is getting entertaining; check out this article from The Register.
Another article mentions that: “White Lilies Island [Natalie Imbruglia’s latest] uses Israeli technology company Midbar’s Cactus Data Shield to prevent the disc from being played in a PC CD-ROM drive. The encoding process systematically corrupts the music stored on the disc. A hi-fi CD player’s error correction mechanism can compensate for the corrupt data and recreate the sound to a level that Midbar claims is undetectable by the listener. Put the CD into a PC, however, and the drive will pick up the corrupt and claim the disc is unreadable.”
Where was the record company’s head when they came up with this idea? This kind of copy protection flies in the face of how many people actually use audio CDs: they listen to them on their computers while working (or not), rip them to make personal compilations to play in their car or portable stereos, and rip-and-MP3 them to play in MP3 players. These days, how many of us actually listen to a whole original CD, as published, over and over again?
Interestingly, at least one member of the US Congress seems to be willing to take on the music industry over this issue.
