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While digital copyright on the Net is exercising the minds of music industry
lawyers, a new extended-play blank CD from Memorex could spell even more
trouble. The capacity of blank discs has been limited to 650 megabytes, or 74
minutes until now, because it’s tough to apply heat-sensitive dye coatings at
the extreme edges of a disc. But because pre-recorded CDs often run longer than
74 minutes, copying one cannot generally be done on one blank disc alone—a
useful deterrent to home copying. Memorex has solved the dye problem, and last
week launched 80-minute discs with 700 megabytes.