Napster is a small, barely financed software operation indexing music for easy access by consumers, and Sony and RealAudio are great corporations proud of their cutting edge sound technology. But they are equals to Napster before the law, and when a party comes into court seeking redress, or to defend its conduct, they are each entitled to consistent application of legal principles on the same basis, regardless of their respective wealth or power. Ogg Vorbis will not be the last word from the freeware community on this either. Stuff that matters. Their attitude would be shared by many of the world's great inventors of the last century, happy just to do their arcane work in a good lab anywhere, which is then written up in professional journals, and expanded upon by academic and commercial motivations.
People create software because they like to.
New Open Network Music Encyclopedias Sponsored by Emusic , Ogg Vorbis, FreeAmp and others, a new open music encyclopedia is also on the way through the freeware community. See Musicbrainz , a network of music websites that, like a normal encyclopedia, contains numerous facts about artists, their albums and tracks. Musicbrainz users can refer to artists, albums and tracks without any ambiguities, and allow users to exchange playlists that are based on unique track identifiers. The unique signature will enable anybody's MP3 player to download the information and store it in his compressed music file for future use. Doesn't that sound like My.