It's important to point out that empeg have taken certain measures that make it difficult for you extract files from the empeg car player. There's another U.S. law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that criminalizes the creation of "circumvention" devices. How this law applies to the situation of "backing up" files on an empeg is largely open to dispute because there really isn't sufficient case law (i.e., judicial verdicts that interpret the DMCA). The EU has a similar law on the books that's, so I've heard, even more draconian than the US law (and don't ask me how the EU parliamentary system interoperates with national laws of EU countries).

In short, given the current twisted technical and legal quagmire that is sometimes called "digital rights managment", it's quite understandable why empeg ships their product as they do. Until things settle out, including the lawsuit where I'm one of the plaintiffs, it would be inadvisable for a third-party to build software to "circumvent" the mechanisms built into an empeg.