Is File-Swapping Piracy Or Promotion?

[lgh529]

Not quite the latest news, but I haven't seen it here so I thought I would post it

ake that, RIAA! In the most methodologically rigorous tracking study to date of actual online file-swapping patterns and sales of specific music CDs, two university researchers say that, at best, P2P networks account for a very small fraction of the music industry’s sharp decline. By tracking and comparing heavily downloaded songs with their retail sales, researchers at Harvard Business School and University of North Carolina found that in the case of CDs that sold over 600,000 units, P2P activity actually may help retail performance by selling an additional one CD for every 150 downloads of one of its songs. Professors Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC) concluded that in the worst case scenario, file swapping accounted for lost sales of only 2 million CD's in 2002, while as a whole, the industry sold 139 million fewer CD's between 2000 and 2002

This was reported in Computer Power User June 2004 issue (a magazine I highly recommend).

[DereX888]

This is simple, or it should be.
IMO.
If the owner of a ... (song, movie, software - choose whatever youre asking about) if the owner of it hasn't copyrighted his work, you can 'file-swap' it as much as you want, and you actually do the promoting job for him/them. But if the owner of it has copyrighted it, its a plain piracy.

Now I am announcing here that above post is copyright (c) derex888.
You need my permission from now on to even quote this post (or I'll sue your sorry ass ), but you can still freely and legally quote/copy/mangle/do whatever you want with any other posts of mine on this board.
See the difference?

[DiablosuX102]

This is simple, or it should be.
IMO.
If the owner of a ... (song, movie, software - choose whatever youre asking about) if the owner of it hasn't copyrighted his work, you can 'file-swap' it as much as you want, and you actually do the promoting job for him/them. But if the owner of it has copyrighted it, its a plain piracy.

[DereX888]

Be careful DiablosuX102... I might decide to skip the step with suing and take the law in my own hands (it has caliber .42 :P )

[Nilfennasion]

One should note that while sales for major record labels have slumped since the take-off of file-sharing online, sales for labels like Moonfog or Peaceville have literally exploded. Before the advent of MP3, sales for extreme labels like these were not a tenth what they are today. So nobody should be surprised that I see file-sharing as promotion, even if a handful of these labels do not.

[DereX888]

This is offtopic... Sales of major labels dropped down as expected and regardless of online file swapping. For some labels re-releases of old stuff consisted of even 60+% of their releases every year. By the end of 1998 they all virtually run out of top old materials they could re-release on CDs, and it was first and major reason of concern for all the labels before even first Napster was out.
From advent of CDs until about ~2000 rereleasing old stuff was a big chunk of income for all labels. In many expert's opinion most of the labels are actually doing very well nowaday - considering their sales dropped only 20-30% while they release 90+% of new materials only, without sales-boot from "goldies-oldies" anymore. Its just their greed and cry for the "good ol' days" when they could make profit of $10/pc on each sold CD is the reason why we even talk about it today.