Re: CD Life Expectancy
As you probably know, CDs of all sorts have a high intrinsic error rate. Fancy error-correcting codes and redundancy are used to give you an error-free result. As the CD ages, is slightly damaged, etc, etc, the error-correction has to work harder. Eventually the errors get too severe to be corrected. Few CD players give an indication of how hard the error correction has to work to achieve an error-free output.
If you really, really care, I'd make multiple "masters" and copy them every few years. You set the deterioration clock back to zero each time you make a copy since it records the error-corrected data onto a new disk. Of course do a data comparison between the copy and original.
I don't know the legal implications of the copies - you'd probably want to keep the originals as well.
I've heard that direct sunlight can wipe a recordable disk clean in a surprisingly short time. But sunlight in the UK isn't really strong very often.
I hope this is useful.
sc