It's been all over the internets that the President has an iPod. That, in and of itself, isn't really news. Neither is what's on it (a paltry 250 songs on a player that can hold 10,000).
What is news, particularly in light of the case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, is just how those songs got on the Prez's iPod. According the article, the songs on the presidential iPod are "downloaded from others."
The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor at Rolling Stone in charge of music coverage, cheerfully branded "suggestive if not outright filthy" in an interview last week.
No one can say for sure whether there's copyright infringement afoot, or whether it's simply a matter of a bad choice of words by the reporter. (Did she mean "downloaded...from" or "downloaded...by?) At least one website has some questions about how the songs on the Bush iPod came to be there.
While the article states that Bush has a staffer load his iPod from the iTunes Music Store, it also says that he has his friend download music to it from his personal collection. The former, obviously, is not particularly radical, but the latter is exactly the kind of behavior the music industry characterizes as theft.Again, the choice of words here leaves something to be desired. If the president had a friend import music from his personal collection into the presidential iTunes library, technically -- at least as the music industry defines it -- that's stealing, because the president is in possession of music that he didn't pay for. So, is the president technically a music thief? After all, sharing is not allowed.
