Shock report: Teenagers have pirated songs on their mp3 players


I don’t think this article could have featured a more ridiculous bit of research. I love how incredibly precise they are (14% of kids’ CDs are copyrighted, mp3 players hold 1,770 songs) when they must know their research is completely inaccurate. It’s far more likely that a person’s library of music is entirely pirated, or else entirely legal. These official-sounding statistics are pretty meaningless.

Of course, the fact that their star witness is the CEO of the British Music Rights group suggests that this article is somewhat less than completely objective. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to say it was bought lock, stock and barrel by some music execs trying to push bad stats supporting their position into a popular newspaper. So nothing new there.