On October 4th, 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Jammie Thomas, a single mother, for $222,000, for downloading 24 songs, as part of their crusade against illegal online file sharing.1 The RIAA and similar groups claim to be defending artists and protecting music by suing file sharers, but are their actions doing any good?
The basis of the argument against file sharing is that it makes it impossible for artists to make money because people download music rather than pay for CDs. Mitch Bainwol, the CEO of the RIAA, says that "the root cause for this drastic decline in record sales is the astronomical rate of music piracy on the Internet."2 However, others, such as George Ziemann, argue that file sharing is just one of many factors, including changes in the economy, increases in price, and decreases in the number of releases.3 Also, file sharing may actually increase sales in some cases by allowing people to sample things before buying.
Whether or not file sharing is harmful to artists, it does benefit society in some ways. It allows people to access to a huge amount of information and art that people would not otherwise have access to. Rufus Pollock, an economist at Cambridge University, wrote, "for each such consumer society gains the entire value they put upon the good (net of costs). Aggregating the valuations of all of these individuals who only get access at the lower price gives the total value to society of having this lower price."4 With more access to something, there is more benefit from it. File sharing has the additional benefit that it allows almost anybody to get a message to a wide audience and become popular.
Even if everyone stopped buying CDs, artists could still make money in a variety of ways. One way, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has suggested, is known as collective licensing: "The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month."5 Some artists could also make money through donations; for example, Radiohead offered their latest album without requiring payment. Eliot Van Buskirk mentions estimates that they may have made $6-$10 million after only a very short period of time.6 If so, this method of asking for donations has clearly worked well. In addition to methods such as collective licensing and donations, artists can also make money with live shows and merchandise.
Even if file sharing was a serious problem, the efforts to fight it have been pointless simply because they have failed miserably. A study by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, and a few other groups, concluded that traffic in networks that are used for file sharing "represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding."7 Years of lawsuits and other attempts to fight file sharing have apparently not worked very well.
The current fight against file sharing should not and can not continue. Instead, we should focus on making sure that artists get paid while file sharing continues, whether it be through collective licensing, or some other way. When this is done, we can get the benefit of free and open access to information and media, which file sharing provides, while artists can make a living. In any case, lawsuits are certainly not doing any good.