Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, a co-creator of the CD format, is not playing along as major record labels unveil their copy-protection technology for CDs. Philips owns the "Compact Disc" trademark and the CD logo that has been on every disc since Philips and Sony jointly developed the technology in 1978. Now Philips says that as the copy-protected CDs can't be played on some CD players, such as CD-ROM drives and even some standard stereo systems, the protected discs do not qualify as "compact discs" and thus can't use the CD logo.

  The copy protection has been introduced by the five major record labels: BMG Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music and Warner Music Group. The controversial technology introduces minute errors to the CDs or changes the location of data on the discs to prevent them from being played back on computers.

  So far, only a couple of discs have been copy-protected with this technology. Natalie Imbruglia's album "White Lilies Island" from BMG prompted numerous returns in the United Kingdom as record buyers thought their discs were broken.

• Reuters article at News.com