— A wide-ranging study from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) puts a £10 billion (US $ 16.6 billion) price tag on UK digital piracy and estimates between 44% and 79% of global Internet traffic is due to file sharing. In conducting research, SABIP reviewed internationally published research, interviewed stakeholders, analyzed media reports and actually went online to test “at least 29 different ways to download and share unauthorized digital content.” There are two problems with SABIP’s price tag on Internet piracy. First, the researchers give too much weight to the biased estimates of various trade groups that use faulty rationale for measuring the value of lost sales. Second, SABIP fell victim to the common mistake of calculating damages based on volume of files downloaded rather than actual financial ramifications to companies resulting from those downloads. Another problem is that piracy is blamed for many job losses that could easily be explained by the nature of the physical-to-digital transition. On the flip side, the paper succeeds in its exploration of consumer behavior and attitudes and the proliferation of platforms (file hosting services, Twitter, microblogs) that are being used to share media. (“Copycats?” Executive Summary, “Copycats?” 85-page report)
— The New York Times has a good overview of music industry efforts to increase the rates charged for playing music in public places such as nightclubs and restaurants. Nightclubs in Australia, for example, now pay AU$0.50 (US $0.41) per customer to record labels and artists. That rate, originally AU$0.07 (US $0.05) per customer, will jump to AU$1.04 (US $0.85) in a few years. (New York Times)
— Thanks to FileTwt, people can upload an MP3 (up to 20MB) and instantly share the link with their Twitter friends. As soon as somebody comes up with an easy-to-use search tool to find MP3s in feeds, Twitter will have leapt into the quasi-file-sharing service category. (FileTwt, via Music Ally)
