Stu­pid DRM. My com­puter, of course, gets around the copy pro­tec­tion on this CD instantly. My DVD player (which I use as a CD player: shut up Steve, CD play­ers don’t sound a-few-hundred-dollars bet­ter, so I don’t care! ;-) ), on the other hand, can’t play the damn thing. As of right now I’m rip­ping it to my com­puter (loss­lessly with FLAC) and will have a pres­tine, non-DRM copy on a burnt CD for my use in a mat­ter of minutes.

And if a friend ever asks if they can bor­row my Yel­low­card CD (bought on a whim know­ing only one of their songs, I’ll add), I’ll be sure to lend them the ver­sion that works bet­ter: The one I burnt myself, with­out your stupid-arse soft­ware all over it.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll hes­i­tate to pur­chase EMI CDs in the future. All other DRM-encumbered crap I’ve bought in the past has at least had the cour­tesy to work in my DVD player (this one made detec­tion take ages, then picked it up as a VCD with wierd timecoding) — this is the bar­rier at which point it becomes infi­nitely eas­ier to use Peer-to-Peer than buy things that look like they might be inter­est­ing in a CD store.

With phys­i­cal media, I can (read: should be able to) toss it in any­thing and expect it to work instantly (no rip­ping required, etc.).

And, you know, if I wind up using Peer-to-Peer for this kind of stuff, my loss­less (yeah, that’s CD qual­ity, not MP3 junk) audio col­lec­tion will be shared back with the rest of the world. Yes, even the CDs you make it harder for me to use legit­i­mately. I will fig­ure out a way to get them onto my com­puter (or some­one else will with another CD), and I will use shar­ing net­works if scum­bag con­tent providers pro­vide me with suf­fi­cient impe­tus to do that.

(Inci­den­tally, if any­one wants to bor­row a non-DRM-encumbered Yel­low­card CD…)