If Diamond thought it unwise to "take it to a high enough court" I'm not sure why you think we should. An agreement was made which effectively gave Diamond a victory over the RIAA (who REALLY wanted the Rio off the market), and the consequences of that have no real commercial impact on MP3 hardware vendors.

We're not interested in making a file transportation device, we're digital audio developers and people buy our products for their audio capabilities. Some hackers buy the product for wider applications, and that's cool because they'll have no difficulty working around any restrictions.

You say you have no problem with this restriction because you can see the commercial reasoning behind it, but your original post suggested that you had great problems - in fact you were angry with us over this. You can't have it both ways.

Either way, I think we know our business well, and I think we know how to run our business well. I guess all companies are told by clients what they should or should not do, and successful companies take notice. With regard to this issue, the feedback has been that clients understand our position, and someone else will get around to writing the downloader. With a readily accessible unix shell and the source code for our transfer protocols (with lots of useful USB/Ethernet libraries) what more could you need?

Rob