This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Tim Sneath. Original Post: Ingo, I Agree... Feed Title: Tim Sneath's Blog Feed URL: /msdnerror.htm?aspxerrorpath=/tims/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Random mumblings on Microsoft, .NET, and other topics. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Tim Sneath Latest Posts From Tim Sneath's Blog

Ingo expresses his frustration at not being able to listen to his CDs when he's travelling due to copy protection. I can empathise, having just returned the latest Sting CD because I can't listen to it from two out of my three CD players (an Xbox and my laptop).

Clearly there's got to be some middle ground between protecting against piracy and preventing "fair use". Record companies should be allowed to defend themselves against rampant piracy, but if they alienate customers like Ingo and myself, they're going to lose their remaining paying customers anyway. (We're not immune from those tradeoffs at Microsoft either. Product activation has been successful at discouraging casual copying of our software, but we need to tread very carefully to avoid damaging the goodwill we're trying to nurture.)

I was interested to read this little snippet from a recent TechRepublic article: "Microsoft is now working with music CD distributors on a project that allows copy-protected CDs to play in normal CD players, but provides WMA versions of the music files on the CD, which computer users can play on their PCs or move to portable players that support the WMA DRM standards." According to Joe Wilcox, this technology is used on Sinéad O'Connor's latest album. Whether this is a viable middle ground or not is up for debate, but something needs to be done and as an interim step this seems better than the current approach of producing broken CDs.

(Disclaimer: as ever, these are my own opinions rather than the stated position of Microsoft Corporation.)