In a report entitled “Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection: Regulatory Responses to File-Sharing,” two researchers of the London School of Economics and Political Science claim that the British Digital Economy Act overemphasizes copyright enforcement at the expense of technological innovation.

Cammaerts and Meng argue that escalating legal threats from copyright holders has proven to only encourage new methods of bypassing new technical methods of copyright protection and means of infringement detection. Therefore upscaling copyright enforcement in the UK won't simply make file sharers cease and desist en masse, the authors claim.

The report is critical of the music industry's exclusion of music publishing and live music performances from its revenues figures. That would actually show a positive instead of a negative growth. “While file-sharing may have substantially displaced album sales, it also facilitated a broader distribution of music, which appears to have expanded awareness of smaller artists and increased demand for their live concert performances,” reads the report.

The authors suggest the music industry should step away from its hardline copyright enforcement approach and should adopt “user-friendly, hassle-free solutions to enable users to download music legally at a reasonable price.” 

Although that approach would certainly improve the music industries relations with its customers, it is questionable whether the same alternative revenue models exist for other industries faced with illegal file sharing, such as the film, game and comic industry. 

Source: ZeroPaid