Yeah, but you do not question the validity of this research. Others have. Read here: http://torrentfreak.com/tech-news-sites-tout-misleading-bittorrent-piracy-study-100724/

Dear Luigi,
Long time no comment! Good to hear from you. I know of the Torrentfreak article. As you have undoubtedly seen, we link to it. The reason I do not overtly question the validity of the study is, as I stated, that we are in no position to do so in a serious manner. I think Ernesto raises some interesting points to question the study, but I can't fully appreciate how they influence the validity of the entire report.
As the study is a product of science, I think the authors are right to say that they have made their methods and results public and that it is now up to peer reviewers to either find fault with the study or not. For that reason, I choose to find the scientific study more reliable than a blogpost, however well-informed and witty. Moreso because the results fit snugly in earlier findings of similar studies. Still, I think that the discussion is very interesting and hope that it leads to future research. After all, a debate that is not backed by facts and figures is just a hollow argument, wouldn't you agree?

Yeah, I agree, of course. It's just its been numerously shown that those official reports deal out many fake data. And a blog post or not, it does provide serious counterarguments. We should not be blinded by "scientific study". It does not seem to be very scientific after all. If they made such serious mistakes, it would be a good idea to question the validity of the report and not base any conclusions based on that.

But in general I find any argument that "file sharing has mostly legal content" to be irrelevant (and wrong). What I find relevant is that non-commercial file sharing should be legal. This is what needs to be discussed and worked on.

Dear Luigi,
You're absolutely right that no data should be taken at face value. That is why the scientific method of replicable studies was developed in the first place. Torrentfreak did indeed provide serious arguments to question the validity of the study, that's why we wrote an update to the story.
Regarding legalised non-commercial file-sharing, I see three main drawbacks: first is that i'm not so sure about the non-commercial part. Yes, it's free to downloaders, but what about elsewhere in the chain? How about the people who upload or provide a key role in distribution? I think that there are serious commercial incentives there.
Second is, and we discussed that before, I think business models are the best way to ensure that those who wish to consume entertainment pay for it and those who do not want to consume, don't pay. Legalised downloading requires another way to remunerate content producers, like an internet levy. For such a system to work properly, it would require the same invasive monitoring of internet traffic that is the strong counterargument for enforcing copyright online. And I don't think you can have it both ways. When downloading is legalised, developing business models becomes unfeasable, as they would need to compete with free content.
Third is a moral argument. I feel that those who invest in creating work, be it tangible or not, should have a serious say in what happens with their work and that their interests should be taken seriously in developing a solution.
How do you propose to go about it? Have you found good examples pointing towards a solution?

Thanks for posting a follow up! I think this is a good way of showing all the sides of the argument. As for you three points, I will answer those to the best of my ability.
1. If someone along the chain of free distribution makes money organizing such distribution, I do not see this as a problem. Warner and EMI also do not produce music but gain money along the chain. The problem many see with someone getting money by opening a torrent site is that they are not giving money back to the artists. Assuming that artist should get money by means of distribution, we should first of all remember that big media companies also did not give too much back. In my line of work I am working directly with all the majors and we are talking to popular stars in Russia (where I am from) and the contracts they have with those majors have nothing to do with "supporting the artist". So even biggest names are not always in the plus and they have to do quite a lot of appearances and touring to make a decent living. That is just to point out that artists are not that great with the classical distribution model either. In fact, there is this interview with Mick Jagger where he says that there was a short period of time when a popular band could get some good profit out of selling records, he says between 1975-1995. Before that and after that even popular bands, he says, did not get any profit out of selling cds. So this one is important to understand. You cannot check if I indeed work with majors, I have no quick way of proving that, but their standard contracts are not news and you can check this on the Internet, as well as this Jagger interview. But the artists had to stick with majors because that meant promotion.
Torrent sites offer free distribution both for the artist and for his audience. This is what artists were getting for most of the time anyway.
2. A business model ensures not only that those who don't want the entertainment don't pay, but also that those who cannot pay do not get it. And I do not want culture to be served on a pay per view basis. This is a really serious problem. We came all the way to make education and culture available to everyone and now we are trying to take it back and leave education and culture to the rich.
On the other hand, in my opinion approaching this question from a business model point of view is a bit odd. After all, music was not a business but a craft for all our history. The problem is not in business models, the problem is that music is regarded as a business opportunity, while it is one of the worst fields of human activity to do business with. Its like doing business with science - very quickly it stops being science and becomes something else, usually unpleasant.
I have many friends who are professional musicians. They work in different fields - computer game music and such, classical music, rock/folk scenes. Although in the last decade technology, according to the law, has threatened all artists, the income of my friends and their incentives did not seem to change a bit. They live normal lives and do not care if their works are copied or not. The reason is simple - very few musicians actually depend on selling copies of their work. Main line of work is making a music as an order (one time pay) and playing gigs. Copyright laws never really worked in Russia, but I do not see hell unleashing as pro-copyright organizations predict. Their analysis is not backed up by real life. Music scene in Russia is very rich and I have not seen any starving artists on the streets.
So if the downloads are free, the only people who have a problem are musicians who initially depended on selling copies of their work. They will have to reorganize their business. Did you know that when the printing press was invented, copyists who made a living by copying books with ink actually sued the inventor, claiming he dries out their business?
And finally, if EMI and Warner

