Ever been driving down a motorway at 70 mph with one hand while trying to change the CD in your car stereo with the other? It's a dangerous way to drive, but MP3 music players ought to make driving like this unnecessary.
That's because high capacity MP3 players such as Apple's iPod or Archos' Jukebox can hold thousands of songs, so you could drive right across Europe to a musical accompaniment without ever having to take your hands off the wheel.
There's only one problem, which all owners of MP3 players will be familiar with: how do you get the music to play though your car audio system? If you have a tape player, you can use a cassette adapter, but no one has invented an adapter for a car CD player.
Fortunately, there is a solution, and a very elegant one it is, too. Why not send the music from your MP3 player to your car audio system wirelessly? A handful of companies in the United States have introduced tiny transmitters - known as FM modulators - that plug in to an MP3 player's headphone jack and broadcast the music up to a range of about five feet on a choice of FM frequencies.
To listen to the music, you just tune your car radio to the right frequency. It's cheap (the modulators cost about $30), there are no messy cables and just about every car has a radio. And no more dangerous driving.
The bad news is that although these modulators are very popular in America, they won't be on sale in Britain. The reason? Absurdly, even with a range shorter than the length of most cars, using one would technically turn the MP3 player into a pirate radio station!
"Such products are not illegal to own, but [using a modulator] constitutes an offence of unlicensed broadcasting under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949," a spokesman for the Department for Trade and Industry confirms. Listening to music in your car could get you arrested, fined an unlimited amount and thrown in chokey for up to two years.
The argument for licensing - so these devices don't interfere with commercial radio stations - is patently ridiculous. How can a modulator with a range of a few feet cause problems for a radio station powerful enough to be picked up for miles around ? If you tuned your modulator to a frequency used by a commercial station, it's your music - not the radio station's - that would be drowned out.
Even the Performing Right Society - the body responsible for collecting musician's royalties from radio broadcasts - agrees that modulators shouldn't count as radio stations. "Under current PRS practice we wouldn't choose to license the individual in this instance_" a spokesperson for the society said.
It's no wonder we trail the States by a couple of years in the adoption of most new technologies. Over there, hi-tech gadgets are liberating. Over here, they could put you in jail.
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