One of the claims made by the record distributors is that file sharing cheats the artists out of their fair share.

What’s left off of this statement is that it’s the job of the lables to cheat the artists out of their fair share.

What’s also left unsaid, at least by the music industry, is that the artists make more money in a world where we see widespread file sharing:

An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise.

The question about IP is whether it promotes, “the progress of science and the useful arts,” and it appears here that the Jihad by the record industry against file sharers does not.

Without the competition of easy file sharing, they would just take more from the artists, which would, in classic economics anyway, decrease the incentives for artists to produce music.

The file sharing campaigns are about keeping record executives’ worthless half brothers on the payroll.