Harald Popp, too, felt that the mp3, whatever its technical deficiencies, would not soon be displaced. There was an email being forwarded around Fraunhofer detailing the results of the latest catchall survey for English-language search terms: “mp3” had become the Internet’s most-searched-for word, surpassing even “sex.” When Popp saw it, he laughed, and, after 12 years of tension, finally relaxed. The format war was over. They had won.

Of course, the people searching “mp3” weren’t looking for technical details about audio compression any more than the people searching “sex” were looking for scientific information about the human reproductive system. They were looking for free, pirated music, a concept for which the term “mp3” was now synecdoche. Before Napster, pirating music had been just hard enough to limit the number of participants: figuring out how to use Internet Relay Chat or finding a quality FTP site required a certain investment of time and an elementary level of technical acumen. But after Napster, any idiot could type the word “mp3” into Yahoo! and have a hard drive full of pirated albums in minutes.

This put Brandenburg in a difficult position. He believed what Napster was doing was morally wrong. In the debate over digital ownership, Brandenburg had staked out the most conservative position imaginable. To him, the file-sharing revolution was a collectivized form of theft, nothing more. He didn’t pirate music himself and he was committed to compensating artists for the music they created. The music labels too—whatever their flaws, whatever their shortsightedness, Brandenburg believed they were entitled to their share. Whenever he gave an interview now, he finished with a stern, Teutonic directive: “Do not steal music.”

He delivered this line well, with emphasis and feeling, and yet the performance was cut with a certain Brechtian alienation. No person alive, not even Shawn Fanning, had benefited more than Brandenburg from Napster’s success. Only by a global, collectivized betrayal of the rights of copyright holders could he make the money that he did. This irony was something that went undiscussed at Fraunhofer, where a “see no evil” attitude prevailed. It extended to the other Fraunhofer researchers as well, and was particularly acute for Bernhard Grill. Through the years, he had continued to expand his physical archive of esoteric music, even as much of the material he sought was becoming freely available online. As Grill earned millions at the expense of the recording industry, he repaid a small portion in tribute by spending thousands of dollars on compact discs.

There began among the engineering community a celebratory laying on of hands. Brandenburg became one of the most sought-after technical experts in the world. Over the next two years he was nominated to serve on 12 separate standards committees. He was invited to present at universities and give keynote lectures at conferences. In 2000, along with Harald Popp and Bernhard Grill, he was awarded the German Future Prize, the country’s most prestigious scientific citation. The three split a purse of 250,000 euros. Afterward the group threw an enormous party, with music, beer, and dancing.

Brandenburg started to flirt with the idea of leaving research entirely. He talked of moving to San Francisco, to start a dot-com, or perhaps a venture capital firm. Fraunhofer scrambled to keep him. They needed to promote him, clearly, and the most obvious slot was the directorship of Fraunhofer’s Erlangen campus, where he’d done his pioneering work. But that position had already been given to Heinz Gerhäuser, the early leader of the institute’s audio research group. After some discussion, Brandenburg was instead offered the directorship of a new facility, one Fraunhofer was building from scratch in Ilmenau, a small city in Thuringia, two hours north of Erlangen. He relented, and stayed. A short time later, from Ilmenau, he incorporated Brandenburg Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm.

There were two final challenges to total domination—hiccups, really, but worthy of mention. One competitor to the mp3, the psychoacoustic compression scheme known as Ogg Vorbis, arrived late to a crowded marketplace, but it had some distinct advantages. Ogg was an open-source project, meaning that anyone could implement it and pay no royalties. It also scored better on listening tests than any other format. In a world designed by an engineer, perhaps it might have replaced the mp3, and Fraunhofer’s licensing revenue would have disappeared entirely.

Brandenburg and Grill both admired the open-source philosophy, but they also knew that Ogg had never conducted the sort of long-term audio research an independent format required. They both felt Ogg was piggybacking on their encoding algorithms—algorithms that had taken the better part of a decade’s worth of listening tests to perfect. Although the group behind Ogg denied infringing on Brandenburg’s patents, with a few careful words Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers, and the format sunk into obscurity.

The second was Apple. Like Brandenburg, Steve Jobs disapproved of file-sharing, and was seeking to create a legal paid alternative. He was building a music application called iTunes, whose calm, white interface and slick, expensive iconography promised to cleanse the world of sin. The design flaws of Winamp would be swept away, the file-sharers of Napster would be given moral instruction in the virtues of paid distribution, and—Apple’s representatives were insistent on this point—the mp3 format would be abandoned.

Jobs wanted everyone to use AAC. In discussions, he correctly made the point that AAC was a second-generation technology, one designed by Brandenburg himself to replace a format that was inefficient, compromised, and obsolete. In fact, Apple pushed so aggressively for AAC that many users wrongly came to believe that the company had invented it, a misconception that would persist for years. Brandenburg, in collaboration with Henri Linde, pushed back with equal force. The mp3 was too established now, he said. The switching costs were far too high. (He tended not to mention his own economic incentives.)

He won an easy victory. In 2000 the balance of power lay entirely with the file-sharers. Apple was still a second-tier technology player and the butt of industry jokes. It didn’t have the user base to engineer a large-scale consumer format switch. At the time of the first licensing meetings, the company had 3 percent of the market share for the personal computer. Microsoft, 23 times larger by market capitalization, hadn’t been able to do it. What chance did Apple have?

Brandenburg never even met Jobs personally. He did not worship at the altar of Macintosh, and in casual conversation referred to the company’s customers as “brainwashed.” He lived outside of Apple’s reality distortion field, and later, when the company sent him a confidential proposal for a new mp3 player, he started on the back page with the technical specs. Apple wasn’t a threat to established markets, and Brandenburg was, in his own words, “not sentimental” about technology.

In the summer of 2001 he traveled to Hong Kong to give another lecture. Afterward he walked out onto the narrow streets of shops. There, behind glass, was the latest generation of mp3 players. A robust consumer market was emerging as the file-sharers tried to take their plunder mobile. Before him Brandenburg saw a collection of devices from more than ten manufacturers. In front of that was a faint reflection of himself. He had changed. His hair had retreated halfway up his head, revealing a glossy, pointed dome. He favored suits now, and dark shirts with clashing ties, though he’d kept the wooly beard, and the combined effect was not entirely professional. His eccentric body language remained, but he could rely on reputation rather than presence to command respect.