Unfortunately here in the UK that isn't true. It's technically illegal. See my other comment in the thread about it.

Ah, I didn’t know, that’s really mental.

In the United States there are a number of exceptions to the ban on circumventing DRM:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/victory-users-libraria...

CDs do have a copy protection mechanism in the form of flags in the subcode metadata that permit 0, 1, or unlimited copies to be made. It is used by standalone audio CD recorders to implement SCMS and prevent multi-generational copies. Everything else ignores it.

Oh, I didn't realize CDs didn't have copy protection? Why would they not? From the RIAA's perspective, isn't that just a way to double charge customers like the MPAA does?

There were attempts, but audio CDs were specced in 1980, and nobody was ever able to sell breaking compatibility with the existing (substantial) CD player ecosystem.

There's a summary of the context here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_and_DVD_copy_prot...

It seems counter-intuitive, but a red book audio CD really is more akin to a vinyl record than a CD-ROM. The laser locks onto a groove and throws bits directly at a few chips that perform error correction and convert the signal to analog with an absolutely minuscule amount of buffering. Obfuscation isn’t even on the table, let alone encryption.

CDs are older than DVDs, and when they were released there would have been no digital way to copy them. It makes sense that the DRM wouldn't have occurred to the developers of the format.

Also at the time they came out 640MB?! Who has that much money to keep on hard drive let alone the size of said drive. Remember when this was spec'd out 64k was considered a huge amount of memory. A box of floppies would cost 30-40+ dollars. That same box might hold 0.5 to 2 MP3s depending on format size and the song. That obviously dropped off over the years. But just ripping them was not even really feasible. Never mind a robust enough CPU to play something like a MP3. People would copy CD's over to tape. But that was considered acceptable as the gen loss was enough for the owners to not like it much but accept it.

I remember asking the HS computing teacher in the late 80s if CDs could be copied to a computer, since they were both digital. He said... hmm, it should be theoretically possible. Drives for PCs would not come out affordably until the early/mid 90s.

CDs are just digital storage media. You could just layer DRM on top of it, but you'd have to get the whole ecosystem to move. And I have to think they probably would if the RIAA insisted.