‘iPod users are music thieves’ says Ballmer:
Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece - at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer said: “Weíve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’.”
No.
What Ballmer means is that the most common format of music on an iPod is probably MP3, which, although not backed up by fact on any side, is probably right. People with no clue regularly associate MP3s with “stolen”. Not right. Here’s a few suggestions of what an MP3 file can also be:
- Ripped from an audio CD
- Converted from another music source such as LP or tape
- A music or speech recording for which you own the rights, such as:
- Private recordings
- Voice recording memos
- A public recording where you own the rights - such as your band or a creation by some kind of studio program, like GarageBand or eJay
- A music or speech recording that you are allowed to copy/backup for private use, such as:
- Loops or samples for studio programs
- Recordings released by a band or an artist for free or for a fee, most likely over the internet, but without DRM
Some of you reading this will shake their heads and go “Oh, but that’s just phony excuses by criminals so that people won’t close down Kazaa on them. I mean, come on.” Not so.
Everyone I know using iTunes and iPod have ripped atleast a large chunk of their CD music library to MP3s, or AACs, or whatever they chose. I don’t think the majority is “stolen” (by which Ballmer probably means “downloaded from an Internet medium where you do not own the rights to the recording and outside of fair use”; copying is not stealing) - I rather think that a big majority is people’s earlier music library that has been converted to a music file format such as MP3 or AAC.
I know right about five people that have conceded to have been downloading music that they don’t “own in another form” to the extent that their total collection exceeds 1GB in file size. I know around 10-20 people with iPods; 40-50 people with any kind of digital music player (from the first RIO players to the latest WMA+OGG+FLAC+MP3+AAC+color screen+coffee machine models); approaching 60 people if we also include MiniDiscs (which do not contain MP3s, but rather ATRACs, but that’s beside the point).
Add to all this the theory that people download music to see if a song is good - if they like it, they go out and buy the album. If that’s true, we’ll have even more CDs or tapes ripped into MP3s, or WMAs, or AACs. The point is that I really do not think that the majority of music on ANY music player nowadays is illegally downloaded, or “stolen”. Four or five years ago? Back then it was still pretty much a chore to rip music to files - I know I had to download a few seperate programs and try them all out to find one or two that didn’t suck/crash at the drop of a hat - and so it might have been more compelling and easier to just download them from the Internet, despite the on-average lower speed. But now, today, this year, 2004? Come on.
Again, the quote: “Weíve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’.” Windows Media Player automatically adds DRM to any file ripped from a CD. What if that CD is a ‘bootleg’ CD, ie an unauthorized copy of an existing CD, or a ‘mix CD’? Is a music file that through its origins would qualify as “stolen” by Ballmer’s metrics not “stolen” just because it has DRM protection? Ofcourse not. Does DRM equal “not stolen”? By the above example, no. Does DRM, or indeed copy protection in general, do anything beyond annoying the average user or delay a dedicated “abusive” user by a shorter period of time? I don’t know. But it sure is a possibility.