@#$!@#$!^!

Stupid ass music companies and MICROSOFT. Yes, Microsoft had something to do with this, believe it or not. These are copy protected CDs that allow you to copy the songs to your hard drive, but guess what... only in Windows Media format. And as you may know, Microsoft is to music as Microsoft is to secure operating systems. They can't be good at one thing, they have to take over the whole world and suck at everything. Ok, but enough about Microsoft.

One guy says : "Apple's the leader in digital music. It doesn't make sense to release too many copy-protected CDs if they're incompatible with iPods. But Apple could also be at risk if these CDs keep selling well."

Apple will never be at risk. There are 30 million iPods out there. They have 67% of the market share, and they support all non-proprietary music formats (mp3, essentially) and their own. They would never support Windows Media because MS would never let them. And not a lot of people are going to give up their iPods for a stupid portable CD player. I had one, they are so not convenient at all compared to an iPod.

But then a record exec at Sony BMG tells how to work around it!

"Sony BMG, a joint venture between Japan's Sony Corp. and Germany's Bertelsmann, said users can get the music onto iPods by transferring files to a PC, burning them to a CD, ripping those and transferring them into iTunes."

That's the same way to get iTunes bought music stripped of the DRM. Or to download a certain program that I know of thanks to Zatko. It'll only take a few months or shorter before someone hacks this format and there's a program out there to rip these cds directly into Apple Lossless format :)