The implicit point of citing the study is to say that piracy encourages purchasing. This is only newsworthy because it runs contrary to the more common belief that piracy takes the place of purchasing, rather than encouraging it.

The former is causation, and would be something interesting if true. The latter is correlation, and is just more of the same.

John Walker: I agree to a large extent, with one exception: I don’t believe the pirates are “telling the truth about how they break the law and why”. “How”, sure, but not “why”.

Pirates will come up with all kinds of justifications for their piracy — how the industry is screwing everyone or themselves in particular, how they’d buy it if it were cheaper / it had a sample or demo release, how the company behind it is evil, etc.

In the end, though, you’re getting something for free. Once you know how to pirate, and how minimal the everyday risks are, the temptation is strong enough that it’s hard to even be honest with yourself about your motivations, let alone with other people. (Speaking from experience here.)

Granted, pirates lying due to denial is probably better overall than record companies lying due to greed. But let’s not confuse truth with biased self-justification here.

Clockworks: The very mention of “the industry” in your comment carries with it the assumption that the current music industry is the only viable music industry. That’s only true today because their presence chokes out anyone who might compete with them in any major way.

Some artists already find better ways to get music to their fans. If “the industry” ceases business, it will be the business equivalent of a species going extinct because they can’t keep up with modern changes — an unfortunate fate, but at least it creates a void in the ecosystem for someone else to fill.

Oh.

If people only pirated music from the Big 4, maybe your point would resonate more with me. As it is, people pirate music from artists they like, whether those who are signed to the majors (who I agree are often vile and rather anti-artist) or on small labels that wholly support their bands. And trying to tangentially debate the actions the majors has nothing to do with Simon’s post, which discusses a lack of thoroughness on the part of those who carried this story.

I could question the validity of Simon’s use of “the media” when it’s really a number of newspapers, and not every outlet. There’s no proof that maybe thousands of news organizations chose not to post the story because they had the same qualms Simon does. But his point is still valid, IMHO, since many organizations did run it, and we still don’t know what the original methodology was. (Or at least I don’t, since I can’t read Norwegian.)

My point regarding law breaking was merely to highlight that those taking the perceived “middle ground” tend to make enormous assumptions because one side is openly breaking the law. It’s far easier to acknowledge that and therefore move closer toward the Big Four’s territory in response. The problem being, when you investigate the scale of the barely reported law breaking on their side, it gets a little more complicated. And deciphering this complication because easier when you shed the delusion that the industry has any interest whatsoever in their artists’ making money.

My issues with this story are twofold.

1. A claim has been made by a Business School that filesharers buy more music than non-filesharers. This fact has then been reported without any reference to the methodology of the study and in such a way to suggest a causal link between piracy and increased music purchasing (i.e. if you become a pirate you will then start to buy more music) when, as far as I can tell, the study says no such thing.

2. The press has reported the story without talking to the source, referencing the source in any detail or questioning the source. In such a contentious area, where the methodology behind any study’s findings should be rigorously checked (as with the videogame violence studies, where so many bodies have a vested interest), this is frustrating.

ManaTree: re: change in the music industry. I think this has happened with the Spotify model. Now owning music is largely meaningless to me, be it in solid state or digital format. I have most of the world’s music available to me at the touch of a button: it’s now a question of access, a shift that, in many ways, makes this whole sorry debate totally irrelevant.

However, I don’t think that matters. What’s absolutely needed is a change in the music industry, however that is brought about. As John Walker pointed out, artists are very very frequently ripped off.

“an effort to guard their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their artists”

The music industry has never, and will never, have any interest in protecting the livelihoods of their artists. There are of course countless examples of this, but the best essay remains Steve Albini’s fantastic piece from the early 90s.

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

It has dated, of course, but the facts remain the same.

When having this discussion, it is far too tempting to believe one is taking the middleground by being suspicious of the claims of those supporting P2P as they seem so extreme, but not investigate the claims of the Big 4, who are annually fined for blackmail, price fixing and price gouging, and who regularly bankrupt their artists.

The middleground is pretty hard to find in this debate, but I think it’s interesting to note that one side is willingly telling the truth about how they break the law and why, and the other side is regularly caught lying and using deception to continue their illegal business practises.