Courtesy of Slashdot: Steve Ballmer (the CEO of Microsoft) recently said in an interview at Silicon.com that "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."
I find that a bit of a low blow towards Apple, frankly. I don't think the iPod makes it any easier to pirate songs than other MP3 players. Apple has hidden and scrambled the music files to prevent users from easily pirating them, although certain people (Mat, shame on you! 
) have made it significantly easier.
What about the computers that have the music to begin with? I could equally say "The most common format of music on a Windows computer is 'stolen'.", which is a stupidly-huge generalisation, and not true for everyone. I would say that about 85% of the music in my iTunes Library is ripped off CDs (if you know what I mean…). While I'm a student, I do believe in buying CDs (as well as going to concerts) to support artists, instead of downloading music easily. Joshua Allen, however, reckons that most of the music out there is pirated.
While I understand that what Ballmer was really talking about is the importance of music with DRM (whether or not you agree with that), it's still a cheap shot to single out one of Microsoft's competitors (while there are plenty of other valid targets) and at the same time trumpet Microsoft's own products.
Some other posts concerning this topic:
- Erik J. Barzeski calls Ballmer a "clueless dolt"
- Scoble rounds up some quotes from other blogs
Yeah, I don’t think it’s about iPod at all. iPod DRM is pretty good, and Ballmer acknowledged that. If there is pirated music on iPods, only a very small percentage of it would have originated with Apple format (hymn), IMO. I think it’s pretty clear that he was referring ‘iPod’ generically as a stand-in for ‘any mp3 player with DRM support’, because iPod has such a large market share and tends to define that market right now. It’s almost like saying ‘Kleenex’ instead of ‘Tissue’, IMO, and is more an acknowledgment of Apple’s market leadership right now than anything else.