Everything you said is valid (interesting discussion thread, BTW, though not surprising.) I just think we have different levels of paranoia. While I'm not naive enough to think that Fraunhofer will let LAME and others roll willy-nilly over their patents, I don't think that the MP3 format will be disappearing anytime soon enough for me to care about getting a replacement on my Empeg, and if it does, we'll have enough warning that Ogg could be worked in.

And as has been said many times, this is somewhat moot because it's out of their hands right now.