Care to give some examples. Have you actually had to do this?

A fem times. Sometimes discs have been lost, sometimes installations
corrupted.

Microsoft are (suprisingly) very good at this; they used to send
replacement discs for free, provided you could provide proof of holding a
valid product key. I think this may show a general change in attitude, in
light of the iminent .net pay-per-use software payment experiment, in which
all copying is legal.

The idea that you are buying a product key and not a disc is beconing
popular. Id software's cdkey system is suposedly impossible to backwards
engineer (from billion of algorhythmically chosen keys a few million are
randomly selected as 'valid') On Quake III you can share a product key with
a friend, but only ane of you can play online at once. When I bought Q3A
2nd hand on ebay I told the guy to not bother sending the cd, just the
piece of paper with the key on it.

Recently, I was asked for £10 to replace a bought GTA3 disc. I choose not
to take them up on this, instead I downloaded it. I'm confident this was
not illegal. One thing I noticed is that most computer games companies
charge more to replace a console game than a pc one.


It's a grey area. For example, if you buy the vinyl do you have the
right
to download a digital copy for listening on your iPod? You've already
paid
the artist for their effort in making the music, I don't see why not.
I doubt any the record companies would agree with you.

No, but then they don't decide the law.


Ideally I'd buy most my music 'on nothing' - I'd pay some amount to
the
artist/producer/promoter for their efforts but not the media it comes
on,
which to me is nothing more than packaging.
I think there is something to be said for this approach but, like Linux
distros, pay a nominal amount for the media (if it is physical that is).

Sure. I think £5 is maybe a fair price for an album, or £7 if you want it
on physical media. But noone can tell me that it costs £10 to produce a cd,
or £20 to put an old film on DVD. Not while I have a whole desk draw full
of AOL CDs!

One thing that gets me is how people will pay more for a film on dvd than
they used to on VHS, given its cheaper to make! Dabs have a DVD-rom drive
for £22 - as much as a single film in some stores.

I have boxed Redhat that I paid for in the days before I had broadband. If
you want your music 'on' somthing that's fine, I'd just rather not have to
buy ANOTHER cd rack!


I still buy vinyl for those sit back and just listen moments, because
analogue HiFi demands a physically distributed medium - long distance
transmission and home recording of analogue audio just isn't
realistic.
I dunno - R3 live broadcasts can be pretty good but if you're not a R3
listener...

True! I listen to the jazz sometimes. I'll mostly flick between 3+4. I'd
say that my tuner reception is near cd quality. The point I was making is
that when only analogue recording was avaliable there'd have been no way
for you to recieve a broadcast and then record with acceptable quality to
listen to at will, nor to choose what you listen to. Therefore the record
company was necessary as a middleman between you and the artist.

Problem is that I don't see anything on the horizon that will cater for
people that want proper high fidelity sound.

A wav (pcm) file at cd quality is not so big by todays standards, you could
store maybe 200 albums on a cheap hard drive. A few hours download on
broadband, maybe half that with lossless compresion. I've heard talk of
SACD rips to 5.1 ogg vorbis, but am yet to listen for myself.

The biggest barrier IMO is noisy computer fans. That's why I built a silent
pc.

--
Jim