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One thing you need to consider is that the RIAA are an organized crime syndicate. Read more at dontbuycds.org

3. Kazaa is a spyware infested cesspool that will crash your computer. Bearshare is no better.

4. Today's pop music sucks so bad that it isn't worth the time and trouble to download.

Harassment of file traders, not to mention lawsuits against little girls and kindly old grandparents are just a few of the many reasons to boycott the recording industry. Don't buy CDs!

This looks like a big fat trojan horse to me. Don't buy CDs.

People are not stealing when they listen to the radio, and file trading is the new radio. Don't buy CDs until the industry cleans up their act.

We don't have to take it. Consumers can put the RIAA into history's trash can with the horse and buggy industry just by not buying CDs.

Comparing unauthorized copying to rape, murder, and robbery on the high seas is terribly sensational. This "game" is a piece of RIAA/MPAA propaganda whether they will admit to it or not. Don't buy CDs.

Ordinary people must obey the law, or be punished. Big corporations can bribe away laws they don't like. That is wrong, and there is something we all can do about it. Boycott them! And vote the bums taking their bribes out of office.

It is high time that everyone joined the consumer boycott of the RIAA and affiliated labels! Don't buy CDs. Continuing to buy their product just pays them to sue little girls and kindly old grandparents!

File trading has been free promotion from the beginning, as it says at dontbuycds.org, but now it is not free, as they are paying BigChampagne to track what's hot! Turns out a promotion as good is file trading is worth paying for. How long before they are giving the networks Payola just like radio?

File trading has been free promotion from the beginning, as it says at dontbuycds.org, but now it is not free, as they are paying BigChampagne to track what's hot! Turns out a promotion as good is file trading is worth paying for. How long before they are giving the networks Payola just like radio?

All around the world, punish the recording companies who lobby for these laws by boycotting them, and punish the politicians by voting them out of office.

I hope they burned their MP3s to CD-R before wiping their hard drives! People are clearly afraid of the RIAA, but is terrorizing prospective customers the way to get them to buy from you? I don't think so. Don't buy CDs.

Back in the day, cover art gave you something tangible that a home tape never could. That is why home-taping never harmed the recording industry in spite of what they claimed. Their "piracy" nonsense over MP3 and CD-R are the same old refrain. It was about more than the sound. In fact, sound quality was hardly a concern, it was Rock and Roll, not symphonies!

When Columbia House stopped offering LPs in either 1989 or 1990, and told me I could have cassettes for the same price, or CDs for twice as much, (even though they probably already cost less to produce) I cancelled my membership.

For an example, look at Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy. A 2x2 miniature of the front cover on a cassette, or a 5 inch one on a CD was worth no more than a home tape made on the cheapest blanks the store down the road carried.

As for DRM; I can't abide it in any form. DRM is a seller's refusal to let go of something that isn't his any more. If I buy something such as a CD, It becomes my personal property. I decide how to use it. The seller loses the right to tell me how to use it once money has changed hands.

I suspect that only one pay-for-play service will survive in the end. Since I-tunes got there first, they will probably be the one.

The RIAA needs to join the horse-and-buggy industry in the dustbin of history, and we have the power to make it happen. Don't buy CDs.

Personally, I compare them to parasites like leeches. They exist solely to rip off kids, the ones who make music, and the ones who listen to it. If that's not a parasite, what is?

Amen! File trading is the new radio. Old radio and MTV dropped the ball. Napster picked it up. To hell with the RIAA. Don't Buy CDs.

Quoth the poster:

Another high-end store I saw selling markers to black out the edge of your CDs to prevent light loss.

WTF?!? Light loss?

Last time I checked, this is why you blacked out the edges of CDs.

Lower quality? I didn't think it was possible for popular music to suck even worse, but maybe I'm wrong. Music that sucks is a big reason people don't buy CDs.

When you boil it all down, Sunncomm is dancing, but the RIAA are calling the tune. It is the RIAA and affiliated labels who need to be boycotted until they reform, or perish. Sunncomm will die on their own. Sunncomm alredy lost Sound Choice Karaoke as a customer. Using the previous DRM scheme, Mediacloq, caused a backlash that really hurt them, and karaoke is a niche market.

Ha! They spend millions, if not billions developing these schemes and they are cracked for nearly nothing! All they do with this crap is piss off legitimate owners of CDs. They are not even a bump in the road for the pirates making the $3.00 CDs you see at the flea market, and on street vendors' carts. If there were idiot asylums, all the jokers in the recording industry would be committed.

