Last week, I bought a new DVD burner for my computer to replace my ailing five-year old TDK burner. Since I am a computer consultant, and have good familiarity with the equipment, and no need to deal with any special drivers or software thanks to being a Linux user, I never bothered to consult the the instructions.

Tonight, I decided to glance at the specifications. There were no surprises in the specifications, only in the footnotes.

This product is designed to playback discs that conform to the Compact Disc (CD) standard. Recently, various music discs encoded with copyright protection technologies are marketed by some record companies. Please be aware that among those discs, there are some that do not conform to the CD standard and may not be playable by this product.

How would Sony be aware of this? Oh yeah, they were one of the culprits. The worst one, actually.