How damaging is the file sharing the music industry

How damaging can file sharing be for the music industry?

In order to tackle the world wide controversy over copyright and usual technologies which allow copying and sharing, it is necessary to recognize that file sharing is sapping the intellectual property concerning digital products. Nevertheless, the change in record sales in the music industry should be studied more thoroughly.

Although the linkage between file sharing and the change in music sales appears plain and seems to be the more reasonable explanation, Alejandro Zentner from University of Dallas calculates that “without downloads - sales in 2002 would have been around 7.8 percent higher”^[1] which compared to the 30 percent decrease in profitability of buying music that peer-to-peer usage generates, suggests and explains that even if there was no download possibilities, the music industry would still have low record sales. Controversy resides in those who state that the impact of file sharing could not be positive in most embedded contexts and those who assert that regular music downloading favours music purchase.

This is not exclusive to music, other digital copyrighted goods such as movies, software, games and books are also concerned. The growth of rapid connections enables to increase the repercussion of file sharing on sales of these goods too.

Downloading any type of this copyrighted material is illegal; and the music industry has brought file sharing to court.

Nevertheless, peer-to-peer networks have turned out to be complicated to attack legally since they don’t need a central server to operate (Varian 2000, for instance) and others legal usages. The matter lies in that the majority of these systems are established in countries where the legal system is different. Thus, the P2P network Kazaa is registered in Vanuatu, the software distributor is in Australia, and the servers are in the Netherlands. The RIAA has serious difficulties releasing file sharing systems, which led it to set up a new strategy and has been “gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally offering large amounts of copyrighted music over peer-to-peer networks” (RIAA 2003). There are disagreements about the efficacy of this strategy on the volume of downloads. Filing a suit against those individuals who give free access to music might ease the number of files which can be downloaded, but the decrease in downloads is not that evident. It should not be forgotten online files are public goods. Besides, the fact that most popular sites have seen their number of users decrease does not imply that individuals are not using alternative less risky sites. However, the music industry credits the new legal strategy with the increase in sales recorded in 2004.