b.cognosco

Jacobs at SunnComm said his company's latest technology fits the bill, and it's being tested by three of the five major record companies. Sexton of Macrovision, which bought Midbar in early November, said his company will have a similar offering early next year.

The goal, Sexton said, is to enable all the personal uses consumers expect from an ordinary CD, just in a more limited fashion. In particular, the dual-session discs being developed by SunnComm and Macrovision don't allow consumers to convert songs to MP3 files, the most popular format for music on computers and portable digital players.

Instead, when consumers copy one of the new discs onto their computers, they end up with a set of scrambled song files in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio format. Those files can be transferred only to portable devices that support Windows Media.

So the geniuses at the copy protection factories have decided to disable the entire galaxy of portable, personal, auto, and home MP3 players. This is a strategy? This is allowing all the same uses, just in a more limited fashion?

Even if the tech guys can sucker Valenti and friends into paying them a few hundred million for this brain-dead idea, it has about as much chance of succeeding in the US market as I have of winning the PowerBall. If this is the best they can come up with, the game is already over.

Star Tribune Record labels grapple with CD protection. "For three straight holiday seasons, record executives say, Internet piracy has been the Grinch of the music business, undercutting album sales and labels' year-end profits." "Music and technology executives vow that this will be the last holiday season without widespread use of technology that prevents songs from being transferred from CDs to the Internet. Of course, they've made that prediction before." [snowdeal.org | conflux]