Here's a surprise: recording industry revenues actually grew in 13 major world markets in 2009. Australia, Mexico, South Korea, Sweden, the UK, and Brazil were all among the countries that saw revenue increases, and the global music business says this proves the need for tougher anti-piracy laws.

"South Korea and Sweden in particular saw striking returns to growth," said global recording industry trade group IFPI, "showing how an improved legal environment can help impact on legitimate music sales."

And it might be true! The data, though, is ambiguous. Sweden did get a new law in 2009 that gave rightsholders a court-mediated method for getting the names of accused infringers, and The Pirate Bay admins went on trial. But both of those tactics have been usable in the US for years (remember the Grokster case, and all those P2P lawsuits against individuals?). So why did the US account for the majority of the worldwide recording industry losses in 2009 even as Sweden's record industry grew? It can't just be the "improved legal environment" in Sweden.

And how do you explain the case of Australia? This is the country where a federal judge recently issued a 200+ page opinion in which he ruled that ISPs have no responsibility even to act on warning letters from rightsholders, much less have any responsibility to disconnect users from the Internet. Yet revenue is up. Mexico isn't cracking down hard on P2P users, yet revenue is up.

The industry's preferred legal solution continues to be graduated response ending in an Internet disconnection, but a quick look at IFPI's data shows no compelling reason to adopt such a draconian punishment as the final step in the process.

In South Korea, the first country in the world to implement a "three strikes" law that disconnects repeat file-sharers, 30,000 infringement warnings were sent in the last year, but not a single South Korean has been disconnected. Yet revenue is up.

Several ISPs in the UK were forwarding infringement letters to subscribers in 2009, but none were disconnecting users. Even the recently passed Digital Economy bill doesn't allow for such disconnections for at least another year. Yet revenue is up.

And IFPI doesn't list France as a country where revenue is up... despite the fact that France passed Europe's toughest Internet disconnection law last year. In fact, a recent French study found that total Internet piracy had actually increased in France since the law passed, though it migrated from P2P to HTTP streaming and one-click download sites.

So what's been driving the growth? The legal environment may have some effect, but new business models are also making an impact. Sweden, for instance, is the home of Spotify, a hugely popular European ad-supported music service. Even IFPI attributes the growth to a combination of legal changes and "the launch of popular legitimate services."

Seeing this sort of industry data appear year after year, we're left with two thoughts. First, innovation is crucial—make it easier to use Hulu and Spotify than it is to download P2P versions of TV shows and music, and many pirates will go legit.

Second, the industry has overreached on "three strikes," and it's not even necessary—Internet disconnections have stirred up powerful waves of discontent, and there's no clear correlation between such laws and industry revenue growth. Settling for a solution that would garner widespread support, such as the forwarding of warning letters and possible connection throttling or an appropriate, small fine as a final step (with judicial oversight), would have gone a long way toward removing the mask of anonymity from file-sharing. Plenty of reasonable people would have supported such limited, targeted steps; reaching for less would have achieved more.

Instead, the industry pushes Internet disconnections and ACTA. And if it can't pass laws, it starts suing individual ISPs instead (as the recording industry has done in Ireland and the film industry has done in Australia).

When more than 30 countries saw double-digit growth rates in digital music sales in 2009 (and 17 of these were over 40 percent!) and 13 major markets saw overall revenue growth, it's clear that the recording industry isn't about to shrivel up and disappear. Still, worldwide, the market did contract by 7 percent, most of that due to the US and Japanese markets. IFPI boss John Kennedy sees a return to growth for his business, but this depends on "how quickly governments can act to deal with piracy."