Hello Louigi, Thanks for your elaborate and eloquent post! You raise many interesting points and argue them well. Still, I do not always agree, I’m afraid. In the end, I feel this is very much a discussion about core assumptions about how societies should be organised and the balance that we strike between public and private interests. In response to your three points:1) You are absolutely right that the music industry does not consist of saints and that it does not always act in the interest of artists. I also agree that their behaviour needs to change to better reflect the current technological options and the evolution of demand for their products. Torrent sites, as you say, provide a superior means of distribution that artists and labels could or should embrace. However, I would argue that these two arguments do not make file-sharing right. I still think that the principle of copyright, trying to strike a balance between the free flow of knowledge and creating the opportunity for the creators of content to recoup their investment, is a valid one. That balance may be currently skewed, but wanton file-sharing is not the way to redress it. 2) Yes, there is a certain elitism in using market systems to distribute goods. It benefits the rich more than it does the poor. However, I have not yet come across a way to organise complex societies that did not have a similar division. I think the good thing about our modern and globalised economies is that prices can be relatively low, allowing greater numbers of people access to things like music and movies. On the other hand, as we’ve discussed before, this commodification of culture and its abundant production has not always benefitted quality. Music used to be a craft, indeed. However, I do not agree that crafts were not business. Quite the contrary. Since the middle ages, craftsmen organised themselves in guild in order to improve their (economic) efficiency. You have probably read this book, but if not, I can heartily recommend Adrian Johns' Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates. I share your interest in the historical context, but I also strongly feel about socio-technical evolution as a driver for change, rendering history important as a context for the change, but not necessarily as a model to be emulated. Musicians may have been craftsmen, as that was at the time an efficient way of organising the trade. The world was a completely different place back then. 3) When societies functioned on a small scale, with few interdependencies between semi-autonomous groups of people in a clan or village, interpersonal contacts, local hierarchies and reliance on one another often sufficed as a way to organise them. However, with these groups of people becoming increasingly interdependent, codified rules became necessary. So rights would be upheld even if you don’t know someone. In the modern context, where markets are global, so, I feel, should authors’ rights be to make a living on their works. I can’t say I find the scenario you paint about an author becoming all-powerful too likely. Most societies have adopted copyright exemptions like fair use to cover situations in which copyright would be too intrusive. Am I correct in assuming that you don’t favour copyleft alternatives like creative commons? After all, they do assume that authorship should be recognised and that authors do have a say in what they allow to happen with their works.

I like Creative Commons, but I see them as a workaround. Using a CC license gives me a message that in order to achieve natural freedom for art and knowledge, we nowadays have to use some license. It does not give me a message that authors are entitled to control what people do with their work, on the contrary.
A lot of what you say I actually agree with also. Believe it or not, what you say does not contradict a lot what I say, simply because I mean a lot of what I say in a different context.
For instance, low price on culture is missing the point. Even if anyone in question can afford it, the whole situation of needing money in order to engage in an activity, which otherwise, without an artificial limitation, would be free in all senses, is a situation which can not be resolved by any rules but legalization only. Without legalization there will always be a very strong conflict. As Eben Moglen put it, informational battles today are so rough because for the first time in the history of mankind both sides are of equal power. I simply do not believe that there is any practical method to artificially limit the use of information.
2. Recouping investment is fine, but I do not understand why you insist on a music "industry"? In my line of argument I've shown that it is fairly recent and there are other ways musicians recoup their investments. And that they actually do and live fine, with file sharing which, if not formally legal, is legal to most people in their minds.
I also do not believe that copyright really does help recoup investments. Again, most musicians I know do not depend on it. It is a very recent thing. Perhaps the world now is very different and requires copyright. I need some solid proof - in Russia we have arts and no working copyrights - everyone seems quite fine.
As for crafts vs business, this is a state of mind kinda thing. A craft, the way I mean it, is something you do in your family, something that is the basis of your life. It is what you are associated with. Your main goal is perfecting your craft, doing it. And this is what feeds you.
A business is an activity the main goal of which is to make money. What is used to get to that goal is secondary. Perfecting it is only interesting in relation to how much money it will bring. And if it stops bringing money, the activity can be changed to something else. This is an abolutely different mind set.
All in all, I would love for our discussion to find what root statement do we see differently.

"In all, these studies do not seem to support the pirate’s hypothesis that file-sharing is a tool that supports the free flow of open-sourced or publicly licensed works. What we see here is the human economic mind at work: why pay for content when there is an abundant free supply of Hollywood’s latest? Even when taking into account that most file-sharers are willing to pay for content, how can new business models, that I think everyone agrees should be developed, emerge in such an environment?"
This is true. Today torrents are mostly used to download copyrighted content.
But BitTorrent is a technology to transmit information. No matter for what it is used now, technology itself is just technology.
The reason for the current situation is simple - most relevant content in the world is copyrighted. That, in turn, comes out from the fact that copyright is granted by default, even if you don't want it and that the period of copyright is very long.
Not paying for something that you can get for free is reasonable.
At that time there are two ways out. One - make it impossible to get content for free. Two - create a new business model.
First way is a technical question. However, advances in computer technoogy, which itself is based on the operations of reading, copying and storing bits of information, make it fundamentally impossible to come up with a technical solution that would prevent a computer from performing its basic operations.
A method of solving the problem legally does not seem to work in real life. The ability to copy and store information only gets more convenient and more accessible, thus pronouncing it illegal would not prove to be effective. As the number of people using computer technologies increases, monitoring the situation, let alone controlling it, becomes physically impossible.
The second way of changing the business model is the only way left.
There are many ways to set up an efficient business in that domain, the obvious being official torrent centers, with subscription to using it, much like private torrent trackers. The availability of a huge catalogue, guranteed seeds and a reasonable subscription fee are a solid business model.
Fiel sharing environment is very well suited for large scale businesses, such as movie, gaming and music business and can create revenues, not possible for the standard physical media selling practices.