Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder

I remember the DAT as a format killed by IP lawyers. The were many lawsuits seeking to prevent their sale in the US due to piracy concerns. The media was incredibly expensive. I only ever saw them in use for backup devices in small data centers. Even that went away once disks became cheaper.

As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... )

The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.

I wonder if this is what led to Sony forcing ATRAC down users throats. It killed their chance at any success in the mp3 player market which should have parlayed into greater success in the mobile phone market.

Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit.