[Bill Posters]

Originally Posted by haku

If that were true, no one would be buying music now. Anyone who wants free music can get it very fast and entirely free on the internet with very little effort, and pretty much no risk. Yet itunes is making a killing, so obviously people are more than willing to do it the legal way. The number of illegal downloaders is only a small percentage of the total number of downloaders.

You may have a point.

I think the fact alone that it's illegal deters a great many.
Similarly, I think the threat of being caught deters a great many more from doing it.

If filesharing apps were to undertake the kind of high profile promotion that iTunes has, then I think we might see a significant shift in the center of balance between legal and illegal downloads.

There are still huge sections of the web using public who's only knowledge of music downloads comes from legal sources. They don't spend time on software or techy sites where P2P apps tend to be promoted.

(I suspect that the bulk of illegal downloaders, by and large, fit a certain profile, probably male, 16-25 (possibly 14-35), with a greater than average interest in technology and possibly with an awareness of alternative music.

I'd certainly be interested to see any actual data on the array of profiles of illegal downloaders. I suspect they'd 'cluster' quite predictably.

I'd also be interested to see if iTunes and other legal download resources have customer bases which consist of relatively few customers [compared to customers of total music outlets] with high individual spends or large customer numbers with lower individual spends, or some other combination/balance.)



Home users tend to be of the variety which visits the Yahoo/ISP/whatever homepage, which about a year or two ago, started advertising music downloads. And that's possibly the first they knew about digital music, let alone about downloading it.

They're generally unlikely to read the Technology sections of news outlets, so are unlikely to come into contact with the story unless it runs as a sitewide headline.


Still, I as said, I suspect that if it were to become common knowledge that, whilst it still illegal, the powers that be weren't actively going to try to catch or punish you, we might see a different public attitude to illegal downloading.

Either way, I'm not convinced that removing the threat of discovery and punishment is necessary or likely to prove helpful.


…imo.