brian said:
As an aside, I heard a news item the other day. Seems a French court
has ruled that CDs with the "no copy" thing are "faulty goods" and
buyers should have their money returned. Anyone have more detail?
Only that they are classed as faulty, not merchantable quality etc, and thus
replaceable (I assume with non copy-protected versions).
There are no plans to prevent any form of copy protection from getting into
the market, only replacing media that is faulty- or behaves in a faulty manner-
as you are legally entitled to anyway.
It is reputed that even some "real" audio CD players cannot play these copy
protected CDs.
As far as I'm aware, there has been no success in stopping any form of copy
protection from getting into the market in the first place.
At this stage, the only option available is to return them to the place of
purchase, and claim a (real red book standard) replacement, or if that's not
possible, a refund.
This will hurt the retailers, and is most certainly not a suitable outcome,
it isn't their fault, they don't usually find out about this till their
customers come back screaming. But the law won't change to stop the problem at
the source.
Vote with your wallet. Don't buy known copy-protected CDs, and return any
you do buy. If the retailers can't sell them, they won't buy them. And if
they aren't buying them, the record companies can't sell them.
Record companies are continually looking at refining copy protection
techniques to make them work with all "normal" CD players, and stopping them
from working on "normal" CDROM drives.
Whether or not this is a problem for you, depends entirely on you. As I
said, vote with your wallet.
