Impact?

Slapnose notes that the RIAA and MPAA claim P2P networks, "facilitate and promote theft and are a threat to their business, despite the fact that their sales of CDs and other music products rose 2 percent last year." This is, of course, faster than the rate at which the population is growing. But even making arguments of this sort concedes too much to the content industry (and, to be fair, this growth came after several bad years). As I've been urging, protecting the profits of the record industry is not the appropriate aim of intellectual property policy. Rather, the point of intellectual property law is to ensure that adequate incentives continue to exist for the production of new works.

Perhaps readers will write in to correct me, but I don't believe I've even heard anybody try to argue that fewer new songs are being written or recorded or that people are listening to less music than they used to. It's the availability of new music for consumption that we're supposed to be protecting here. P2P, through both authorized and unauthorized uses, obviously leads to an uptick in the number of people who listen to any given song. You would need a pretty huge decrease in the quantity of new music being recorded (and, as I say, no sign there is such a decrease at all) in order to make the case that the progress of musical arts was being seriously impeded here. P2P probably is a problem for the major record companies, both because infringement will reduce their sales potential, and also because it will make it easier for public domain and independent works to be distributed and publicized. This, however, simply isn't something IP law is supposed to prevent. The health of music-production as an endeavor is not at all the same thing as the financial status of the RIAA's membership. As I say, if there's evidence that thanks to copyright infringement kids aren't forming bands anymore, artists are quitting the business in droves to go to law school, or clubs are finding that nobody wants to go on tour anymore then that would be interesting and relevant, but I'm not familiar with any such evidence. "Rock star" isn't exactly a really crappy profession that people would be unwilling to take on if you couldn't get rich doing it.

UPDATE: See also Mark Cuban thinking along the same lines. To re-iterate my extremist line against even Cuban, however, aggregate sales aren't really all that relevant. If the music is getting made, and the music is getting listened to, well then, that's a healthy IP environment. The creation and consumption of new works is the end, sales are merely a means to that end.