[DMCA-Activists] MP3-what if there's an MS connection?

[Matthew Caron]

My girlfriend posed the following scenario last night:

1.) $1 royalties do not really affect corporate bottom lines; companies
will just raise the price by $5 and be done with it.

2.) However, it kills free(cost) downloads of players because there is a
world of difference between "click to download WinAmp" and "click, enter
credit card, pay $5, download WinAmp". Plus, not everyone writing
players has the infrastructure to do so. (Various Free Software Apps,
for example).

3.) However, further assume that Microsoft is willing to eat the cost,
and still let people download Windows Media Player for free. Widespread
adoption occurs as people can get WMP for no cost, but not other MP3
players. Getting people to get used to WMP is essential to a flawless
Palladium changeover, as they'll get upset if WinAmp doesn't work
anymore, but you know WMP will.

4.) So, since MS has the most to gain, perhaps they are even behind all
this?


Of course, as an aside, since many of these programs (especially the
free software ones) are plugin-able, they can just pull the mp3 plugin.
And XMMS supports Ogg out of the box, if I remember correctly. 

I fully plan on spending a month re-ripping all my cd's....

-- 
MS Windows is only cheaper than Linux if you
steal it.
                        - Matt and Liz
~~ Matt Caron ~~