Philips joins copy protected CD fracas

Philips, the Dutch company which co-created the Compact Disc format along with Sony almost 20 years ago, is standing defiantly against the industry's use of copy-protected CDs.

The firm has warned that discs protected with such technologies could not be classed as compact discs and can't use the 'Compact Disc' logo that has been stamped on every CD since the format was developed.

Record labels are also being pressured by Philips to include warnings to consumers that copy protection techniques are used on a CD and may cause problems with some devices.

The big five record companies - Bertelsmann BMG, Vivendi Universal, Sony, EMI and AOL Time Warner - have been steadily introducing the controversial formats which prevent the copying or 'ripping' of CDs to MP3 since last year.

But Philips, which also governs the Compact Disc trademark, is refusing to follow suit under the acknowledgement that the introduction of such technology could do more harm than good.

Designed to protect the copyright of record companies in the wake of such technologies as Napster, which sparked a flood of copyright infringements, a variety of protection technologies have been tested on an uninformed public.

At the end of last year big stars such as Michael Jackson and Natalie Imbruglia came under fire from consumers when copy protection systems were used on their CDs without any warning on the packaging.

The UK release of Imbruglia's White Lillies Island album prompted numerous returns after it emerged that the quality and playability of the CD may have been impaired by copy protection technology.

It has come to light that a high number of these untried and untested technologies, such as Cactus Data Shield, not only prevent the CDs being read in a CDRom drive but cause problems on a number of standalone CD players.

The UK Campaign for Digital Rights (UKCDR), which is fighting against the proposed European Copyright Directive, our equivalent of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, estimates that well over a million of these CDs have already been released in the UK alone, often with no visible warning.

Jim Peters, who heads up the UKCDR, has posted a warning on the group's website which says: "The record companies seem determined to keep going along this path. Universal, for instance, has said that it wants all of its CDs copy-protected within six months. We feel that they should not be allowed to get away with this."

He added that there were still unlabelled copy-protected CDs available to buy in the shops. "The public is still being lied to and misled. We want this issue to become common public knowledge so that the record companies can no longer get away with all these underhand tactics," he said.