I know, I bought it (part 2)

For the record I would like to state that copy protection doesn't mean that the protected material isn't available for download.

A few years back the music industry felt their pockets emptying because of declining sales figures. Luckily there was a simple answer to why they were loosing money; Piracy. People everywhere, a faceless crowd, were downloading the music from popular peer to peer networks all over the globe like there was no tomorrow. The music industry though long and hard and finally they came up with a solution. If people hesitate to buy more records why not raise the prices? Said and done the price for a CD went from too much to this is ridiculous in an effort to sell more of their precious artists.

Not surprisingly this didn’t stunt help their sales so they were back to the drawing board. Enter the copy protection. In an effort to prevent piracy they invented a copy protection with the only drawback that some of the CD-players could not play the protected CD. Well you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette don’t you? This leads me back to my first statement. I bought the Massive attack CD 100th window when it was released in 2003. Excited like a child on Christmas eve I literally ran home popping the CD in my player.

Let’s stop for a minute and ask ourselves the question, if a CD can’t be played is it broken? With a poorly disguised rage I went back to the store demanding a refund for my broken record. The store clerk was very understanding; it wasn’t the first time he had done a refund because of the copy protection.

When I arrived home again I went on the net to see how hard it would be getting a hold of the CD I had been awaiting for over six months but the record industry now had denied me. I had given them a chance so I didn’t feel like a criminal when I ten minutes later had the album on my hard drive. So much for the copy protection.

A not too clever thing to do is putting in a protection that only affects the people actually buying it; Kind of like putting a trailer for piracy on a buy only DVD I would say.