Most songs on iPods 'stolen' - Microsoft CEO

Found on The Register on Sunday, 03 October 2004
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It's official. All iPod users are music thieves - according to Microsoft CEO Steve 'Monkey Boy' Ballmer.

He singles out the Mac maker for attention because - wait for it - "we've had DRM in Windows for years". The implication is that DRM hasn't been in the Mac OS for a similar duration, and that's what's allowed all those stolen tracks to seep through onto the web.

Windows has, of course, also had Napster, Grokster, Streamcast, Aimster, Kazaa full and lite, et al for years, but - again - none of that Windows-only music theft apparatus has registered on Mr Ballmer's radar screen, it seems.

No, there's no music piracy on Windows, and that's because Windows has had DRM for so long. People haven't been ripping CDs. They haven't been sharing the songs using Windows-based P2P software. And other folk haven't been downloading and transferring them to portable players. Clearly, all those shared tracks have just popped out of nowhere.

Then again, Microsoft has been promising to offer easier to use DRM since at least 2002, as its then Windows Media Player wish list revealed. Yes, that's right WMP users want what MS wants, ie. DRM and more of it, please.

DRM? No thanks. Users don't want every song they play being checked against a database. Nor do they want to lose their right to use what they payed for. And, besides all that, DRM cannot stop filesharing anyway. It's just a way to bully potential customers.