Recording Industry Association Of America boss Mitch Bainwol has been speaking up the use of that rather irritating copy-protected CD technology at the NARM music convention in the US this week. Such technology, he argued, would overcome a number of problems the music industry faces, in particular the authorized distribution of home-burned CDs.
While people downloading music from illegitimate sources is a big problem for the music business, Bainwol warned that music fans making duplicates of CDs and passing them on to their friends is, in fact, an even bigger problem. While an estimated 16% of the music distributed last year came from illegal online music sources, 29% was CDR copies of albums made for friends.
Bainwol encouraged record labels to continued to invest in technology which limits the number of times a music fan can make a copy of a CD (the idea being a couple of copies for personal use is acceptable, but anything more than that is not). This recommendation comes despite criticism of copy-protection technology by some consumer rights bodies who argue that music buyers should be able to make extra copies of albums they buy for personal use as and when they wish. Those groups also point out that some protected CDs will not play in all CD players which, they argue, is another infringement of consumer rights.