Scarcely a month after the launch of the video iPod, Web users have already started watching pirated TV shows and movies on the portable media devices, the Wall Street Journal reports.
File sharing technologies like BitTorrent make the formatting of TV shows and movies for devices like the iPod relatively simple for savvy Web users. There are also a sizable number of programs on the
Web capable of cracking copy protection on DVDs. An analyst estimates that the average number of song purchases per iPod has fallen from 25 to 15 in the last year, while the amount of downloading from
file sharing networks is nearly double what it was two years ago--nearly a billion songs per month, compared with iTunes' 600 million downloads in its two-and-a-half years of existence. Another
analyst says you can't blame Apple for profiting from piracy, because piracy existed long before the iPod. Rather, he said, all you can do blame the 21 st century.
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