Or, as it’s spelled out, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
I am, in principle at least, a believer in copyright and intellectual property. The idea that, “Hey, this copyrighted piece of music has been digitized, therefore I can make all the free copies of it I want,” has never made much sense to me, even if I’ve not always been a paragon of virtue in this area.
On the other hand, the Big Soulless Corporations who own the rights to so much music, video, etc., have been anything but good poster children for intellectual property. Instead, they’ve come across, time and again, as greedy scumbags who aren’t interested in art, just in raking in oodles of bucks from it.
To that end, I find it very interesting that Phillips, who “owns” the standard for Compact Discs, and thus the CD logo, has now decided that copy-protected CDs are not, in fact, CDs, since they are not written to the standard. Not only do they not want music companies to use the CD logo on copy-protected CDs, but they’re actually angling to have a disclaimer printed on each one that doesn’t meet the standard, so that customers know that, even though it looks like a CD and is sold like a CD, it’s not, officially, a CD.
Interesting times ahead.
(Via Words Mean Things)