About a year before it sued Napster, the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia. Before it had even heard of Napster, the record industry knew it didn’t want MP3 as a technology to catch on. But while Napster was eventually defeated, the RIAA lost the Diamond Multimedia case. The Rio PMP300 went on to become the first commercially successful portable MP3 player. As the author Stephen Witt has noted in his book How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention, from the perspective of history, the music industry won the wrong lawsuit.
