Every US citizen has the right (as defined by the AHRA) to make first generation copies of a CD they own. This is controlled by SCMS.

That means there is a legitimate explaination of every one of those blank CD's purchased, putting aside the fact that many of them will have been used for entirely non audio purposes. That is no more an absurd statement than EMI saying they were all used to pirate music.

The scariest part is that the record companies may well be about to bring the MP3 consumer electronics market crashing down. They have the means (backed by the DMCA) to do this, and I'm not totally convinced that there are enough tech savvy consumers to create sufficient backlash to stop them.

Rob