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A study conducted on 2000 Canadians has shown that most people download songs off the Internet simply because they want to try-before-buy or because they were unable to find this music in their local stores. Yet, the recording industry is playing deaf, dumb and blind, endlessly trying to prove that sharing, by its very nature, is bad.

The two researchers at the University of London that conducted the study for the Canadian Government estimated that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is actually an increase in music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.

In other words, P2P sharing (or pirating, however you want to put it) increases music sales.

This is in stark contrast with the usual drabble from the record industry which often has insane models of calculating P2P’s “damages”, counting every downloaded song as a direct loss in sales.

As this (and countless other) studies show, the situation is not nearly as black and white. But, even if it were, guess what? We live in the age of the internet, and you cannot fight it. Every news item you can read for free on the internet - even this one - is probably squeezing a bit of juice out of the newspaper business. What should we do, stop publishing news for free? Sorry, it’s just not going to happen.

Furthermore, all this P2P business is just a technologically enhanced version of an ancient phenomenon called sharing. Remember the days of the audio tape? Did you not create mix tapes for your friends and family, and did you not re-record and share tapes with people? P2P is exactly the same thing: the only difference is that it’s now vastly easier to make. Thus, it robbed the recording industry of their monopoly, which is essentially, well, recording - and made every user out there a tiny record company.

All of it doesn’t have much to do with the creators of the music, many of whom have recently chosen to discard the traditional record industry business models, and are doing just fine selling their music directly to the users.

Still, the recording industry - failing to adapt to the new age - is trying to impose impossible demands on everyone to keep earning impossible amounts of cash. One of them is the case of Australia’s MIPI, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (nice name, sounds really benign), which is threatening to start suing Australians if ISPs don’t start policing file sharing.

The aforementioned study isn’t helping here. MIPI general manager, Sabiene Heindl, claims that the study is not relevant to Australia, and points to another study, which was conducted by Quantum Market Research in 2006 among 1000 Australians. This study found that 57 percent of P2P users rarely or never purchase that music legally.

It doesn’t take too much effort to understand that these two studies aren’t necessarily talking about the same thing.

First of all, the motive for downloading music is one thing, actual action one takes after downloading it is another. If I download a song because I could not find the album in a local record store, how the hell am I supposed to buy it afterwards? Maybe I will, after a year or two when I find it somewhere. But it’s obvious that good intentions don’t always have to result in a CD sale. Secondly, if I want to try before buy, I’m going to find a lot of stuff I don’t like. Therefore, I won’t buy. In fact, I might even erase the stuff from my hard drive.

Now, looking at what I just wrote, how does it sound for you, from the consumer’s point of view? Being able to get music you normally wouldn’t, and being able to make better choices and try out stuff before you buy it - is that so bad?

In any case - returning to the ISP policing P2P business - it’s important to understand that something like that is very hard and expensive to do, invades every user’s privacy, and it’s completely opposite from the inherent nature of the internet. Which is, if you remember, about sharing.

As far as piracy goes, I call on all “pirates” to spend their money on a live show and a T-shirt. The artists will understand.

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