What I find odd about this is that I distinctly remember companies telling consumers that CDs would not last forever, stating that the average life of a cd was somewhere between 20-30 years.
It was magnified later when the CD-R became popular and they said the life of a CDR was about 10 years. I'll be honest though, with todays mass produced CDRs I'm getting about 2 years life out of most of them.
I don't have any CDs that are twenty years old yet (New Order - Substance, purchased in 1986 will be 20 years old soon) and I have yet to experience the problems described in the article or by Kosmo with CD Rot in any of my 1,000 store bought CDs. I do take maticulous care of my CDs, never use books or sleeves, alternate between hoizontal filing and vertical filing every two years out of fear that one may be better than the other, though I'm not sure which, and I never store them near any heaters or appliances.
I have lost a lot more music through hard drive failure than CD Rot, and probably twice as much vinyl through groove wear than anything else. Of course groove wear was 30-40 years, not the 20-30 they're talking about for CDs.
I rip nearly every CD I own to a USB/Firewire drive, but I'm getting tired of HD failure - I've gone through 4 of them, only twice was I lucky enough to copy over before the faiure.