Their own sales figures aren't the only force pushing labels in the direction of protection. Many retailers, which are bearing much of the brunt of declining music sales, are blunt about their dissatisfaction about the slowdowns. "They're trying to complicate the issues," said John Sullivan, executive vice president of Transworld Entertainment, one of the nation's biggest owners of retail music stores. "We think they should just get it done. We'll take care of consumer complaints." The response from consumers has been overblown, despite the considerable controversy in headlines and online, Sullivan said. His stores saw no consumer backlash to Universal's protected release of the "More Fast and Furious" CD, he said. But reaction has come in more areas than simple sales, at least in the United States. Two lawsuits have been filed over protected CDs, even before they were widely distributed. The first to be identified, a small release of country singer Charley Pride's most recent album, drew the first suit, alleging that customers were being misled about the contents of their purchase. It has since been settled. Experienced class-action firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach followed that lawsuit up with another against all five major labels, charging that the big music companies were selling defective CDs without notifying consumers. That suit, filed in June, has yet to make significant progress. In Washington, Rep. Rick Boucher has led a campaign questioning the legality of copy protection, asking whether the technology would violate consumers' "fair use" rights to the music they've purchased. Meanwhile, the technologies themselves have occasionally run into trouble. Anti-copying technology from Sony and Midbar each proved to be easily disarmed using only a felt-tip pen. Compatibility problems with Macintosh computers led Apple to warn people that problems resulting from playing nonstandard CDs wouldn't be covered under standard warranties. No miracle lock
The companies producing the technology say they're close to working out most of these issues. But there is no silver bullet, they say. Record companies would like to have perfect playability along with perfect protection. That's impossible, says Noam Zur, vice president of sales and marketing for Midbar. However, an acceptable compromise between playability and protection has been reached, he says. "The number of complaints we get is negligible," Zur said. "I think the products are mature." Macrovision, the US company that is expanding from protecting videotapes and DVDs into music copy protection, says that consumers have to be given benefits along with the copy-blocking. Like its rivals, it is creating ways to put digital music files on CDs in a format that can be transferred to computers or MP3 players, along with video files, Web links or other add-ons. Once these files are routinely put on CDs, criticism of the locks will be muted, the company believes. "What we and the labels have been spending a great deal of time on is developing the capacity to make it easy to use music on PCs and portable devices," said Brian McPhail, vice president of Macrovision's consumer software division. Once those additions are in place, he said, "I think all the objections will go away, except those from ideologically inspired organisations." If the push toward copy protection on CDs has slowed, then, it appears that it's not forever. A new generation of technology could persuade the record companies to pick up the pace again. "The record labels in this country are very sensitive to consumer tastes," said Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. "They are looking very carefully at the technology as it improves, but the technology needs to be more consumer-friendly."
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