A Belgian consumer group, Test-Aankoop, have decided to sue the music industry over copy-protected CDs that don't play in many CD players. EMI, Universal Music, Sony Music and BMG are the specific companies on the receiving end.

A former Treasury official in Australia is questioning the apparently "obvious" link between music downloading and reduced sales of CDs.

"If the healthy state of CD sales in the face of massive do-it-yourself competition surprises you, you are in good company. Midway through last year the Chicago University economist Stan Liebowitz was warning of annihilation. The recording industry loved him for it. He said large-scale unauthorised copying could soon make it obsolete.

Liebowitz has since had a change of heart. In a new study entitled Will MP3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? he concedes that the evidence for annihilation has failed to materialise...

He concludes that the impact has not been large and says his best guess is that the worst of it is over, given that most homes that would want CD burners now have them."

The BBC have a similar report about CD sales in the UK. Apparently album sales were at a record high in 2003 up by 10 million units on the previous year. "Album sales in the UK rose by 7.6% in 2003 to a record high, fuelled by falling CD prices - in spite of piracy fears, according to an industry report. "

The editor-in-chief at Wired, Chris Anderson, has penned an open letter with some useful advice to Jack Valenti's forthcoming successor at the MPAA.

"You've still got a little time to figure this out, but a lot
less than your advisers are telling you...
Customers who feel they're getting their money's worth are less likely to turn into pirates...
You're at risk of alienating your customers like the music industry did...
the Napster for movies has been born. It's called BitTorrent...
So what should you do? Start by accepting that new technology means a new way of doing business...
And don't fight the technology. People want their digital media the way they want it: every way imaginable."