Over the years we've heard plenty from both sides of the filesharing lobby - those against and those for.
Both sides have used a variety of weapons, not least statistical analysis and research. Now you can pick and choose the studies you want (numbers can say pretty much anything) but the pro-filesharing lobby has had to rely on one major study for most of its ammunition - the Oberholzer-Strumpf documents of 2004 (there's a PDF here.
We wrote about that study, but now it's been backed up by another - this time commissioned by the Canadian government.
The new review - which was conducted by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, two researchers based at Birkbeck College in London - is available online... and it comes up with some interesting results:
We are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada... That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing.
A couple of Canadian commentators, Michael Geist and Mathew Ingram, chipped in over the weekend with their thoughts.
I can honestly say that in the years since Napster, I've enjoyed a musical renaissance - listening to (and crucially buying) more music across more genres than ever. But are people like me mainstream examples, or just edge cases?
