Diamond Rio PMP300

~ the eulogy ~

in 1998 the recording industry tried to legally block the first mass-market mp3 player. they lost. the player was the diamond rio pmp300, and that lawsuit is the reason every later device of the kind legally exists. the rio went on sale in the united states on september 15, 1998. it had 32 megabytes of internal flash and a small LCD that scrolled the song title. a smartmedia slot added another 32 megabytes. that was enough room for about an hour of compressed audio at the bitrates people actually used. it cost $200, with a 64MB version following at $250.

diamond multimedia was a san jose graphics-card company looking for the next category. mp3 was already a thing on pcs by 1998 because winamp had made it the default desktop music format. nobody had yet shipped a portable that would play those files. the pmp300 was the answer. you connected it to a windows pc through the parallel port using diamond's transfer software. you picked the mp3s you wanted and let it copy them across at modem speeds.

then the recording industry of america filed suit. the riaa argued the rio violated the 1992 audio home recording act because it lacked SCMS copy-protection. a temporary restraining order was issued in october 1998. by the end of that month it was denied. the ninth circuit eventually ruled that the rio's space-shifting was fair use, not infringement, in a decision that became foundational for every subsequent portable music player. without that ruling the ipod would have shipped into a different legal regime.

i was 14 in 1998, on a 33.6k modem in ankara, and the rio was a us-only product priced for a us salary. it did not have a turkish distributor and would not have been useful at home anyway, since downloading 32MB of music over a 33.6k connection took most of an evening. mp3 players landed in turkey through gray-market iriver and creative units in the early 2000s, by which point diamond was already exiting the category.

~ the dossier ~

~ the riaa case ~

the lawsuit is the part of the rio's story that mattered most. the riaa wanted the device blocked because every previous consumer recording format had been pushed to add SCMS copy-protection chips. the rio shipped without one, on the theory that the 1992 audio home recording act covered devices that could record audio, and the rio could not record. it could only play files copied from a pc.

the ninth circuit agreed. the court ruled in 1999 that the rio was a playback device for files the user already had, and that the user already-having those files was a separate question outside the scope of the act. that ruling let napster operate for a couple of years and let the ipod ship in 2001 without licensing concessions. the rio's lawsuit win was the legal foundation under the entire portable digital music era.

~ what it set up ~

diamond kept iterating on rio devices through 2002, getting up to hard-drive-based players that could hold thousands of songs. but creative labs and iriver were doing the same thing with better industrial design, and the ipod arrived in october 2001 with itunes integration that diamond could not match. by 2003 sonicblue, which had absorbed diamond, was in bankruptcy. the rio brand got passed to a series of acquirers and quietly faded.

~ the long tail ~

the pmp300 itself sold an estimated 200,000 units after the lawsuit cleared, mostly in 1999. that was a small number compared to what the ipod would do, but it was the proof that a market existed. every subsequent mp3 player owes the pmp300 the courtroom victory that made its existence non-controversial. the device itself shows up in computer history collections and on retro tech youtube. it does not work with anything modern. windows 98 was its maximum supported platform.

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