In a recent interview by Kate Bulkley for The Guardian, RealNetworks' CEO Rob Glaser all but calls iPod owners thieves.

"The Guardian: Apple's model is to make money on the sale of devices, using music to drive that - and it is working.

Rob Glaser: Apple has gotten away with this approach to a greater degree than we thought they would. The music industry has made a mistake, not by agreeing to Apple's fixed-price level (79p per track), which is what gets all the attention, but by allowing Apple to create devices that are not interoperable. If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution: it's called stealing. The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25, and there are many more songs on iPods than 25. About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends' CDs, which is illegal. But it's the only way to get non-copy protected, portable, interoperable music."

Glaser's statement is dumbfounding. Not only is a blunt accusation, pulled out of the air and with no factual evidence to back it up, but there have actually been studies carried out that prove the opposite.

Glaser's statement is nothing new, and in the past, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has made similar statements, conveniently forgetting that people actually owned music before the iPod came out that music can still be bought in the form of CDs. The fact that studies, such as that by XTN Data have shown that Pod owners are substantially less likely to download using filesharing software with only 7% of iPod people downloading illegally compared to 25% on average, and that they are more likely to be buying CDs with your everyday iPodder buying 2.3 albums a month compared to the average of 1.8, makes these accusations even more absurd than they already are.

Without a doubt, both Microsoft and RealNetworks are unhappy with the success of Apple's iPod, however, going after the very customers you are hoping to gain and calling them thieves is not the way to go about it.