I have several CD's that are apparantly copy protected, and they play fine on my Macs in iTunes, and can be ripped easily too. The 'black ring thing' blanks out the CP, as I understand it this is like a dummy track that is processor hogging, and if the computer can't recognise the format, it gives up. Or something like that, I'm sure someone will correct this. In general, don't buy CP CD's if you are against them - mine have all been presents!
The Air CD sounds like either a hardware problem or a faulty CD though, as has been said already.
Marc