In the U.S., people who downloaded pirated music had larger music libraries than those who download only legally.  That’s to be expected, but what researchers didn’t expect to find was that those same libraries were also made up of more legal purchases than the legal-only collections, by a significant 30 percent.  The proportions are even higher in Germany, where the pirates actually pay for nearly three times as much digital content as their legal counterparts.

While studies like this would indicate that music sharing can actually be a benefit to the music industry, groups like the Recording Industry Association of America are still working to stop it.  American Assembly’s Joe Karaganis says this is bad for everyone.  “There is ultimately no solution to copy culture that does not lead toward a wider war on general-purpose computing – a lockdown of personal computing.”

[Ed - we talked about this one before, the music industry does not like this type of study becuase it kills the number they use to push for more restrictive copyright laws. We talked about this in a recent article where we covered the logic used to created the numbers and how they fall apart under close study. Maybe one day the industry will open their eyes and perhaps embrace some of the new content distribution methods and change their business model to adapt instead of trying to push for laws that try to control everything.]

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