Finally, don't forget that good German ladies and gentleman at Frauhofen Institute still hold our metaphorical balls, since they are copyright holders for MP3 technology and might choose to charge for it whatever they want (or more likely, what they feel the market will take).

As far as I remember, the German governement placed conditions on the grant given to the Institute for the development of the format; I believe that they were required to hold copyright but not exploit the format commercially.

They are allowed to charge for tools, such as encoders, decoders, etc. I think the intention was to prevent the same situation as the "GIF" charade a few years ago, which was resented big time in Germany when the copyright holder suddenly tried to apply commercial exploitation tactics on a de-facto standard.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015