It's a totally bogus charge. People with iPods are by and large, putting music on it from iTunes, from all I have heard. It's the people with generic mp3 players that are filling it with stolen music! Only Universal can't go after anonymous chinese companies, so they go after Apple and its iPods. Clever. Why not also slap a fee on turntables? You can play bootlegs on 'em. DVD players too, they can play stolen movies. You have to charge a piracy fee for cameras, because they can take snapshots that are illegal. I guess the same sort of surcharge would have to apply to pens, because I'm sure you can violate somebody's copyright, with a fountain pen. Don't forget chopsticks. Tax chopsticks, because you can eat stolen food with a good pair of chopsticks.

Where DOES it end? Perhaps it's time for Steve Ballmer to step down and check himself into a hospital or something. This news is maybe 5 years old. I do not know if they actually managed to do that, get Apple to implement a piracy fee on their iPods, or if Universal made good on its threat to pull its catalogue out of iTunes. If either of those things actually happened, the respective companies would probably be filing for Chapter 11.

I was looking at an iPod at work. It belongs to one of my coworkers. I asked her how she liked it. She said her teenage daughter loaded hundreds of songs on it for her. I asked her where her daughter got all those songs. She said, "I don't know, why?" I responded, "I think they are supposed to pay for each song". My coworker got a little pissed off. Not at me.

Of course this is ridiculous. But the last time I checked the data, most people (more than 60%, and way more according to some studies) that have an iPod do not use an online store, and almost no one uses one exclusively or predominantly.

This doesn't mean most of the music on iPods is illegal per se. But a very large percentage probably is illegal. That's not to say it is Apple's fault - they're trying their darndest to get people to use iTunes. It is really the recording industry's fault for doing a fantastic job of hating their customers.

Also, the last time I checked the studies, it was before DRM-free music started becoming more available (e.g. on iTunes and Amazon).

For the record, I predominantly use CD rips, vinyl rips, and the Amazon store on occasion.

Quote:
For the record, I predominantly use CD rips, vinyl rips, and the Amazon store on occasion.

Likewise.. I've ripped 1500 songs at 256kbps or higher from my cd's onto a 20g iPod and will start ripping vinyl as soon as I install a program for my Bellari with usb out. It's not high end, but it's very portable

Quote:
http://brain-terminal.com/posts/2006/11/30/giving-customers-a-reason-to-pirate-music

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenew..._industryNews-1

my qualm with them is not about the stolen music thing..it is just that they generally suck ass, sonically. not to mention that they take more of the human equation out of the listening process...and Itunes is one of the worst POS to ever hit the computer.

Yet Stereophile magazine didn't think the Ipod 'sucked ass sonically' when it reviewed and bench tested one. Quite the contrary.

http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/934/

"The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players

Stolen music???

I own (as in, I PAID for) some original Capitol LPs of The Beatles, I also own the Mo-Fi LP boxed set of The Beatles and in addition I own copies of the original CD releases of The Beatles catalog. Now I'm told that there is another set of remastered Beatles CDs soon to be released. I suppose that I will have to PAY for these too. So who is STEALING from whom?

I pay taxes and I'm sick and tired of the movie and record companies tying up law enforcement officials and the courts (and wasting tax dollars) with all of their copyright issues AFTER they released their products in unsecured (or inadequately secured) digital formats. It's not a law enforcement issue, it's simply a bad business model and aren't the US tax payers already paying massive sums to bail out other bad business models?