Quote Originally Posted by holotropik
Which got me thinkin - why did the industry give the nod to the CD format?? They really shot themselves in the foot with that one. The only plus that digital audio has is the quality and workability. Copyright control is its weakness.
I think this kind of misses the point...

Once a new technology is developed, pandora's box is well and truly open and there's not much you can do to close it.

No-one in the music industry was going to carry on releasing exclusively on vinyl and cassette once Philips et al started producing CD players - the plain fact being that in the majority of consumer applications (hi-fi's, personal audio etc.) CD's gave the best trade off between quality, cost and portability.

I don't want to get into the whole "CD / vinyl" debate as at a DJ / pro audio level it becomes debateable, but you have to agree that on a consumer level (to the average listener) CDs give excellent quality on reasonably cheap equipment and media, with high portability.

So, once this Technology was released, any label / shop / distributer etc. in the consumer music market which refused to stock CDs was shooting themselves in the foot, because CDs were what consumers wanted. Big labels now either release albums on CDs or go out of business.

It's like this with mp3s now. The technology to rip audio from any source and encode the mp3 is present in pretty much every home in this country now. You can do it with every PC, and (now) many consumer audio devices... and as much as the industry is trying to retroactively legislate against it it is what people will continue to do.

Even if KaZaA (or whatever) is eventually shut down, it will evolve and people will find a new way - mainly because the computer geeks who spend their time trying to break copy protection and come up with new ways of sharing files are much more numerous (and IT-savvy) than the people trying to stop them.

Note that I'm not really arguing for or against... I'm just pointing out that this is the situation now, and no amount of arguing about "fairness" or right and wrong is going to change it.