RIAA Keeps Trying To Spin Hadopi's Clear Failure Into A Success Story

from the how-sad dept

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It's one thing to make bad predictions or be focused on the wrong thing -- but to totally spin the data to pretend you were right all along when it's pretty clear you were wrong... well, that's just delusional. And that appears to be the situation the RIAA is in. You may recall the fact that despite Hadopi trying to declare success because unauthorized file sharing appeared to have dropped off considerably, it was pretty clear the program was a failure because music sales continued to drop . And if the point of this kind of crackdown is to help the industry, then it seems like a pretty big failure. But, in the RIAA, apparently "failure is not an option" -- so they just take a clear story of failure and pretend it's a giant success , because therea boost in digital sales and subscriptions -- even if overall revenue is down.But this argument makes no sense. You can't just ignore the part of the market you don't like when it's inconvenient. The RIAA tries to get around this solely by focusing on growth within digital (and ignoring the continued free fall in analog sales). But if we're talking about the overall music market, shouldn't that be seen in how the impact is measured? Besides, as Saskia Walzel rightly points out, it appears that the growth in digital services that the RIAA trumpets as proof that Hadopi worked were seen in other countries as well -- including countries without such a draconian three strikes policy. So, while there may be a correlation between three strikes and people paying, the evidence of any sort of causal relationship is totally missing. The RIAA can't just pretend that the changes in France were due to Hadopi when the evidence suggests otherwise. At least someone should call them out for the claim.

Filed Under: file sharing, france, hadopi, piracy

Companies: riaa