It's disappointing when research groups play fast and loose with words and numbers. The title of the Parks Associates piece calls P2P use piracy. This is inaccurate and misleading as the article states that P2P use is considered legal in Canada.

The Parks Associates conclusion that RIAA's lawsuit has cut the file sharing population by 15% is similarly suspect.

1. There is a huge anomaly in the study. Why is Canadian usage 30-100% higher on the three measures? Does the survey compare similar types of users?

2. Let us assume the survey does compare similar types of users. How then do we explain the hugely higher Canadian usage. Without any known cause we can only assume the simplest explanation. The Canadians in the sample were more avid music fans. Regardless of whether that's due to P2P being legal there or a sampling artifact, we must accept that as fact for this sample. Given this, it is fair to assume that Canadians are similarly more knowledgeable in P2P as one channel for obtaining their music. So Canadian usage of P2P as a percentage of music downloaders would be higher. Lastly we assume that P2P is used primarily for music and so is dependent on music downloaders.

Let us follow the numbers. 35% fewer US households download music compared to Canadians households (28% vs 43%). 82% of Canadian music downloaders use P2P. Now we would not expect that 82% of American music downloaders use P2P, since we've already established that these Americans are not as active and knowledgeable in digital music as the Canadians. Let us assume that similar to music downloading, US P2P usage is 35% lower than US Canadian usage, which results in a US P2P rate of 53%. This gives us an expected US P2P usage percentage of all households of 15% (28% music downloader x 53% P2P usage), which is almost exactly the result of the survey at 16%.

3. Lastly, while RIAA's lawsuits are a factor, they are not the only one. As the article indicates, sharing files is considered legal in Canada. I would argue that that is a much more significant factor in P2P popularity compared to the punitive action of lawsuits.

In summary, there is no direct way given the limited data to assess the effect of RIAA's lawsuits. In fact if we combine the points above, we could just as easily conclude that RIAA lawsuits INCREASED P2P usage.

Music Piracy More Common In Canada
Parks Associates
http://www.parksassociates.com/press/press_releases/2005/gdl1.html

Canadians are significantly more likely than Americans to download music files from the Internet and use peer-to-peer, file-sharing networks, according to Global Digital Living, a new multinational survey conducted by Parks Associates. Over 40% of all Canadian households with broadband download music files on a monthly basis, compared with 28% of similar American households. Likewise, one-third of all Canadian broadband households use a peer-to-peer (P2P) network each month, but in the United States, this figure is just 16%.

"In Canada, the recording industry has had a harder time fighting piracy, and so these data quantify the impact of the RIAA's legal efforts in the United States," said John Barrett, director of research for Parks Associates. "Using Canada as a benchmark, it would appear the lawsuits in the U.S. have gotten about 15% of the population to stop pirating music."

File sharing is considered legal in Canada, and Canadian isps are not required to divulge the identity of online pirates. These circumstances present a relatively "risk-free" environment for music piracy.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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