Chris Curtis dot Org

Wow—is anybody buying this garbage?  Reports are flying left and right at how the RIAA‘s lawsuits have successfully pulled the reigns in of music piracy and internet file sharing.

Although critics roundly accused the RIAA of bullying music lovers with the lawsuits, those tactics appear to have paid off.

Really?  The lawsuits are what has caused online music trading to drop by 50%?  Oh wait, what’s that?  The research was a survey and didn’t actually use any concrete data?  Ah, I see.

It goes further.  The study, conducted by Pew Internet & American Life project, was a phone study, and they sampled a whopping 1300-1400 people.  One of the questions is something along the lines of “Do you download illegal music?” They conducted this very same survey in early 2003 and 29% of the people they called said “yes.” This time, only 14% said “yes.” Well, that’s imperical evidence then, isn’t it?  Nevermind that they could have simply called more people outside of the popular filesharing demographic, let’s assume that not only is this survey valid, but that it is applicable in direct ratio to the population as a whole.  The reports are taking these numbers and extrapolating some major assumptions:

The percentage of Americans who download music online has been sliced in half

and that it is a direct result of the RIAA‘s lawsuits.  However, “the survey did not distinguish between use of free, ‘peer-to-peer’ music-sharing sites such as Kazaa, and licensed, commercial downloading sites such as the new Napster, MusicMatch, Rhapsody and iTunes.”

Nor does the survey take into consideration the RIAA‘s other strong-arm tactic, that has been way more effective than their public lawsuit campaign (which interestingly, they are not winning in the courts).  Purposeful insertion and dissemination of buggy, bad quality, or just completely broken versions of songs.  The file trading networks are overrun by them.  The survey also doesn’t consider that if one of its “findings” is true--that fewer people are downloading because of the lawsuits and bullying--how many people are going to lie to them out of fear of it being another RIAA trick?

One final comment on all of this bogusness.

The survey found that one-fifth of users who said they had stopped trading music online did so because of the music industry’s aggressive legal tactics.

Well this is certainly a twist, and one that I only found reported in the Washington Post.  So illegal music downloading hasn’t dropped by 50%.  Oh, yes, you can do the math that way if you want, the number has been halved.  But it’s very misleading.  29% said previously that they downloaded illegal music.  Now 14% admit to it.  So it’s dropped 15%.  And how much of that percentage is attributable to the RIAA‘s bullying?  Only 1/5th of those that stopped.  In other words 3%.  Where’s that headline?

RIAA’s Lawsuits Successfully Reduce Illegal Music Trade by 3%!

Morons.

Posted Monday January 5, 2004 in News by Chris Curtis

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