Rich Fiscus
26 Feb 2009 13:18
As the Pirate Bay trial continues in Sweden, the prosecution seems to lose credibility every day. The last two days' proceedings highlight a distinct lack of evidence or legal arguments on the part of prosecutors and their recording industry counterparts.
Earlier this week a so-called expert provided by the IFPI managed to prove only that his investigation of The Pirate Bay was tainted by inaccurate assumptions about how BitTorrent works. This was followed by a day of (conveniently evidence-free) recording industry claims of P2P downloads harming the music industry.
There's probably a good reason he didn't try to back this up with actual numbers (outside of CD sales) - because they numbers don't back him up at all. According to Billboard Magazine, concert attendance in 2008 was the same as 2007 despite higher ticket prices.
CD sales, on the other hand, were down significantly. In other words the music industry is doing fine as long as you're talking about musicians rather than label executives.
Thursday's testimony came from experts who aren't on label payrolls, and predictably it brought the prosecution's evidence into question.
Equally predictable was the reaction of IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky. Rather than adressing Professor Roger Wallis' claim that P2P downloaders spend more money on music than most other people, Danowsky chose to question his credentials.
Wallis attributes lower spending on music to the growth of other industries, such as video games. Retail trends from recent years would seem to back his assertion.
He also pointed out how restrictive music licensing makes it impossible to buy some music online no matter how hard you try to pay for it. This is nothing new for Wallis who has criticized the industry in the past for their attempts to control internet distribution rather than profiting from it.
Is it any surprise the defendants are so confident in the trial's outcome? It's hard to believe they can lose based on the prosecution's evidence.
Quite frankly they don't seem to have any.