Charter forever. The RIAA never! Don't buy CDs.

Maybe, however, one or two paid P2P networks will be viable like satelite radio if they can guarantee that there are no viruses or spyware. (Kazaa is a cesspool of both.) To get any customers, they will also have to abandon placing any restrictions on customers' property rights. Once a customer buys something, it becomes his or her personal property. The seller loses any right to tell customers what they can and can't do with their personal property once money has changed hands. This is simply how commerce works, and the recording industry needs to accept it. Until they do learn to repect customers, don't buy CDs.

To hell with the RIAA. Don't Buy CDs

This is certainly a good idea, and is listed at dontbuycds.org under non-RIAA music sources. When the RIAA and affiliated labels perish, a new industry of, by, and for music lovers will emerge. This has already begun.

This is certainly a good idea, and is listed at dontbuycds.org under non-RIAA music sources. When the RIAA and affiliated labels perish, a new industry of, by, and for music lovers will emerge. This has already begun.

I think they should get students' attention with nicely illustrated comics

Isn't it pretentious how the leeches and hangers on in the recording industry claim to be in the music business. Composers and performers are in the music business, not the parasites at the labels, or Hilary Rosen. File trading isn't theft, it's the digital ages radio, and the best form of promotion music ever had. Dont'Buy CDs until the recording industry cleans up its act.

If they file "John Doe" they don't know who they're actually suing until they've already won (if they lose, end of story).

Yes, used CDs are good. The RIAA and affiliated labels get nothing from them, as royalties were paid the first time. This is called the first sale principle. When the original owner bought the CD, it became his or her personal property to resel. As no new copy was made, copyright was not involved in the transaction. The RIAA, and pretentious entertainers like Garth Brooks want to abolish the first sale principle, and grab ill-gotten booty from used CD sales. To hell with them! Other than used ones, don't buy CDs.

The RIAA are dinosaurs who deserve to be extinct. Read more at dontbuycds.org

Yeah! Suing kindly old grandfathers and twelve-year-old girls who live in public housing with their single mothers is PR? The RIAA are worse than the mafia. Don't Buy CDs.

Yeah, Kazaa isn't exactly on the up and up, but the RIAA are absolutely criminal racketeers. Dont Buy CDs.

The RIAA affiliated labels deserve to be boycotted into oblivion. Don't buy CDs.

Yes indeeed! Taking $2000 from a single mother with two children to feed takes food, clothing and shelter from them. Brianna and her little brother will have to go hungry, or possibly cold at night for a while so Cary Sherman can have some fine Columbian snow to snort! Now, more than ever, don't buy CDs.

Yes, you make excellent points.

But at this point, it doesn't even matter that what these people are doing is illegal!

EFF said it best, but I'll paraphrase:

Enjoying music is not wrong! Technology has enabled music lovers to build the largest collections of music ever! With a large harddrive and a fast internet connection, it is painfully easy to develop a collection of music that would take months to listen to end-to-end.

Instead of providing users with a legitimate way of doing this, the RIAA has set out on a path to criminalise music lovers everywhere.

What I mean is, it's become apparent that CDs are just not convenient enough for people to buy lots of them; people want to pay for single-song downloads, and then only have exactly what songs they like. Instead of enabling this and making life good for consumers and artists alike, the RIAA is alienating EVERYBODY.

I suggest everybody go out and discover independant music. I've been surfing on iuma.com (Internet Underground Music Archive), and I've found lots of great music that the artists want you to download for free. It's free, it's legit, and it's not the cookie-cutter shite that the RIAA has been pushing lately.

So I say, fuck the RIAA. If they want to put all of their potential customers in jail, they can go out of business for all I care.

And finally, check out Downhill Battle, and Don't Buy CDs , two good sites advocating the downfall of the RIAA.

Here is another story with some choice quotes from Cary Sherman. Now more than ever, don't buy CDs.

What would be an acceptable course of action for the RIAA? Here is an exerpt from dontbuycds.org:

To sum it all up, the recording industry needs to reform itself. Our boycott will end when they meet these demands.

* Stop using copy protection schemes. Using them denies us our fair use and personal property rights, and accuses us all of being thieves. If we buy discs, we have the right to play them in the player we choose. If that is the CD-Rom drive of a computer, so be it. We have the right to copy them to a personal MP3 player, or make a custom CD-R of favorite songs.

* Leave file traders alone. File trading gives artists, and the recording industry free promotion. Radio used to be a great promotion, but now rarely deviates from limited play lists which labels must pay to get onto through independent promoters. While Napster was online, CD sales were up. File trading is a legitimate way to try before buying. Music fans need it, and so does the industry.

