CD sales losses from downloading questioned
In an article in the Toronto Star, Professor Michael Geist uses CRIA’s own numbers to conclude that the Canadian music industry’s losses from music downloading are not as great as some claim. He goes on to suggest other reasons for CD sales declines, including DVD sales and changing consumer habits.
Meanwhile, a trial has stated in Australia against the owners of the Kazaa file sharing software for copyright infringement.
Read the Toronto Star article
Read a Washington Post article about Kazaa
The statistical methods used are often very questionable. As a software author that is focused on Free/Libre and Open Source Software http://flora.ca/floss based business models I am included in the Orwellian double-speak named “Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft” statistics as infringement. In fact, most of their major competition is included as “theft” in their bogus statistics.
These “software manufacturing” companies count the number of computers shipped, estimate the demand for people to buy their own software (obviously being overly-optimistic and biased), subtract actual shipments and declare the difference as “theft”. Every computer I have bought was estimated to have some “software manufacturing” software on it, the computers I own (or those customer machines I support) have no “software manufacturing” software on it, so everything I do is illegitimately counted as “theft” by CAAST.
In addition to this, the most likely organizations to infringe my copyright are “software manufacturing” firms who want to redistribute and modify my software without obeying the terms of my license agreements.
The recording industry is no better, often including as infringement the major competition to their legacy methods of production, distribution and funding.
Comment by Russell McOrmond — January 2, 2006 @ 11:31 am