The ugly truth of P2P

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Mr. Oragahn
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The ugly truth of P2P

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Dec 05, 2009 11:06 pm

Apparently, according to media moguls and other entertainment firms, online piracy kills culture and sales.
Assuming we agree on what culture means to all of us, it would be unfortunate not to pay attention to the following elements:

Working paper on P2P, Harvard.
Music Downloads: Pirates—or Customers?
Why the Music Industry May Gain from Free Downloading - the Role of Sampling
A feavy file, the Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy demonstrates that the EU Commission's project to extend copyright rights to 95 years would be detrimental to culture, distribution and prices. English Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law's own study shared very similar conclusions.
Ups and downs. Economic and cultural effects of file sharing on music, film and games. 128 pages study available here.
Study: P2P effect on legal music sales "not statistically distinguishable from zero".
The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing: Abstract.

A series of complete and exhaustive scientific and economical studies, all of which provide both interesting numbers and evidence that Piracy Induced Culturicide (TM) ranges from hastily analyzed to biased reviews, some bordering the bogus dogma deeply rooted in ignorance.

Piracy and the Demand for Films: Analysis of Piracy Behavior in French Universities, rather relevant since France is a forerunning country in terms of Internet locking served by an excuse about massive piracy and other dangerous lurking things inappropriate for people, including the Hadopi(2) law. Say, a test on European Guinea Pigs before it gets adapted everywhere and mixed to other nonsense about cyberterrorism.
Pirates or Explorers? Analysis of Music Consumption in French Graduate Schools.
Why the Music Industry May Gain from Free Downloading - the Role of Sampling.
File-Sharing, Sampling, and Music Distribution.
Piracy of Digital Products: A Critical Review of the Theoretical Literature, a solid analysis of piracy.
An Economist's Guide to Digital Music.
All of which is supported by an OECD study that refutes the correlation between the decrease of sales and piracy, if only that!

A complicated document by Patrick Waelbroeck (a man with close relations to the business leagues), which did illustrate that piracy and falling sales were related... only between 1998 and 2002. This is the kind of document that may be cited as proof, while ignoring the mass of fresher evidence about the sampling effect, since more people moved to Internet and the electronic file flux.

The debate is not settled though, as music is not consumed the same way a film or even a video game are.

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