Real breaks the law, deliberately

Most interesting thing of this is this quote "RealNetworks said it was not concerned that the system would be illegal" They are going to diliberatly break DMCA, this is going to lead to three possible outcomes.

1. Real gets bitch slapped hard, fined, and there already a bit dodgy financial position degrades further, which must be pretty desperate if they are willing to take the extreme measure of deliberately breaking the law. This increases the speed of movement away from Real and it's eventual closure. Real becomes another Netscape under the treads of the microsoft tank, but at least they won't be trying to push more spyware/adware infected software on the general population.

2. DMCA is seen as the anti-consumer peice of crap that it is and this is allowed to slide opening up a precident for ignoring DMCA. The precedent of large corporations ignoring laws that humans have to obey was set along time ago.

3. Real makes licencing deals with Microsoft and Apple meaning that in future any music can be played on any device. This is particually good as it will stop Microsoft from gaining yet another monopoly based on propertory file formats.

Strangely all of these are good things. The most likely outcome is number 1, which is a bit of a shame as it shows once again what Microsoft can do by leveraging monoploy power to push its way into new markets. Looks like a win/win situation.