Very good information, thanks. That was a very well-informed post.

Your conclusion is, of course, the other logical end result: The record companies could choose, via this method, to force the consumers to upgrade old hardware that won't play the new discs. This is risky for the record companies (as well as downright evil, IMHO).

But think about it... If an upgrade is required to read a CD, which consumer group is more willing to do the upgrade: The audio consumers or the computer consumers?

What I'm saying is... There will probably be some CD-ROM drives that will read the protected CDs, just like there will be some audio drives that won't. Those who are interested in ripping their CDs will just upgrade their CD-ROM drives to a model that'll do it for them.