Criminal Friends of Entertainment: Analysing Results from Recent Peet-to-Peer Surveys

Peer to peer has turned out to be a disruptive technology that has had had profound impact to the content ecosystem. Copyright owners are worried that file sharing is destroying their business and legislators have reacted by enacting laws that criminalise illegal file sharing. Industry and researchers disagree on how the illegal file sharing affects legal sales. IFPI estimates tens of billions of illegal music files are traded annually worldwide at an estimated ratio of 20 illegal downloads per every track sold.The conservative International Policy Institute calculated the total piracy loss to US sound record industries from global piracy to equal $5,3 billion. Such numbers are only reliable if file sharing is a direct substitute. A recent Canadian study did not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. However, the study suggested that of the Canadian P2P file sharing subpopulation, there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. The study estimated that the effect of one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year. According to a widely discussed study by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, “downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” They concluded that file sharing is not the main reason for the decline in music sales. However, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf’s results have been since questioned.

Getting a reliable result of the impact of illegal file sharing is hard. Nevertheless, rights owners consider it a serious enough problem to warrant spending a considerable amount of money on copyright enforcement in massive and costly trials. In recent case, Sony BMG’s head of litigation Jennifer Pariser testified that record labels have spent “millions” on the lawsuits, and that the record companies are losing money with the litigation program. Yet the file sharing phenomenon has not disappeared and some studies suggest it to be on the rise.8 Why are people massively infringing copyright law? Do file sharers see changes in their consumption from legal sources? Do they know what they are doing is illegal or do they just not care? The problem calls for further study. We conducted a web survey and asked questions about file sharing and copyright law. This paper describes the results of that survey.