Wednesday, May 30, 2007

CD-WOW versus the BPI: whatever happened to the free market?

So much for customer choice. We learned today that the rather wonderful CD-WOW! lost its court case against the all powerful BPI, the fatcats who control the British record industry, and will now have to pay approximately £35 million in damages. Yeah, the BPI, who all those years ago wagged the finger and told us that home taping is killing music. The same BPI which now battles the tide of illegal downloading. Yet they choose to punish something as legitimate as CD-WOW! which sells real CDs - not fake ones - the only 'crime' being that the company may have sold CDs which were licensed for sale in Hong Kong, for example. Who cares where they were licensed - they were (and are) legal, and give us, the record-buying public, a chance to obtain CDs at decent affordable prices and not the rip-off-Britain prices which you'll pay in many record stores. What was that about internet shopping giving us freedom of choice? There won't be much chance of that as long as the Scrooges of the BPI exist. We at EuropeCrazy say "Long Live CD-WOW!" We will certainly continue to order our CDs from them.

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