Are companies deliberately trying to make peoples paranoid delusions real?
Used to be you only had the government to worry about, now it's going to be everything you touch...
Where did I leave that tinfoil hat...

They probably took it, not wanting you to be immune.

Thats exactly the sort of thing THEY'd do!
I'll make another... I wonder how much foil I need to cover my doors, windows and walls...

256kbps MP3 sounds identical to the original CD to my ears. Changing to a new format seems like a solution in search of a problem.

The company that developed this are either idiots or brilliant businessmen, depending on who their intended customers are. If they're intending to try to sell this to music listeners then they're idiots for the many reasons that have already been covered in this thread. However, if their intended customers are record label execs then they are quite savvy. If this latter scenario is the case then they probably understand completely that this new format will never catch on, but also understand that it will appear quite appealing to label execs who will pay plenty of money to license the format for a couple years before they realize it's a complete non-starter.

That's because audio files on a modern CD are 256 kbps.

??

A Red Book CD is actually 1411.2 kpbs.

I would like to have this explained too... When I rip my cd's they are normally around 1000 kbps

They are no such thing:
44,100 samples per second x 16 bits per channel per sample x 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits per second

I dunno maybe it's just me then. Mine always come out to that in any case when ripped. My mistake.

Ignore this, the title is misleading.
Also I'm sick of these aggregation topics.

The properties of the resulting file when you rip a CD are entirely dependent upon what you've told the ripping program to output.

Ah, gotcha, I feel like an idiot now, haha. I'll mess around with that crap later, thanks.

You're making slightly less sense than usual