Copy Protection
This news doesn’t appear to have been made particularly public — or perhaps I just missed the whole thing. Various sources (Mojo magazine, and Digital Media Europe among others) have reported that Sony and Phillips have dropped the much-maligned “copy-protection” systems from their CDs. I have serious doubts that these limp, easy-to-get-around systems ever did anything more than annoy legitimate users, and I don’t believe they ever had the slightest effect on piracy as generally you could get around the protection by just not allowing the CD to autplay, so this is good news.