Claim 1: Downloading is not “Stealing”



Evidence: Downloading music for free by means of person to person file sharing programs such as Ares, Kazaa, Morphous, or what used to be Napster, is often referred to as “Stealing”. When a song is downloaded, the artist and Record Company do not lose the song, they still have it. Some people may infer that if one can download the same songs for free, they will not buy the album in the stores, and thus results in the decline of value and the loss of profits for the record companies. This is also incorrect. People may download a song or songs to see if they would like to purchase the entire album, and then make their decision to purchase it after they have downloaded the song.



Claim 2: The rise of the person to person file sharing programs is not a direct cause of the decline record sales.



Evidence: The rise of Napster in 2000 also marked the beginning of an economic decline in the United States. This economic decline could be partially or fully responsible for the decline of record sales starting in 2000. People started having less money to spend on things, and one of the items in their budget they could do without was the purchase of records.



According to an article from the November 24th 2004 issue of the New York Times entitled “Does a Free Download Equal a Lost Sale?”, “In a paper that Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School wrote with Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he examined the correlation between popular downloads and popular CD's in the fall of 2002. . It seems that downloading was more a symptom of an artist's popularity in the record stores than a barrier to it. ''Our best guess is that peer-to-peer networks in 2002 had no effect whatsoever on sales,'' Professor Oberholzer-Gee said.”



Another article, written in April of 2004 by Damien Cave, commenting on the same aforementioned study conducted by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf quote: “The fifty-one-page study — arriving six days after the record industry sued another 532 file sharers — is the most rigorous economic analysis available... The research also supports the idea that most people download music that they wouldn't buy anyway. And, says Oberholzer-Gee, "the Internet is more like radio than we thought. People listen to two or three songs, and if they like it, they go out and buy the CD."”



Claim 3: The records on sale today are currently overpriced due to many unnecessary costs.



Evidence: According to the RIAA, the most expensive part of producing a CD is not paying the artist, or the recording studio, but it is the marketing for the album. Person to person file sharing is marketing for music in itself. Also, the RIAA states that only about 10% of albums turn a profit, and those albums actually finance the other ones. This means that the money one pays for a record may go to pay for other records that the person has no interest in. The “Research and Data: Music cost” section of the RIAA web site says “Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today”. File sharing in itself is advertising, the advertising costs do not go to the artist. This article goes on to say that “After production, recording, promotion and distribution costs, most CD’s never sell enough to recover these costs, let alone make a profit. In the end, less than 10% are profitable, and in effect, it's these recordings that finance all the rest. “



Claim 4: File sharing will always continue



Evidence: Although illegal, file sharing will never stop.

According to an article on January 27, 2004, in Business Week online titled Big Music's Worst Move Yet, the Supreme court “found that a federal law the RIAA used to force Internet service providers to cough up the identities of alleged file swappers is unconstitutional. The court ruled, essentially, that the provision violated due process.”

The Supreme Court thus threw out several of the cases of the RIAA vs. downloaders of music.

Prosecuting copyright law infringement is very difficult because it requires the prosecutor to search private property. Stopping illegal downloading will always be a battle of digital technology and file sharing will always continue.