Joel Rose spoke with him about the story of the MP3, and we jumped at the opportunity to get the professor to walk us through the history of the format. Today, Brandenburg is a professor at Ilmenau Technical University at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology – the same organization that funded his efforts as part of the MPEG. Google 'history of the MP3' today, and you'll find two options, neither satisfying: brief timelines that privilege the user experience over the process of invention and relentlessly technical, acronym-studded descriptions of the differences between various algorithms. The story of the MP3 is the story of how intellectual property became the commodity over which the Internet's greatest wars would be fought, and also how the work that goes into innovating can be forgotten in the face of a technology's rapid spread.
