Idolator

Cary Sherman's op-ed defending the Recording Industry Association of America's litigation-happy tactics as far as dealing with piracy not only claims that the RIAA's strategy recalls people's end-of-their-rope tactics when dealing with family members/loved ones who are out of control, it also somewhat gleefully notes that scaring the bejeezus out of consumers has, in fact, worked ... to keep record sales a good 14% off their pace from last year:

What have our antipiracy efforts yielded? A legal marketplace that is far better because of what we've done: Digital revenues doubled as a percentage of the market in 2006, from 8 percent in 2005 to more than 16 percent. An illegal marketplace which, prior to the initiation of our deterrence program, experienced exponential illicit P2P use has now mostly stabilized—the average number of households downloading music illegally on a monthly basis was roughly 7 million in 2003 and is now 7.8 million. Compare that with the growth in broadband access to the Internet, which grew from 38 million home users in 2003 to at least 80 million today.

Can there be any doubt that a whole lot more of those broadband subscribers would be illegally downloading but for the lawsuits? Surveys confirm that fact: People who have stopped illegal downloading cite the fear of being sued as the first or second reason for changing their behavior. And, lastly, there is a fundamentally different understanding of what you can and can't do on the Internet—37 percent of those surveyed in 2003 thought it was illegal to distribute music for free over the Internet; now that number has grown to 73 percent.

Think about it. What would the online music world look like had we done nothing? It's not a pretty picture: skyrocketing illegal peer-to-peer downloading without even a second thought about its legality or morality, and a small handful of legitimate businesses struggling to gain traction in a marketplace overwhelmingly dominated by piracy.

Yes, that's so much better than those same "legitimate businesses" having an ever-growing reputation for being hostile to their customers! Especially when you go crowing in print about how you've instilled fear in said consumers. And a question about those scaredy-cats who have run away from Kazaa: Have those people who have "stopped illegal downloading" started buying music again at all, or have they just decided to put their time into other pursuits like Halo 3 and/or knitting? Ah, that's the problem with statistics—even when you want to cite them triumphantly, there's always some detail or other that gets left out.

Rights and wrongs in the antipiracy struggle [ZDNet]