This boycott has nothing todo with Napster, its all about fair-use. Over and over, the US Court System has upheld the consumers right to fair use. Our ability to take something we legally purchased and either directly play it on a new device or convert it into another format for playing on a different device. Between my wife and I, we own over 500 cd's. Every one of these provided profits to the RIAA. To prove the point that this isn't about Napster, I have over 6gigabytes in MP3's right now, not a single one of them was downloaded from Napster. Content Copyrights are important, the RIAA and the artists have every right to make a profit on distribution of that music. But they have no right to tell me I can't listen to them on my computer - or in a tape-drive, when I purchased it on CD. I know this because US Copyright laws tell me I can do it!
With DVD's, the MPAA provided a new format that increased audio and picture quality dramatically. Content on DVD's increased as well. You often get cut scenes, games, 'making of' material and much more when you buy a title on DVD. This was a great incentive to the consumer to give up their fair-use rights voluntarily and it is working! The sad thing is, most consumers don't realize they are giving up their fair use rights in this case. One fair-use of DVD's would be to copy it to tape and play it in your VHS upstairs. Unfortunately DVD's enable macrovision, a copy-protection mechanism that causes most VHS recorders to scramble the picture. Still, some will decide that its worth the tradeoff to get the additional content and quality. And this description of mini-discs even talks about the possibility of having code-activated tracks on the disc itself. Maybe you log into the internet and pay to get a code to listen to the last song on the disc that you've already purchased. This can be done as a permanent activation or even a pay-per-play!.
The good thing about music is, it's already easy for us to take a stand and boycott new encrypted formats. The music quality on audio-cd's is already full-digital! And I seriously doubt they will provide any additional content on the new formats. The only 'good' thing about the new proposed formats is that they are much smaller than the current compact disc's. They plan to use the size to get them adopted by the masses, merely by promoting them in the smaller sized music players. These will compete head to head with the mp3 players that exist today. We already have small audio-playing devices, without having to adopt these new formats.
We are the consumers, we control the market by spending money. We have done it before, specifically with the DiVX format. The MPAA really wanted to get us into the idea of paying for every use. If as consumers, we had embraced the DiVX format, you can bet that they would have phased out DVD and other multi-use formats! Why? Because a pay-per view format would have ensured profits now and in the future, even if the price per viewing was small. While pay-per-view isn't exactly the same as copy protection, what both do is highlight the idea that the content providers want us to believe that when we purchase something, we don't own it and we cant choose how or when we use it!
Just say 'no' to new formats that require us to give up our rights to something we buy. Every new music format that comes out now will included copy protection mechanisms. They will try their hardest to prevent us from copying it to mp3 or tape. They will even put pressure on device makers to produce new devices supporting the new formats. Thats ok though, because no matter how much pressure they put on Sony, Phillips, Magnavox, etc - they can not force us to give them our money. All of them - the MPAA, and the device makers are profit motivated. We can control them by not buying things that force us to give our rights. We must make a stand and we must do it now!
The distributors want to sell us the content, but they want to control that content after we purchase it. At the bottom of This article, they claim "Consumers are going to buy it [DatPlay discs] because it has the content they want.". Well surprise, folks, they still have to make money.