I listen to a lot of music, radio in the mornings and mp3s when I'm working. Especially while working music helps me block out interruptions and get's me to get the "flow". Listening to music a lot means that you have to have a big music collection as you get bored with the same bands and records really soon. I don't download music online (legal or illegal) which means I visit the records shops often. Even so I want to have all my records in a digital form so I have grabbed my CD collection to Ape files (lossless audio format) and then transformed them to mp3s for consuming. With the new copyright laws in place here in Finland diverting high-grade copy control is illegal. Which means that under law I can't grab my audio CDs to digital format if they use a recent copy control system. As I consume a lot of money on CDs in stores this makes me feel bad as pirating the music form internet is only frowned upon my the law (not illegal but unadvised).
Technically grabbing CDs has never been a problem to me. CD extractor programs don't seem to mind about the copy control techniques used on the discs. Some mp3s suffer from some clicks but most of them are just fine. Some people I know have stopped buying CDs if they are copy controlled but this hasn't been a problem to me with so I haven't cared about whether a disc is copy controlled or not. What's causing me grief is that the copy controlled discs sometimes don't work in my car or DVD player.
Perhaps with the new copyright law in place I should start pirating all my music so that I wouldn't be a criminal because I want to listen to the music I own with my laptop and iPod? Does this make sense at all? This is what you get when the music industry get's to run the show, sheesh...