Overstock.com responded in less than a day to my latest question about their selling copy-protected CD's.

Here's what I emailed on 7/27/05:

How can I tell in advance whether a music CD you have in your online catalog will play on an iPod or my PC?

PS - I am asking since BMG and Sony have announced use of copy protection technology that would render their music CDs useless to me. I am stopping purchase of music CD's till I am assured I can play the CDs I buy.

This is the response I got:

Thank you for contacting us regarding our CDs. I am sorry that the answers to your questions were not available on our site. Thank you for the opportunity to assist you today

The CDs on our site will list if they are special in any way. The listing might say ECD for ENHANCED CD which contains multimedia files as well as just the music. If you would like to purchase CDs, I suggest reading the details and the album information first.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance for this, or any other issue. I hope you will visit us again soon for great savings on name-brand products.

This is the most complete response so far. Kudos to Overstock.com!