[wordup] Copy-protected CDs come to NZ ...

[Adam Shand]

I suspect that more people (politicians, RIAA reps etc) could do with
getting letters like this from their potentially pissed off customers.
Oh, and I have had CDs fail on me, but not many, and generally due to
abuse so, point well taken Brent. ;-)

Adam.

From: Brent Rieck <bsr at spek.org>

[ Adam, feel free to repost this rant, if you like.  --Brent ]

I usually don't get particularly hot and bothered over
copy(right|protection) issues, as most of what I know enough to care
about and do is on a computer, and almost always covered by one or more
of the free (as in speech) licenses.  But I also care a lot about music,
and when my income level supports it I buy lots and lots of music, copy
protected CDs get me rather hot and bothered.

I believe in putting my money where my mouth is, and "voting" with my
checkbook, so I try to.  I like music, I want to support music, so I buy
music.  I buy more music than probably 99.99% of the people out there
buying music (from what I've read about music buying habits), some
10-12, sometimes 20 albums a week, income permitting.  I've bought music
in both it's shiny plastic disk version and as MP3s downloaded over my
DSL line.  Because I like to register my satisfaction with something by
paying for it, I don't find myself using napster/gnutella/kazaa, and
besides, when I've played around with them they tend to suck ass for
actually finding and getting anything I want to listen to - I'd much
prefer to spend money on (and have spent a fair amount of money on)
services like EMusic.com and be able to download a bunch of legal MP3s
reliably and easily.  I'd even spend MUCH more than what EMusic charges
if somebody could put something together with a selection approaching
what a good record store has.  The music industry's stunningly asinine
attempts don't cut it for anybody who actually likes music, do they
actually have any customers?  My guess is that they created them simply
so they could say people don't want to buy music online.

Anyway, back to copy protected CDs.. I rip all of my new CDs, and am
slowly ripping my entire catalog, not because of the bullshit reason
that I'm "saving" or "protecting" my physical CDs that I see people moan
about online.  Seriously, how many CDs have crapped out on you?  Perhaps
if you store your CDs naked on an equipment testing shake table covered
in sand you'll see failure, but c'mon.  To me, the people that say they
want to make backup copies of their music sound like the white guy with
dreadlocks and a ratty beard who smells like patchouli collecting
signatures for medical marijuana.  I'm sure he believes medical
marijuana is a great thing and all, but does anybody really think he's
doing it just for the cancer patients?  Not a single CD has failed on
me, *ever*.  I rip them because it's a pain in the ass to have music as
a CD when you have a lot of them, I very much prefer them to be a set of
MP3s on my hard drive(s), finding what I want to listen to is vastly
easier.  

So the music industry wants to prevent me from doing that, great, thanks
guys, thanks for hurting one of your best customers.  And the deal is,
I'm not so pissed that the CDs are copy protected - like the guy said,
people will just run the CD player through their sound card, the ripping
software I have now supports doing that already, and will even make some
good guesses at where to breakout tracks from the incoming bitstream - I
just happen to really object to being treated as a music pirate when (I
think) I'm a rather good customer. 

I suppose I'll take my money elsewhere and spend it on CDs that are not
copy protected and services like EMusic.  My guess is that other music
lovers will do the same.

--Brent