Won't fly.

Reasons:

1) If they alter the formatting of the CD, there will be some audio CD players that will refuse to play the discs. I know a little bit about the way these things are formatted. Some players are more picky than others, and there will always be players that won't tolerate a disk with goofy formatting. No record company in their right mind would publish a CD that won't play on consumer equipment. Can you imagine how pissed the record stores would be if their customers kept returning the latest Ricky Martin album because they thought it was defective?

2) Different CD-ROM readers will read different discs. Even if they encode this onto the CDs, there will still be some CD-ROM drives that can read it. So the system wouldn't be 100 percent effective at copy protecting the discs.

3) Because of (2), albums that contain this protection would be distributed more vigorously on the internet than ones that don't. The users with the drives that have the capability of reading the CD will rip and post MP3s of the copy-protected albums. The effect would be the exact opposite of what the inventor intended.

As I've said before, the record companies opened Pandora's box over a decade ago when they embraced the CD format. It's an unencrypted, non-lossy system that allows perfect bit-for-bit duplication. Because CDs are such a universally accepted medium, there's very little they can do at this point, other than to adopt another distribution media format and make everyone switch. I don't see that happening any time soon because there are plenty of people still stinging from the fact that they had to buy all their LPs on CD over again.

Reminds me of the Tommy Lee Jones line in Men In Black. He shows Will Smith a super-tiny optical disk and tells him, "This will replace CD's someday. It means I'll have to buy the White Album again."