Ordinary Gweilo

As I’ve mentioned before, I have almost given up buying music.  If you live in Hong Kong it seems to be impossible to buy music from services such as iTunes and Musicmatch, and I’ve heard so much about copy protection and CDs that cannot be played in computers that I take fright if I see any wording on any CD about what it might not be able to do on a PC.

This story from The Guardian explains something that I had not realized – this obsession with copy protection has not yet spread across the Atlantic, so CDs from UK record companies are likely to be OK.  If you’re wondering why, here’s an explanation:

Though hardly immune to physical piracy – the BPI estimates the volume of counterfeit CDs in the UK increased threefold between 2000 and 2004 – [the UK] CD album market, excluding compilations, has proved remarkably buoyant.

In 2003, for instance, the volume of albums sold in the UK actually increased by 7.6%. In 2004 there was a further 3% increase and although overall album sales – both artist and compilations – dropped by 1.2% last year, sales of artist albums were up 1.4%. Even with supermarkets and online retailers driving prices down, the UK appeared to buck global trends.

As a result, while the UK majors retain an open attitude towards copy protection, at least publicly, some employees are highly sceptical about the cost and effectiveness of such initiatives. One Sony BMG UK representative says the US XCP fiasco was met with evident relief.

At Jupiter, Mulligan explains: "You might put off some of the casual copiers but you’re not going to cut out the sort of person who’s doing it on a serial basis. So you’re not penalising the hardcore criminals, the mass pirates – you’re penalising the average consumer."

Indeed.  It’s not difficult to defeat copy protection (the simplest way is to use a standalone CD player and an audio card), so why inconvenience millions of customers in this way?  Stupidity, I guess.