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Tenth Anniversary of First Commercial MP3 Player

Posted by Zonk on from the now-they're-implanted-at-birth dept.

Pickens writes "The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300. The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the RIAA which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. It was later ruled that the Rio had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained from the lawsuit."

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And to think.... by Arguendo · · Score: 5, Informative
    Actually, the case (RIA v. Diamond Multimedia) was surprisingly limited and there's still a lot of debate about what it meant. Which is why we're still debating this stuff today. The Ninth Circuit simply held that MP3 players were not "digital audio recording devices" because they didn't actually make the digital copies (computers did). There wasn't much discussion of copyright issues.

    However, the Court did reason that its ultimate holding was consistent with the purpose of the Audio Home Recording Act, which supposedly was to "ensure the right of consumers to make analog or digital audio recordings of copyrighted music for their private, noncommercial use." 180 F.3d at 1079 (citing S. Rep. 102-294). And then the Court said the following:

    The Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or "space-shift," those files that already reside on a user's hard drive. . . . Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act.
    And then the company that made the Rio went into bankruptcy and Apple made a gazillion dollars. Sometimes it's good to be second to market.