That's what I was afraid of. It wasn't a geek that came up with the ideas of CD-R or DVD-R, it was a marketing guy who wanted to sell more optical drives. If the RIAA or MPAA intentionally chose a proprietary format for its media, then media players would also become proprietary. Then any copying of any kind, of hardware or software, even for personal use, would be a serious breach of patent. I think that eventually, this is what will happen. Since the musical and film content we have is already basically owned by 2 companies (MPAA and RIAA), having everything owned by 1 company (including the players) is totally concievable.