When I was a kid there used to be some graffiti scrawled on a wall. It read "When injustice becomes law resistance becomes duty".

The whole issue of copyright has got me a little confused. What am I exactly allowed to do? I bought Jewel's 0304 CD the other day. It has heavy protection on it. I can't get it to work properly on my work PC, when it does the provided MP3 player uses all available CPU time and the CDROM makes menacing grinding noises. Worse than that the MP3's are recorded so badly that Jewel sounds like a constipated Dalek on amphetamines (no she doesn't! Don't go there!). So, according to the cover, I'm not supposed to copy it, listen to it in anything other than an audio CD player - if it works, and I'm definitely not allowed to convert it to MP3's or copy them from the CD. And - the RIAA tells me - this is all so that the artist's rights are protected. O.....Kay. So I am not allowed to listen to it?

I had no intention of doing anything except MP3ing them for my own personal use. Why? I have a 110 disk CD player - it's like owning a black hole. You put a CD in and it never comes out - you just search for it with the remote and I'm not going to truck my CD player back and forth from home every day when the CD doesn't play on my PC at work. Maybe the RIAA can send me someone to help carry my CD player from home?

Am I allowed to make MP3s? I PAID for the CD so why can't I listen to it? Nothing would stop me, I am a computer programmer - I can burn copies of that sucker anytime I want, copy-protection or not. Actually, my mother, who only learned to turn a computer on last month could burn a copy of it if I demonstrated how to do it.

So why do they spend all that money on "protection" that doesn't work? To protect artist rights? Lets look at that!