Quote:
Does apple prevent (or extort money from) others from creating MP3 players with the same dock and messaging protocol?

Not that I know of, but I'm also not aware of anyone else using this connector, are you? And do you really think that if enough companies started using it, they wouldn't start trying to get that money? This is Apple we're talking about. Didn't they want to charge the 3rd-party accessory manufacturers?

I love the idea of a standard connection (wasn't there a big push for that a couple years ago?), but if it's Apple's, I'm sure they'd try to make a buck off of it.
_________________________
Matt