NY Times: A Heretical View of File Sharing
The music industry says it repeatedly, with passion and conviction: downloading hurts sales.
That statement is at the heart of the war on file sharing, both of music and movies, and underpins lawsuits against thousands of music fans, as well as legislation approved last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee that would create federal penalties for using what is known as peer-to-peer technology to download copyrighted works. It is also part of the reason that the Justice Department introduced an intellectual-property task force last week that plans to step up criminal prosecutions of copyright infringers.
But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?
