Andrew Dubber has a great take on the "piracy" issue as it relates to music:

I'd also suggest that piracy is not something that tends to happen on the scale that the mainstream media seems to suggest. Unauthorised duplication goes on, but not piracy. The idea that these two things are the same is one that major record labels tend to be quite fond of, but it bears no resemblance to either external reality, or what words actually mean.

The key question to ask yourself is whether those unauthorized copies actually represent a lost sale or not. As Andrew puts it:

When asking "€˜Should I be worried about piracy?" the real underlying question is about whether there is a significant potential loss of income as a result of unauthorised copying. And here we're talking about what'€™s generally referred to as the "€˜Lost Sale"€™.

The one off copies aren't costing you much, and can't be stopped anyway - it's the organized, mass copying efforts (organized crime) that are a real problem. In general, when a copy floats to someone through a peer network, the liklihood of a future purchase of new music probably goes up. The person listening to music on the radio didn't pay directly, but the hope is, it will drive a sale. The same goes for peer sharing. The only thing lost is the ad revenue (and that was mostly a mutually agreed upon fiction anyway).

In the PR game, some people say that any publicity (good or bad) is a net positive. I wouldn't go that far, but with peer music sharing, it is true - the individual level sharing of music should be looked at as ad hoc marketing. The beauty of it is, you don't have to pay an agency for it, and it's almost certainly more effective.

Technorati Tags: sharing, peer to peer, copyright