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Real CEO: iPod owners steal
In an interview with the UK newspaper The Guardian, Rob Glaser says that most iPod owners fill up their portable players with stolen music.
Are iPod owners thieves?
RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser says yes.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Glaser delved into the digital music industry's worst-kept secret today--that most music filling up portable players isn't purchased from legal download services but taken from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks or ripped from a user's personal CD collection or that of a friend.
But Glaser only labeled users of iPods as guilty of theft, leaving unclear if he feels the same way about owners of non-iPod portable music players like those that are compatible with his company's Rhapsody music-subscription service.
When asked about Apple's business model of selling music with a low profit margin at 99 cents per song in order to drive iPod sales, Glaser said that "Apple has gotten away with this approach to a greater degree than we thought they would.The music industry has made a mistake, not by agreeing to Apple's fixed-price level, which is what gets all the attention, but by allowing Apple to create devices that are not interoperable."
"If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution: it's called stealing," he continued. "The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25, and there are many more songs on iPods than 25. About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer network or from ripping friends' CDs, which is illegal. But it's the only way to get non-copy protected, portable, interoperable music."
The comments are very much in line with statements Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made in October 2004 when asked about digital rights management (DRM) technology and the lack of interoperability it causes between the major digital music services and players.
"We've had DRM in Windows for years," Ballmer said. "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen.' Most people still steal music. We can build the technology, but there are still ways for people to steal music."
Both sets of comments are at odds with a UK study published earlier this year.
In that report, XTN Data found that while 25 percent of those who regularly download music use P2P file-sharing to get their tunes, only 7 percent of iPod users do so.
Given those conflicting views, the question is: What's on your iPod?
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