Anne Eisenberg, in the NYT, has a story about a new device from Neuros that can take any digital input and turn it into an MPEG-4 file, which means it will play easily on your computer or iPod. The article is about how Neuros, the company, is allowing the device to be hacked, software- and hardware-wise; the idea is that programmers and hardware experts can tweak the device to make it continuingly useful as technology and file formats evolve. The article doesn’t discuss the copyright implications, which seem to me legion.

As the Ipod came to dominance four or five years ago, skeptical of Apple and curious about open-source issues I decided to get one of Neuros’s MP3 players. It did some snazzy things, among them play radio and serve as a voice recorder, but its bulk, difficult software, and hardware problems eventually wore me down. I dealt with the company’s customer service, which wasn’t entirely unhelpful but certainly never got me a product I could use the way it was supposed to. I ended up junking the not-inexpensive thing and ran back to Apple, tail between my legs.