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Consumer Alert: Are CD-RWs Less Useful?

This year, thanks to lower costs, CD-RW drives should make significant inroads even into the business space, says IDC analyst Wolfgang Schlichting. They're already fairly common in home PCs. But CD copying, a key application for the consumer CD-RW market, is threatened by new copy protection schemes for audio CDs now being introduced by the recording industry.

Because many consumers buy CD-RW drives not only for data backup, but also--or even primarily--to mix their own custom audio CDs, such schemes may decrease the drives' value. All of the major labels say that they're looking at CD copy protection, and major players such as Macrovision, which creates protection schemes, expect their products to be in millions of CDs in the next year.

Some CDs are already on the market with such protection. And Universal recently became the first label to use a new, dual-protection scheme for a CD (the soundtrack to The Fast and the Furious): It has locked, uncompressed audio files that you can't play on a PC and preripped files in an MP3-like format Windows that PC owners can play but can't use for a custom CD.

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