Recording Racket update: Big Five recording company and former international arms dealers EMI reveal their plans to launch a service allowing users to download and burn CDs. That's right, the unprotected Red Book audio format which will be the death of corporate capitalism. (I very much doubt that they have developed a way of burning copy-protected CDs which cannot be copied bitwise; given that hardware CD players ignore CDR barcode serial numbers, watermarks and all that stuff. Though I wonder whether, in exercising due diligence, they will pollute the sound quality of the burned CDs with some half-baked watermark scheme.)

Or maybe EMI actually Get It, and understand that end-to-end copy protection is not a viable requirement? I don't know about you, but I would pay for music in an unprotected format I can use at my leisure without having to deal with proprietary software that only does things its way. (In fact I did; I bought some MP3s from the 4AD back catalogue last year, before atomicpop.com went broke.)

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