: The latest Celine Dion CD damages your CD/DVD drive if inserted.
: It affects both Mac and PC, and even some stereo models. Apple
: even put an Knowledge Base article about it
Actually, it doesn't wreck the drive - it just prevents it from reading, loading or even ejecting the disk. In some cases, the Mac will try to boot off the CD, which it can't read, so your Mac is effectively dead. With some of the newer Macs, the only way to extract the CD is to take it in to be serviced. Ouch! Talk about a poison pill.
Personally, I don't like Celine Dion either. What scares me is that the recording industry, with all their misguided wisdom, will make this the standard for all future CD releases. The problem is that, just as the DVD encryption scheme was broken, someone somewhere will find a way to defeat this scheme of copy protection as well. Someone will probably even come up with a fix for Macs so that they can read these CD's. If they don't, then I'll revert to piracy myself and download music off the Internet rather than buying CD's that I cannot play in my computers.
When will the recording industry learn? The reason that kids copy music, and always have, is that they can't afford to buy everything they want. The incremental cost of copying is marginal, so there will always be a "black market" for music when it's overpriced. They need to 1) price CD's low enough that most kids will find it more convenient to buy the CD than to download it or copy it from someone else, or 2) include collectable items with the purchase of each CD that can't be downloaded or copied (does the Marathon Trilogy boxed set come to mind?).
