Kazaa & Limeware (sic) are not illegal file sharing sites.

The software might be used for illegal purposes, but they are definitely not illegal.

73% of survey respondents admit to illegal file sharing. All those Mac fanatics that flamed Steve Ballmer owe him an apology.

Mac *AND* PC owners (yourself included, but you can live vicariously through the rest of us) owe Ballmer little more than a kick in the nads, RC, not an apology.

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RealityCheck wrote:
73% of survey respondents admit to illegal file sharing. All those Mac fanatics that flamed Steve Ballmer owe him an apology.

Ballmer's statment may be true, but this survey gives us no way to determine that. First, this was not a survey of iPod owners. Only 16% of respondents own an iPod. For all we know, there could be no overlap between the illegal downloaders and the iPod owners.

Even if it were a survey of iPod owners, the results would not prove anything in relation to the overall iPod market, because it covers only teenagers.

It's not mentioned in this TMO article, but iPod was not even listed as a choice--it had to be written in. This is huge.

Balmer's envy is really showing. MS can't keep up with the pace so they resort to spreading inuendo and outright lies. Even if the percentage of "stolen" music were as high as 30% I would be surprised. And, considering how many windows users now have iPods, I wouldn't be surprise to see the percentage of stolen music on that side of the aisle to be far greater than on Mac side given the rampant piracy that apparently goes on among window users. Anecdotal evidence indicates that many prefer the PC platform because they can copy software from each other to get what they want. Now when you factor in the handful of PC-only and other lesser MP3 devices, I suspect that the percentage would skyrocket, since most have no real rights management (who needs it if you are stealing the music off the net anyway?)

In the end, just more grease under the MS wheels.

+

To address RC/Ballmer's argument head-on, let's assume that the teens polled accurately represent all iPod users (a stretch, but go with me on this). Thus, 73% of all iPod users illegally download music.

Ballmer, however, does not state that 73% of iPod users illegally download music. He states that the bulk of music on iPods (50+%) is from illegal downloads.

These two don't necessarily equate.

The 73% of users who illegally download music might rip two times more songs to their iPods via legally-owned CDs. Plus, those 125,000,000 songs legally bought from iTMS have to be out there somewhere.

Thus, the percentage of iPod users illegally downloading music has no bearing, whatsoever, on the percentage of illegally downloaded tracks on iPods. It's like the old dog-and-cat argument: Some say dogs are more popular as pets in the US, because there are more households (dog owners) with dogs than households (cat owners) with cats.

Cat people say cats are more popular, becuase more cats are kept as pets than dogs. How is that possible, if dog households outnumber cat households? Simple. There are many cat people (myself included) with multiple cats, while many dog-loving homes are content with one dog.

Thus, the percentage of dogs vs. cats in the US can't be derived from the number of dog owners. Likewise, the percentage of illegally downloaded songs on iPods can't be derived from the number of iPod owners who have illegally downloaded songs.

The survey said 16% of the participants owned iPods, and 73% of participants downloaded illegally.

(This is a loose interpretation: having not seen the survey questions, it may have asked who used the aforementioned filesharing service and not focussed on the legality in the text of the question. Regardless, taking the worst case scenario at face value...)

It is possible that the 27% of participants who did NOT own up to using the filesharing services illegally included ALL of the 16% who owned iPods.

OK, I'm reaching, but as statistics go, these are pretty vague and can be interpreted in many stupid ways, including the view RC chooses to spew.

I believe Ballmer was actually misquoted when speaking about the stolen music. He was actually saying something about how someone had stolen his foot long steak and cheese sub. And if I'm not mistaken, the confusion occured due to the fact that he had moved his hand in front of his face (to wipe some sweat from his brow) at the exact time he was making the statement.

...do NOT own iPods, as it's clear that the term is being used generically for MP3 player. One only needs to think about how many teens, 16% represents, and compare that to the total number of iPods sold to comprehend this. iPod is to MP3 player as kleenex is to tissue.

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Anonymous wrote:
...do NOT own iPods, as it's clear that the term is being used generically for MP3 player. One only needs to think about how many teens, 16% represents, and compare that to the total number of iPods sold to comprehend this. iPod is to MP3 player as kleenex is to tissue.

Teenagers know the difference between an iPod and other products.

The interesting thing about the results is that the iPod was a write-in vote. The percentage would have been much higher had it beed offered as an option on the survey.

most teens use iPods to listen to their music, however almost every1 use file sharing programs to get the music they want, so if all the file sharing are banned, iPods would go broke as teens couldnt not download anymore music they wanted.

therefore: ban filesharing = destroying iPod market