Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no

A paper from the London School of Economics that tries to do more than just challenge the UK's Digital Economy Act, passed last year. "Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection" argues that everything Big Content says about file sharing is wrong.

In fact, it suggests that file sharing is the future, and that revenue downturns can largely be explained by other forces. "The music industry is performing better than is being claimed and declining sales can be explained by other factors in addition to illegal filesharing," say Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng of LSE's Department of Media Studies. "The negative framing of the debate about file-sharing and copyright protection threatens to stifle the very same creative industry the Act aims to stimulate."