"their message on piracy is sinking in?" ...well one hopes thats true, but that strikes me as more of a PR line to save face rather than just admit they were downright wrong to copy protect CDs in the first place. One of the big problems with copy protected CDs is that they often don't play in various in certain devices such as car stereos and hinder users who want to use their PC to legally copy music to a portable device. Sony makes a lot of car stereos and is heavily pushing its own ATRAC digital audio format as used in its NetMD players. Coincidence?

One of the main factors in me purchasing an MP3 player was a couple of incidents with copy-protected cd's whereby they would not copy to mini discs. Once i saw that they were trying to make my mini disc player redundant i moved swiftly on to MP3 where the copy protection can be got around. I know you mentioned the NetMD above, but I think i read somewhere that sony has had a change of heart with forcing people to use ATRAC as the only digital format for its MP3 players, i think they were going to move towards mp3.