Tommi Hietavuo
15 Jul 1999 9:17
"The Register" today reported that:
Audiohighway patents MP3 digital music player
US purveyor of online music Audiohighway.com put the cat among the digital music pigeons yesterday when it announced it had been granted a key patent on portable digital audio players.
The company applied for the patent, number 5,914,941, back in 1995. It describes the use of a "portable information storage/playback apparatus having a data interface" used to store and play back downloaded content regardless of the format that content is stored in.
So essentially anyone who ever produces a digital audio player, such as Diamond Multimedia's Rio, now has to cough up a royalty to Audiohighway, something clearly not lost on the company.
The whole article can be seen at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/