* Stop selling music at such an obscene mark up. The cost to press and package a disc has continually gone down. It is currently less than one dollar. We realize that there are production costs beyond manufacturing, but that doesn't justify gouging. When CDs were new, they cost twice as much as LPs and cassettes. The industry claimed that the cost to produce this new format was high, and promised that as their costs came down, so would retail prices. This price drop never occurred. Instead, retail prices have gone up. In stores where vinyl records and cassettes are still sold, they are priced lower than CDs, even though they cost more to manufacture. A movie on DVD frequently sells for less than its soundtrack on CD. The industry has colluded to fix prices, and was forced to settle a class action law suit over this practice, yet CDs in suburban malls can retail for more than twenty dollars. In many countries, CDs cost more than that. In Iceland for example, a CD can cost 2500kr, equal to 29.50 in US dollars. This is unacceptable.

The recording industry must reform itself, or perish like the horse-and buggy industry did after the automobile was invented. If you don't like that comparison, try this one. If your head is in the basket, you were on the wrong side of the revolution. The RIAA are trying to avoid sharing the fate of Louis XVI.

If it won't play, it's a lemon! That's what groups like dontbuycds.org have been saying all along. It is great that some courts around the world are starting to get it.

This price drop is one of the major things dontbuycds.org and other anti-RIAA groups have been demanding all along. Now, hopefully all the labels will follow Universal's lead. They also need to stop making "copy protected" CDs that often won't play at all, and need to stop harassing file traders.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Long live the bill of rights. To hell with the RIAA. Don't buy CDs.

The Australian courts have done something good. Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. Australian consumers can really punish Warner and Universal by not buying their CDs. That could amount to a great deal more than chump change in lost sales.

Advocates of the free flow of ideas detest these things, especially since the term of copyright has been extended 11 times in 40 years, and only a few huge corporations like Disney have benefited. People who dislike copyright fall into two camps: those who view it as a necessary evil, and those who see it as an abomination that defeats the purpose of communication.

I am in the former camp, not the latter, but DRM makes me so angry, that I often seem to be in the second camp. For a long time, hearing about these issues made me angry, but I did nothing substantive about it. Personal experience motivated me to act. The final straw that made me start dontbuycds.org was a karaoke disc published by Sound Choice. Headbangers Hits Volume X. The disc cost over thirty dollars. It had the Compact disc digital audio logo, but was encoded with Suncomm's Mediacloq brand of DRM. My computer was my player, and I used it to rehearse before going out to shows. I personally purchase hard rock and metal, because the DJs usually only have country. I could not use the disc without going and buying a dedicated player that was not computer based! Some are, so the cheapest one at Wal-mart might not work.

To top it all off, Karaoke discs were never being ripped, and offered on Napster. File trading was no threat to them. The joke of it all is that the disc would copy in a dedicated copier, and real piracy, i.e. counterfeiting, was the only kind they had to worry about.

Sound Choice took a lot of lumps over using Mediacloq, or as critics call it, Mediaclog. Some tolerated it because their discs, although expensive, contain the best background music, and most easily readable on-screen lyrics in the industry. Others abandoned Sound Choice, and have not gone back. The backlash eventually convinced them to stop using Mediacloq, and after a while, they did re-release my disc in a non-DRM format, and replace it, but forgiving and forgetting is hard. I have still not purchased any more of their discs. Ironically, many other publishers are selling downloads for computer based karaoke machines like the CAVS JB 99 digital jukebox. With it, a DJ doesn't have to lug around large, heavy quantities of CD media, or worry about getting them scratched up, or beer spilled on them. His whole songbook is on a hard drive in the player.

Back to DRM. If publishers are going to use it, it had better be completely undetectable, or people like me will go off. This has never been technologically feasible, and I suspect it never will be. I could go on forever, but most of what I would say is on the site somewhere. By the way, the external links page lists many legitimate non-riaa music sources. Have you tried offering your music there?

Advocates of the free flow of ideas detest these things, especially since the term of copyright has been extended 11 times in 40 years, and only a few huge corporations like Disney have benefited. People who dislike copyright fall into two camps: those who view it as a necessary evil, and those who see it as an abomination that defeats the purpose of communication.

