Slashdot Mirror
Study: MP3 Sharing Not Serious Threat To CD Sales
pkaral writes "The two distinguished gentlemen Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee have most likely made RIAA executives choke on their lunches. Those two economists at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have done the research and the math on how much CD sales are actually hurt by P2P sharing. The answer: A whopping one CD per 5,000 files downloaded. Needless to say, RIAA are already trying to discredit the study."
I know this article was posted just to placate the RIAA-hating psychos who think everything should be online for "sampling" purposes.
...meanwhile, let's post another article about a GPL violation!
Just a question--why do you think it's okay to violate everybody's copyrights and dictate to others how they should distribute their own intellectual property, and then post an article berating some company for "violating the GPL?"
Why do you latch onto copyright in one instance and reject in the other when it means getting free stuff? Let's be honest here--those millions of Kazaa and eMule users are NOT there to "sample" albums in order to run down to the store and buy them. Hell, people are starting to package entire band discographies into big multi-GB RAR files for easy download. Are you telling me all those downloaders are going to run to the store when they like what they hear? Most of these are being put out in high-quality MP3 and MPC.
As usual, the issue of the artists in this mess will be completely ignored, and instead they will be replaced with the "evil" RIAA who has dared use legal means to pursue people illegally distributing their copyrighted works. That's baaaaad...even though it's exactly what Slashdot was saying they should do when Napster was under attack.
It just reveals that it all boils down to people wanting free stuff, getting used to the convenience, and then getting mad when it's threatened to be taken away. You've built entire mindsets around it, that you're "sampling," that it's "free advertising"...none of which has any basis, none of which matters legally or morally. Just because your niche opinion equates illegal piracy to sampling doesn't mean the rest of those terabytes going across p2p every month is all for sampling purposes. Get real!
What's interesting is that nobody mentions movies or games. Look how the PC games industry is dying. They're either going to console or putting out the same top-seller sequels every year that they know will make them money. Why do you think that is? Are you going to call it "sampling" when Doom 3 gets put out online a week before it hits retail, as they all are now? Is it "free advertising" when full DVD-R rips of the retail DVD of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King are on eMule at the very moment I type this?
Oh, yeah, I forgot, the MPAA and the RIAA are "goons" because they don't like when people illegally distribute their copyrighted works. I forgot that Slashdot has the right to tell people how to advertise, sample, and distribute...