[Marseille]

Originally Posted by Dumas

Do you have a source for that?

Perhaps not one you'll like.

Q: What would the RIAA like people to know about the lawsuit program now that it has ended?

The program was designed to educate fans about the law, the consequences of breaking the law, and raise awareness about all the great legal sites in the music marketplace. Like any tough decision, there are trade offs. On balance, the legal marketplace is far better off because of the program:

1) Educational Impact: Awareness of the illegality of downloading without permission surged from 35 – 72 percent following/during the initiation of the program.

2) Digital Marketplace Surges: Digital revenues have grown from nearly $200 million in ‘04 to $2.3 billion in ‘07 (estimates for ‘08 - $3 billion), accounting for 25 percent of all retail value revenue (upwards of 30 percent at end of ’08).

3) Illicit P2P Growth Constrained But Still Major Problem: Prior to the campaign, illegal p2p music trading was growing exponentially. Since 2004, the percentage of Internet-connected households that have downloaded music from p2p is essentially flat (NPD).

There's no question about the increase in awareness--even if someone wants to write off any info from the RIAA as propaganda (it is, but then so is almost all the info that wasn't from the RIAA -- not a lot of competent neutral sources in the music wars). RIAA foes thought suing grandma was a misstep, but it was a strategy. The more sympathetic the person sued, the more coverage each suit got. Since they could only sue a tiny percentage of infringers, they needed shocking coverage to achieve a chilling effect.

While suits aren't solely responsible for p2p not growing (increased access to legal digital sources, black market exhaustion, digital sources becoming friendly by embracing mp3s all helped too), when you pair 1 and 3 above with a fair recollection of the coverage that happened during the heyday of RIAA suits, it's tough to make credible argument that they were ineffective.

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Of course not since measuring online sharing is essentially impossible.

Measuring it precisely isn't possible, but then again, we can't even measure how many people there are precisely, or TV ratings, or the effectiveness of vaccines, public health policies, safety regulations, hand-washing etc. On the other hand, it's far from impossible to use statistics to gather some useful and meaningful measurements. There are yearly 'most pirated x' lists that people love to chat about (where x equals games, music, movies etc). Are they 100% accurate? Of course not. But they aren't useless in measuring sharing either.