[Rumori] In Survey, Fewer Are Sharing Files (or Admitting It)

[Carrie McLaren]

January 5, 2004
NEW ECONOMY
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/technology/05neco.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
In Survey, Fewer Are Sharing Files (or Admitting It)
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

ow easily do online file swappers scare? Pretty darned easily, a new 
survey suggests.

The number of people swapping music files online has dropped by half, 
and the number of people downloading files on any given day has 
dropped 75 percent since the middle of last year, according to a 
report to be released today by the Pew Internet and American Life 
Project. Last September is when the Recording Industry Association of 
America started suing people accused of making large numbers of songs 
available for downloading.

"Clearly, the R.I.A.A. suits were a watershed moment for the 
downloading community," the director of the Pew Internet project, Lee 
Rainie, said, referring to the lawsuits by the recording association.

In a previous survey of 1,358 Internet users, conducted from March 1 
to May 20, 29 percent said they had downloaded music. The percentage 
dropped to 14 percent when the question was asked again from Nov. 18 
to Dec. 14, after hundreds of people had been sued by the recording 
industry over accusations of copyright infringement.

In the survey period last spring, 4 percent of the Internet users 
said they had downloaded files on an average day. Only 1 percent of 
Internet users in the later survey said they had downloaded files on 
any given day during the survey period. And about one in five of 
those who said that they still shared music and other files said that 
they were doing less of it because of the industry lawsuits.

Past surveys showed that many people did not fully understand that 
they were infringing on the copyright of others by downloading free 
music, Mr. Rainie said. Despite the abuse heaped on the industry for 
its tactics, he added, that message appears to have gotten through.

Before the lawsuits, interviewers were often told, " 'We think what 
we're doing isn't a violation, because we're just sharing,' " Mr. 
Rainie said. Now, he said, "significant numbers of people are 
thinking differently about it, in part because of the R.I.A.A. 
message," even if the lawsuits were "not a high-water mark for the 
reputation of the recording industry."

The result is a change in behavior, though not necessarily in 
attitude. "It's not like people are happily embracing this message,'' 
he said, "but there are consequences now to what they are doing."

Mr. Rainie said that the steep drop represented a sharp turnaround 
among Internet users. "I'm trying to think of any significant 
Internet activity that was popular, and on an upswing, and saw a 
decline of this level," he said.

A representative of the recording industry hailed the news from Pew. 
"This is another data point that tells us that the lawsuits have had 
an impact," said Mitch Bainwol, the chairman and chief executive of 
the recording association. He called the new figures "encouraging" 
and said that, along with other measures that his group tracks 
internally, "it tells us that we're on the right track, and ought to 
continue with the lawsuits."

The industry was dealt a setback last month when a federal court 
ruled that it could not use a special fast-track process to force 
Internet service providers to unmask file traders so that they could 
be sued. But Mr. Bainwol said that the industry would continue to 
"vigorously defend our rights" through lawsuits, even if the legal 
procedure they have to follow to initiate the suits is more 
cumbersome and expensive.

The new study comes as other measures of consumer activity suggest 
that the industry's slide of the last several years might be slowing. 
Year-end figures released last week by Nielsen SoundScan showed that 
fourth-quarter sales of compact discs were up 5.6 percent over the 
same quarter a year earlier, and that CD sales for 2003 were down 2 
percent from 2002. The overall music business, which includes sales 
of 19.2 million digital tracks since the end of June, was down 0.8 
percent compared with sales from the previous year, Nielsen said.

While other evidence also points to a sharp drop in online music 
swapping among Americans, some experts on the downloading world said 
that the Pew figures might overstate the drop in file sharing. For 
one thing, respondents to surveys could be more reluctant, in light 
of the lawsuits, to admit to engaging in an activity that could get 
them into legal trouble.

"I think it's not unreasonable to believe that most folks have at 
least heard of the R.I.A.A. lawsuits and probably figure that telling 
a stranger on the phone about their downloading isn't a very good 
idea," said Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that has fought the 
industry. At the same time, some people may have gone to greater 
effort to mask their online activities, including going to 
alternatives for trading music that are harder to track, including 
so-called darknets, file-sharing networks with restricted membership.

Rob Glaser, the chief executive of RealNetworks, which makes software 
that plays music and video, said that he suspected that an 
unwillingness to admit to downloading could be skewing the Pew 
results, and that the survey went farther than other data he had 
seen. Moreover, core Internet users, like college students, have not 
changed much, he said. "The mind-set on college campuses,'' he said, 
"is still, 'Whatever.' ''

If anything, use of file sharing is still on the rise, said Eric 
Garland, the chief executive BigChampagne, an online media 
measurement company. "We have empirical evidence that the use of 
popular file-sharing services like Kazaa, both in terms of the number 
of users and in terms of the volume of material, is up, and up 
dramatically" over the time measured in the study, he said.

Even though some bias could be creeping into the survey because of 
the legal problems with downloading, Mr. Rainie said, the report 
provides clear evidence of a significant change in behavior.

"My guess is that a portion of our respondents are no longer fessing 
up downloading," he said. "But that can't account for the full 
dropoff in the downloader population."

While services like Kazaa claim that file sharing on their networks 
continues to rise, those increases probably reflect global usage and 
not what is going on within the United States, he said.

The Pew results are supported by new figures from a consumer 
monitoring firm, comScore Media Metrix, which were released along 
with the Pew report. The comScore data showed a significant drop in 
the number of computers in the United States running four of the most 
popular peer-to-peer file sharing programs compared with levels a 
year ago. Use of Kazaa, the largest program, fell 15 percent, while 
WinMX fell 25 percent; BearShare, 9 percent; and Grokster, 59 percent.

To Ms. Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lawsuits may 
have helped the industry address the problem of downloading, but they 
cannot fix a broader issue: giving people the music that they 
actually want to buy. "Who will the labels blame next if file sharing 
actually has gone down,'' she asked, "but they still haven't seen a 
corresponding bump in their revenues?"

-- 
Carrie McLaren
Editor, Stay Free!
www.stayfreemagazine.org
www.illegal-art.org
718.398.9324