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To: Jon Tara who wrote (11064)	2/21/2000 7:35:00 PM
From: Todd Pagel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18366

JonTara...Yes, pirating will be unstoppable to a certain degree. But that isn't the goal. The big picture is aimed at the "typical" music end user, the one who will buy CD's and enjoy the music, but doesn't take the time to program the VCR clock. It's all about keeping "honest people honest." The average music purchaser at brick and mortar stores will gradually begin to buy music in various downloadable manners, and many people already buy music online. These people are accustomed to paying for music, and they make up the vast majority of retail music consumers. SDMI is geared toward these people. There will always be those who will find ways around the security protocols, but they will be a distinct minority. Most people are far too lazy to undertake that kind of task, espepcially since the price of online music may be a reduction from what they pay now. As far as transcoding goes, yep, oyu can do it. Ever listen to a cassette recording of a cassette recording? Keep in mind that the music is compressed to begin with, using "lossy" codecs (by definition). To transcode just makes the quality worse. People will pay for better quality, especially if the price were nominal. So in the end, there will be room for those who cheat the system, but they wil be out of the mainstream IMHO

To: Jon Tara who wrote (11064)	2/21/2000 7:43:00 PM
From: bob	Respond to of 18366

Jon, I agree with you that the current crop of MP3 players will not become obsolete anytime soon, but what happens when the only choice left for consumers to buy are SDMI compliant devices. In fact that is what will occur as the 2nd and 3rd generation portable music players hit the shelves over the next six to nine months. There are few if any companies that will offer MP3 only devices as the music labels and consumer electronics companies come to agreement on the nature of digital distribution and quality of music. None of the labels will be encoding their libraries in MP3 as transcoding degrades slightly the sound. I do not know whether or not watermarking (both soft and hard) will survive that process and if not you can be sure none of the OEM's will offer this to the public. Perhaps those old MP3 players will be much sought after on the black market in a couple of years but I doubt they will be available to the public for much longer.

To: Jon Tara who wrote (11064)	2/21/2000 11:25:00 PM
From: cAPSLOCK	Respond to of 18366

Current MP3 players will not become obsolete. You are correct sir... And until the industry does away with non compressed digital masters, commonly referred to as CDs, the free standard will always be the defacto standard. As to the notion that some of these newer encoding formats, including EPAC sound better is pure marketing hype. Plus even if they do sound better I guarantee you that there will always be a open standard that sounds as good. As a matter of fact MPEG-2 AAC is in development, and as far as I know this format is open, and not require watermarking. regards, cAPSLOCK