An open letter to those that want to prevent me copying CDs...

Why I Want An MP3 Player

• An MP3 player is very small, much smaller than a portable CD player. Fits nicely in my pocket with room for my wallet.
• An MP3 player will hold many more albums of music than my bag could hold and saves me carrying those CDs around with me, asking to be damaged or lost.
• An MP3 player won't skip when I run. It's impossible.
• An MP3 player won't scratch my CDs when it gets old
• I can drop an MP3 player and not damage my music
• I can destroy my MP3 player (or it can be stollen or lost) and not lose my music (it's at home, on CD)
• An MP3 player lets me play music / interviews / any audio I download from the internet without having to burn a CDr

* Note, I'm talking about a solid state MP3 player (same tech as USB keys), not the newer ones with little hard disks in. I'm not sure how sturdy they are...

I DO NOT want an MP3 player so I can easily listen to pirated music. I just want to listen to my music and protect the CD collection I spent so much $$$ purchasing by not having to carry it around.

The ways they're changing my beloved CDs is frustrating enough that the huge desire to own CDs is fading. I know now that if I buy a CD it might not be just music. It might have a watermark on it, deliberately reducing the quality of the music I bought just in case I copy it. It might have some spyware on there to change my computer. It might have some crappy multimedia thing on it I never want to see.

If I want multmedia I'll buy a DVD.

On the otherhand, the urge to protect the CDs I do have is much greater. This collection could be the last of the untouched music, before they alter the "CD" to be something different, something of lesser quality and usability. Ignoring the fact more than half of the collection has been "deleted". A concept that really shouldn't exist in today's market.

I already own a bunch of EMI Australia CDs protected by their version of copy protection.

I sometimes wonder how well they'll play in 10 years time...

They spend so much money on preventing customers using what they've bought, when they should be spending that money on recording studio time for the artists I like.

* PS: Please don't buy me one for Xmas ;p None of them do quite what I want yet.

Ignoring the very recent and very public outcry in the US against such measures, Sony have announced they will include copy protection on their new Australian releases [via acb].

They haven't decided which copy protection to use yet.

If I were signed to SonyBMG Australia I'd be calling my manager right now and asking some hairy questions. Like, if Sony screw it up here like they did so well in the US, what are they going to do about my lost sales?

This is exactly why I've kept away from iPods and the such (ignoring the fact I think they're still too expensive). I've heard rumours of iTunes renaming, moving files, losing files of people's existing collections. But I figured this sort of thing had been fixed since last year.

I couldn't think of a bigger sin for a piece of software to mess with my files. I mean, imagine the uproar if when you installed Media Player and told it to look for your music it found all your MP3s, moved them to somewhere random, renamed them, and then lost half of them?

I look forward to an MP3 player that is nothing more than a USB key that happens to play whatever MP3s are copied to it. No special software. No messing with my files.

Carnage.