Steve McCollum wrote in 981211 MMDigest:

> This underground music movement might have remained unknown to most
> consumers if it weren't for a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry
> Association of America (RIAA).  The suit, filed against San Jose,
> Calif.-based Diamond Multimedia, was an attempt to stop Diamond from
> distributing a $200 pager-size MP3 player called Rio.

and Jody Kravitz commented:

>[ This is just the next generation of recording and Internet
>[ technology to arrive.  I don't consider it evil, and I hope
>[ RIAA loses this lawsuit, bigtime -- I think it's frivolous.

Well, they lost it !  On 26th of October, 1998, Judge Collins of Higher
District Court of California decided that Diamond Multimedia's MP3
player Rio PMP300 is not a violation against the 'Audio Home Recording
Act' (AHRA) of 1992.

The player cannot make 'serial copies' and therefore the AHRA is not
applicable.  Diamond also won the security of USD 500,000 -- at least
they had to stop delivery for 10 days.

Besides the 'Rio' player of Diamond company -- which has the size of
a cigarette box and only 70 grams in weight, uses flash-memory to store
about 30 min. of music -- there will be more MP3 players available on
the market:-

Korean company Saehan has announced an MP3 player called 'MPman' for
less than USD 300 (see http://www.mpman.com/) -- German company Ponti
has a similar product to 'MPman' (see http://www.ponti.de/) -- Taiwanese
company NAiAM has announced a CD player for less than USD 300 capable
of playing MP3-CDROMs (!) (see http://www.naiam.com/) --  so you can
have 400 to 500 pieces of music on one disc.

The Diamond Multimedia web site is at http://www.diamondmme.com/rio/

If somebody is interested in the principles of psychoacoustics used
in MP3-compression techniques you can find good information and
articles at

 - http://www.mp3.com/
 - http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm (Fraunhofer Institut)
    ... they try to charge licence fees for all MP3-encoders
 - http://www.lte.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de/~spo/Audio/AES97munich.html

Claus Kucher