I just want what's mine!

March 31, 2004 12:58 PM

The file-sharing fight continues.
Recording industry associations in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada have filed lawsuits or taken other legal action, aiming mainly at heavy users accused of offering a large number of songs online.

In other news, A study of file-sharing's effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have had little part in the recent slide in CD sales.
posted by ashbury (9 comments total)

Some extra (good) news:

Sharing files is not an infringement of copyright under Canadian law, a judge has ruled.
posted by Blue Stone at 1:03 PM on March 31, 2004

Here's another link:

Globe and Mail: Court sides with music swappers
posted by CrazyJub at 1:38 PM on March 31, 2004

Kewl. That Canadian ruling surprised a lot of people. Everyone had been saying for years that it was okay to download, but illegal to share your mp3s. I'll hold out on celebrating this until we see if the supreme court will hear an appeal...
posted by sfenders at 2:26 PM on March 31, 2004

A weblogging Canadian lawyer posts his thoughts on the Candian court ruling.
posted by stevengarrity at 3:32 PM on March 31, 2004

Another article on Canadians success: CBC
posted by tiamat at 4:39 PM on March 31, 2004

In other news, Recording industry officials continue to fire small caliber bullets at their own feet, over and over again.

Soon, they'll all be rolling around in wheelchairs and screaming obscenities whilst swilllng Mad Dog 20/20 .
posted by troutfishing at 7:55 PM on March 31, 2004

I can't see HOW anybody could make a study on this.

Maybe, if there wasn't file sharing, the cds in the study would have been sold 20 times more.

That's the interesting thing about the music industry.

Nobody can predict.
posted by asd at 12:00 AM on April 1, 2004

I can't see HOW anybody could make a study on this.

Like this: For each album they're measuring, they looked at the number of songs from that album downloaded over p2p networks over a period of time. For the same period of time, they looked at album sales.

The number of downloads fluctuates quite a bit as p2p network conditions change. The authors say that at least on the particular network they were measuring, it's sometimes easy and sometimes difficult to find a copy of a given song.

So, if there is a relationship between the accessibility of the song for downloading and the number of album sales, and if we assume that the ratio of demand for the album in legit CD stores to demand for it on p2p networks is constant, then if the accessibility of downloads changes (which it does), the sales would reflect that. They don't.

That's their argument, anyway. The only potential flaw I can see is that it assumes that people who would by the album only if they can't download it (if such people exist) will give up after X number of days attempting to download it, and we've no idea what X really is. I don't know if they addressed this, I'm just going on a summary of the report that was on CBC radio last night.
posted by sfenders at 1:57 PM on April 1, 2004

RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said in a statement. "Our own surveys show that those who are downloading more are buying less."

Of course, it's much easier to find flaws in RIAA's reasoning. Even if they weren't downloading more, those people would still probably be buying less. And perhaps people who download lots of music tend to be influential in their peer group, since they probably talk about music a lot... meaning the stuff they download will be more likely to get talked about and perhaps purchased by their friends. And so on.
posted by sfenders at 2:06 PM on April 1, 2004