According to this Yahoo! article, today marks the debut of a special new encrypted CD, which Arista records predicts will baffle file swappers and keep those extra two zeroes on their profit margin (My little girl just has to go to Stanford, and those bribes are considerable!) However misguided this approach, I do admire one aspect of the CD:

In CD players, the disc plays normally. When put into a Macintosh (news - web sites) or Windows PC, the disc installs software to keep the music secure, and an interactive menu pops up with several links, including one to copy some or all of the Windows Media tracks to your hard drive. Another link allows you to send e-mail to friends so they can download a copy of the song playable for 10 days. "You're sharing music, but you are not giving it away forever," Whitmore says.

This last bit at least shows some marketing savvy. However, I guess Arista is overlooking one major problem with "encyrypted CDs" or any effort to keep people from ripping sounds or music from CDs, the net, or even radio.

All pirates would have to do to beat this CD encryption is to open up their sound mixer (recording), switch to "STEREO MIXER," and then use any sound-recording software (Cool Edit Pro is my choice) to rip whatever is playing through the soundcard into a new file. The operation would take about five minutes, tops. Even if the capitalists found a way to make the CD totally non-playable in a computer, you could simply plug your walkman into your soundcard via a headphone cable and rip away.

What's even more fun, though, is the "D'OH! moment" that will occur when the record executives discover the same thing that software-copy protection gurus discovered some twenty years ago: In this quaint little place called Earth, there exists a whole horde of geeks who "get off" on cracking copy protection and spreading their 'warez.' Announcing that you are releasing a CD with unbeatable copy protection is like dropping a helmet down a well in the Mines of Moria (to use a reference from the awesome LOTR movie...)

I hope to Marx this ridiculous effort to keep information in captivity will fall flat on its swelled head--and hopefully burst open like a stolen watermelon. :-)