It's surprising how many people here do this: buy the original, rip it, and then store the CD. I also hear this from others who listed to MP3s on other systems: and finally, there's a large number who (cassette) tape them to stop them being knackered in constant use.

The most often-quoted reason for this? "They are so expensive, I can't afford to replace them", a sentiment I can agree with entirely having been infuriated on several occasions by the destruction of a CD from use in car or other locations. (Aside: is it just me, or are the things getting softer/more scratchable?)

Contrary to the way they are actually marketed, the CD was never designed to be a rugged medium, and it's pretty sensitive to dust & scratch damage. I recall seeing the original CD-A decoder board prototype (one chip built as a discrete TTL circuit, about 2m square!) at Mullards in Southampton in 1980, and the engineer proudly showed me the glass CDs that they were using for playback tests. He showed off the fact that they were scratch-resistant and impact safe. What happened to these? The cheap plastic [censored] we get now is nothing like that.

I am currently sidestepping the protection issue by only buying cheap back-catalogue material, which is invariably unprotected. What strikes me as odd is that the "new wave" of remastered "Old Masters" is entirely unprotected, even though someone has been paid to put in the effort of re-mixing and re-digitising analogue master tapes from years ago (even some digitally recorded ones, too). So why is this stuff apparently less in need of protection than the lastest stuff? Has it got something to do with the fact it's a minority sales market, selling to a different type of consumer? What criterion do they use to decide which material must be protected and which not? Seems to me there's only one simple one - if it's new and mass-market, it needs protection.

This entire story of "pirating" is an almost word for word repeat of the "Home taping is killing Music" campaign that they tried just as vinyl LPs were being superceeded by the CD: they also pushed for a levy on blank cassette tapes in those days, similar to the blank CD-R levy now. Joke, joke, joke. . They're not so pissed about people taping CDs these days, are they? Of course - no one has cassette players any more.... But then, we are the modern equivalent, aren't we?