In this story on Yahoos news site is some details about MS news CD copy protection technology.

Supposedly they are planning on gettin Music studios to "embed" 2 copies of the music in "layers" - one for PC's the other for regular CD players.

How they are going to physically fit these 2 layers on the one disk I don't kow unless they've come up with a clever hack for the Red Book standard, which is single layer uncompressed Audio.

Anyone want to lay bets on how long this technology will be around before its beaten?

You've got to wonder why MS is interested in this at all. They have no stake in any music company, from labels to studios to distributors, as far as I know. It's not like they really need to prop up their OS in that industry, not that this would help that particular thing.

The only thing that this does is help remove features for their actual customers. And that's only going to piss people off. I can't imagine that anyone's going to say ``Yay! Now I don't even have the option of copying the music in any other way!'' Any person who's interested in not breaking the law (from their point of view) is just not going to do it in the first place. I don't believe that anyone could possibly be holding the position that copying music off of your CDs for personal use only is currently wrong, and that this will give them license to do it.

Maybe the intent is to make the data version available as WMA, while locking down the audio layer. Or perhaps some sort of digital rights encoding, and you would need to go to a central server to get the rights for that machine...

Right. But why do they care? How could implementing this make them more money, or not implementing it cost them money?

Well, in theory, pushing WMA over the MP3 standard would get them licensing $$$. Also, any digital rights server, especially one that they control, would certainly bring in subscription fees or brokerage fees from the music labels.

exactly, microsoft doesnt care if there is copy protection on music cds or not (data cds is another matter) but if there is going to be copy protection on audio cds, you can bet microsoft wants to controle it.

MS does appear to have an intent to get into digital publishing. I know that they bought Liquid Audio's digital rights management. Liquid's method was one of the few that was acceptable to large labels like Universal and BMG.

There is DEFINITELY money in a method of protection that is non-obvious to legitimate users and prevents hackers from widespread abuse.

So... how DO we get around this, anyway??? ;-)