Numbers.

We encounter them every day. How much investors lost on Wall Street in 2008. How many billions the U.S. government will spend to stimulate the economy. How many trillions our national debt will reach. And yes, how many legal vs. illegal music downloads occur online.

The latest entry in the numbers race comes from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, with a long history of solid research with both piracy and legitimate download services. They found in a new report that the digital music business grew 25% last year, but that those legal downloads comprised only 5% of all music download. The 95% of unauthorized downloads totaled around 80% of all Internet traffic.

For ten years now I’ve been reading figures on unauthorized downloading, from IFPI, CacheLogic, Big Champagne, research firms such as Forrester and Gartner, and now entities involved in the network neutrality debate who come at the subject not with an interest in infringement per se but instead on network traffic relating to network management. The numbers always vary, as this is far from an exact science, but two things are always consistently reported:

Unauthorized downloads of creative works dwarf authorized downloads. And infringing traffic makes up a majority of Internet traffic.

The overwhelming number of studies reaching these conclusions should allow us not to worry about specific percentage or number of downloads and instead recognize that even in this era of paid download services, licensed streaming services, and growing subscription services including wireless, most of the time someone acquires a sound recording, songwriters and recording artists are not being paid for their creative output.

Can we all accept that premise?

Now I recognize that most opponents of existing copyright law recognize this problem, and rally around various licensing models that would “decriminalize” unauthorized file-sharing. All of these models, of course, only work when creators forfeit their rights and entrust others with their compensation.

Far more interesting are efforts in Great Britain and here in the U.S. to work voluntarily with Internet service providers to reduce infringement on networks. The IFPI report cites a separate study showing that 7 out of 10 infringing downloaders would stop if told to by their ISP. This makes sense, since the IFPI study also suggests that most infringers want creators to be paid and are only infringing because it is so ridiculously easy to do so.

It’s important to focus on the core of a debate, not the periphery. If we spend time arguing about percentages of infringement in traffic and downloads, in ratios of illegal to legal, we miss the larger point, that infringement is real, large and impactful on both creators and the market. I welcome more studies and more research in this area, but new numbers are unlikely to change the ultimate conclusions drawn from these studies.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 10:33 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, internet, licensing, market forces, network neutrality, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.