The Financial Times has an interesting piece (not behind the paywall, at least not yet) on the extent of the filesharing problem in the UK. It quotes a report by Musicmetric, and comes up with a (literally) headline figure of £500 million for the loss to the record industry in this country. I suspect this falls into the trap of assuming that all, or a sizeable proportion of, the downloads from illegal sharing sites represent lost sales, which was never the case back in the old days before I knew what copyright was when I used to tape schoolmates' LPs and let them do the same to mine. Given that this was pre-Dark Side of the Moon and Tubular Bells, I'm fairly confident that I won't be pursued. And I will also argue in mitigation that the result of taping from an LP was in no way whatsoever an acceptable substitute: it was usually pretty difficult to make out what you were listening to.
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