Nora Jones new CD -- Copy Protection -- YIKES

Prpixel, There was an article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago about copyright issues. The concern is that in fact you don't have full rights to the music; you actually lease the music to be used as they tell you can use it. The article went deeper than this but the point was that copyright law is going too far and is actually stifling creativity and new thinking. Copyrights and patents now last so long that an idea, a song, whatever may not enter the public domain for 100s of years.

Witness the discussion in this thread that exemplifies the problem. Technology has moved forward and we can now store all of our music on hard drives with instant access to hundreds of albums and playlists. However, the record labels are preventing this from occurring on new releases through the use of copy protection. They own the copyright to the music and they can tell you what you can and can't do with that music when you buy the CD.

I'm not sure what you can claim in small claims court. There is no legal guarantee that says you have the right to rip a CD to your computer or to play it in the CD drive of your computer. As I understand it the definition of fair use has changed over time so you may not be able to rely on that. the best we can do is speak up and make ourselves heard. As more and more people use their computer as their media system what can the labels do???

One thing I forgot to add was that the retail on the new Norah Jones
album and the new Keb Mo album I purchased at the same time at B&N
was $19! "On sale" for $16. Weren't they supposed to be
lowering the price of CDs? Most new DVDs cost $10.

I believe Circuit City advertised it for $11.99 for this week.

Good news - the Norah Jones CD is not copy protected. The problem is that the Bandlink software can get a little weird and break windows media player. After a few calls to Blue note somebody finally gave my number to Cedric at CDIntelligence, the distributer for the Bandlink software. He was very polite and knowledgable and after about 20 minutes I was able to figure out how to get it to play. On some windows xp PC's you might have to disable autorun to prevent then Bandlink software from launching. After I did this (in the registry - don't go there) the CD booted up fine and I was able to play it. I was even able to rip it to my music hard drive.

Blue Note (EMI) is taking a different approach to preventing illegal copying. They are giving you extra content to encourage you to buy the CD. In fact, if you intall the Bandlink software, you can get access to a bonus track and other material.

I was surprised to have someone call me at 7pm to help me with my problem. I didn't expect to have anyone return my call. Especially from a big record company like EMI.

Anyway, I hope this helps other people that were having the same issue.

Best Buy - $9.99 this week.