Is a SWAT team going to burst through the windows of your house one night and drag you off into the moonlight because they can’t find the CD original of some tracks on your iPod since you threw out the disk when it got scratched? Unlikely.
Here’s why I believe that CD’s could pose a bigger threat to the music industry than web-based file sharing.
The music industry has three tactics to put people off trading online: polluting networks with false tracks; telling parents that file trading exposes children to porn; suing individuals. This will put people off.
Authorized online distribution of digital music files, Apple music store style, will enable copy protection within the files. Hardware devices such as iPods will continue to use protection measures at the hardware level.
CDs and CD players don’t have this kind of protection, because CD standards were defined before ubiquitous file trading, it will remain easy to rip a CD to MP3. Since a CD is a physical medium, it is too costly to provide protection measures such as individual unique watermarks or serial numbers per CD.
Initially, file sharing will have migrated from Napster to P2P to ‘Sneakernet’ sharing. If you share CDs with friends in the school yard, then they will be able to copy them. If you borrow a CD from a library, it will be easy to rip and there will not be the same fear of doing so over the net.
Even if this is somehow stamped out, the ultimate form of file sharing and the one that will be impossible to stop is ‘accidental file sharing’ where both the perception and technicality of this being illegal will be impossible to discern.
If your girlfriend buys a CD and you have an iPod that you share, is it illegal to rip the CD to it?
What if you split up with her and both your CD collections are duplicated on the iPod, are you going to manually delete copies from her CDs – what if you can’t find the original or remember who bought what?
What if you have a family iPod or a house iPod or a school iPod?
Is it illegal to play your kids’ playlists for them in the back of the car?
Accidental file sharing may be the last straw that will force the music industry to go all download as people keep legitimate MP3 copies of CDs so that they don’t have to carry their entire defunct CD collection around with them. As with software, you could have a license to install a digital music track on one user’s machine, but with ripped CD’s that will be difficult.
The introduction of the CD increased revenues as people duplicated their vinyl collection, you can duplicate your CD collection on MP3 for nothing.
The CD will go because it will actually reduce longer term music industry revenue.