I am in the former camp, not the latter, but DRM makes me so angry, that I often seem to be in the second camp. For a long time, hearing about these issues made me angry, but I did nothing substantive about it. Personal experience motivated me to act. The final straw that made me start dontbuycds.org was a karaoke disc published by Sound Choice. Headbangers Hits Volume X. The disc cost over thirty dollars. It had the Compact disc digital audio logo, but was encoded with Suncomm's Mediacloq brand of DRM. My computer was my player, and I used it to rehearse before going out to shows. I personally purchase hard rock and metal, because the DJs usually only have country. I could not use the disc without going and buying a dedicated player that was not computer based! Some are, so the cheapest one at Wal-mart might not work.

To top it all off, Karaoke discs were never being ripped, and offered on Napster. File trading was no threat to them. The joke of it all is that the disc would copy in a dedicated copier, and real piracy, i.e. counterfeiting, was the only kind they had to worry about.

Sound Choice took a lot of lumps over using Mediacloq, or as critics call it, Mediaclog. Some tolerated it because their discs, although expensive, contain the best background music, and most easily readable on-screen lyrics in the industry. Others abandoned Sound Choice, and have not gone back. The backlash eventually convinced them to stop using Mediacloq, and after a while, they did re-release my disc in a non-DRM format, and replace it, but forgiving and forgetting is hard. I have still not purchased any more of their discs. Ironically, many other publishers are selling downloads for computer based karaoke machines like the CAVS JB 99 digital jukebox. With it, a DJ doesn't have to lug around large, heavy quantities of CD media, or worry about getting them scratched up, or beer spilled on them. His whole songbook is on a hard drive in the player.

Back to DRM. If publishers are going to use it, it had better be completely undetectable, or people like me will go off. This has never been technologically feasible, and I suspect it never will be. I could go on forever, but most of what I would say is on the site somewhere. By the way, the external links page lists many legitimate non-riaa music sources. Have you tried offering your music there?

I know you're a troll, you said so on the title bar, but you have provided the perfect thing to start a debate with! DRM is something we should never put up with. I buy a CD, and it becomes my property. The RIAA has no business telling me that I have to use the player of their choice, I'll use the one I choose. They can't tell me not to copy it to my MP3 player, or to lend it to a friend. They can tell me not to make copies of it, and sell them. That is all copyright law is stipulates! Since they want to treat my property like it is still theirs, I don't buy CDs.

Napster provided free promotion. When music is promoted, it sells, unless it sucks so bad even teens don't like it. That is basic and simple. Now, during the Kazaa era, sales are down directly proportional to production being down. Considering the economy, and the millions angry at the industry, sales should be down a lot more, but they aren't. The labels have created an artificial sales slump so they can cry piracy. Here are some informative links:

1 2 3 dozens mone can be found on external links at dontbuycds.org

Very true. Simply allowing file trading would be a much cheaper form of promotion then giving payola to an independent promoter, so he can give that payola(minus what he keeps) to radio stations. If people like the music, they will go buy a CD, or in some cases, a LP or cassette. People like to collect tangible things, but only the ones they like, and only when the price isn't a rip off.

"Personally, I would like to see a user rather than hardware based DRM system. Huh? Well, Fred buys a CD. Fred then rips Fred's CD to MP3 on Fred's computer so he can transfer it to Fred's iPod. I've no problem with that, nor does the law. Then Fred copies Fred's MP3 to Jack's computer. Since Jack's computer is owned by Jack, and not Fred, the Fred's MP3 doesn't play."

Home tape, and now CD-R trading is also a great form of promotion, word-of-mouth. Kill it, and you kill the goose that lays golden eggs. All DRM really does is create inconvenience, which will make the fans mad. You don't want that. If the $20 CDs at the mall have all kinds of DRM restrictions, but the knock-offs at flea markets and on street corners for five bucks don't, where do you think teens are going to buy?

You will never convince the majority that they can't listen to music without coughing up some dough. We just don't accept that, after all, no one has to pay to listen to the radio, and you can overhear someone playing their CDs without paying, too.

While Napster was online, CD sales were up. This is beyond dispute. People heard songs they liked, then went out and bought recordings, much like radio in its glory days. Best of all, Napster was a free promotion. No one had to cough up any payola to get songs listed there. Now, the recording industry has millions so angry that they don't buy CDs. So, why did your industry kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Are you stupid?

While Napster was online, CD sales were up. This is beyond dispute. People heard songs they liked, then went out and bought recordings, much like radio in its glory days. Best of all, Napster was a free promotion. No one had to cough up any payola to get songs listed there. Now, the recording industry has millions so angry that they don't buy CDs. So, why did your industry kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Are you stupid?