I got the following private message today:

Quote:
Hello Tony,

I am a patent attorney doing a prior art search relating to playlist functionality with unsupported file types and invalid files. Unfortunately, the empeg user manual I was able to find does not address this issue.

I was wondering if you or someone you know would be willing to discuss empeg's playlist functionality in versions released prior to September 2000. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I did find the following information posted by you in a google cache (empeg.merlins.org/archives/empeg-technical/2000-August/001324.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages):

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Empeg-technical] Re: For Idiots Like Me...
Tony Fabris [email protected]
Tue, 29 Aug 2000 08:05:00 GMT

<text deleted>

And sure you can say "but the player skips invalid files". Sure it does, but they'd still show up in searches and shuffles, generally getting in the way and being annoying. Empeg doesn't want Joe Consumer having to deal with that.

For what it's worth, you can still drag non-MP3 files into Emplode if you rename them to *.mp3 first. Since the file names get mangled within the player anyway, who cares what they're named at that point. So for the expert users, there's still a pretty simple way of uploading their non-music files if they really want.

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I replied with the following message:

Quote:
This is something that should be discussed openly on the empeg forums. I am not a member of the development team for the product, I'm just one of the product's owners.



My best guess is that someone is trying to patent some kind of similar playlist technology and he's trying to make sure that it didn't already exist before they pursue the patent. I hope that's true. It'd be really cool if one of my BBS posts resulted in one less irritating and frivolous software patent in the world.

There's an outside chance that he's looking for someone to sue over an existing patent. If that's the case, obviously he's looking in the wrong place because the product is long since dead and the company scattered to the four winds.

I'm suspecting the former.

Mr lawyer, if you see this, please post a follow up here and let us know what you're up to. If you're on the level, many of the original devlopers still post messages here and would be happy to help you.
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Tony Fabris