Interestingly, I found a message from Linus on a mailing list that says that he interprets kernel modules as not necessarily _having_ to be GPL'd... I can't imagine that an ID3 module would be any different (though I agree with your issue of complexity of user experience). The biggest problem on this one, is that it appears to be a bit of a matter of interpretation, which is tough since I'm already second in the chain (i.e. I certainly can't grant anything _more_ than what Empeg grants me).

Oh well... We'll leave it for the lawyers ... In the meantime, we hokey ID3 parsing :)

Mike