piracy...

was reading an article on piracy that i stumbleuponed.. then one of the paragraph really made mi LOL..

Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. "While downloads occur on a vast scale," they wrote, "most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded." Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. "Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase."

Extracted from "The Pirates Can't Be Stopped", Condé Nast Portfolio.


so why are they so particular abt people downloading mp3s? lame..... there's another article which i managed to google out.. talking abt piracy issue in china regarding pirated music cds..

The big record labels have complained for years about the damage that CD pirates do to their business in China. By some estimates, more than 90% of the CDs sold on the mainland are illegal copies. Intellec-tual-property theft is just part of a global music-piracy problem that combined with rampant tune trafficking over the Internet is cramping sales. After a drop in 2001 of 5% in terms of value and 6.5% in units, global music sales plunged a further 9.2% and 11.2% respectively in the first half of 2002.

But if the slumping music business is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, it would appear that some of the wounds are self-inflicted. That's because the discs clogging Shantou's warehouses aren't pirated. Some of the world's largest record companies, including BMG, EMI and Universal, produced them, and retailers such as French hypermarket chain Carre-four stocked them—only to dump them when they didn't sell. But instead of being melted down by recyclers, the unloved discs are diverted through a network of scrap dealers and middlemen like Li, ultimately finding their way into stores in China. They are sold there for as little as a tenth of the price of officially imported discs.

Extracted from "Zombie Discs", Times.


awww.. stupidity...