I just read those links to the Lyra you posted. It's basically a Rio with copy protection enforced. Oh yeah, that'll fly.

Wow, I can't think of a better example of bandwagon-jumping and then getting it all wrong in the process. It's obvious that RCA decided that the Rio market looked cool, but then said, "Hey, but we have to avoid the piracy issue, so let's add copy protection." Either that, or they had to bow to pressure from their record-company division to add the copy protection. Jeez, when are these folks going to realize that you can't enforce copy protection on MP3s when the cat is already out of the bag?

I mean, even if the whole world passed laws that required copy protection schemes on all new players and software, I'm sitting here with a perfectly good set of non-copy-protected encoding and playback tools that could easily last me the rest of my life. The only way I could be prevented from ripping tracks off of CDs at this point is if the record companies started making copy-protected CDs. And you know they can't do that because such CDs wouldn't play on any existing CD player.

The record industry needs to embrace MP3, not fight it. They need to accept the fact that they opened Pandora's box all by themselves. They chose to embrace the CD format over a decade ago: a non-lossy digital distribution medium that allows the consumer to make bit-perfect copies. The entire world moved from LPs to CDs almost overnight, because the format was so perfect. Now the record industry is reaping what they've sown: every consumer now has the power to make perfect copies of their CDs if they want to.

Now, I'm not an advocate of music piracy. My only interest is in being able to encode my CD collection into MP3 format for playback on my computer and my Empeg Car. But it just makes me laugh because RCA is trying to sell a product that's deliberately engineered to be worse than the competing products. It's just like the DIVX players. The consumers never bought them because they could just as easily get a real DVD player that didn't have those restrictions.

You just know that the people who came up with these ideas were non-engineer, middle-manager, card-carrying MBA-weenie types. They're probably the spitting image of the Pointy-Haired-Boss from Dilbert. They don't understand the technology, and they think that their marketing degrees give them some sort of supernatural ability to make the masses buy useless crap. If they want to sell something to the world, then they need to make something that's better than the competition, not worse.