Talking of Feargal Sharkey, he's responded to a recent opinion piece in the Guardian regarding those recent stats that illegal downloading is "costing the economy billions of pounds and thousands of jobs".
Guardian tech man Charles Arthur argued that equating the millions of tracks illegally shared online with millions of pounds of lost revenue is stupid, because the file-sharing kids wouldn't have bought most of that music had P2P not been an option, they'd just have less music in their collection.
He also pointed out that blaming all the music business's woes on file-sharing was wrong, because it ignored the increased competition from the film and gaming industries that has emerged in the last two decades, and which competes for the same consumer pound as music sales. Arthur concludes by asking why the record industry keeps on presenting these arguments against P2P file-sharing, because the blatant holes in their claims damage their case for better online copyright protection. He's right, of course, and we've made all those points on numerous occasions in the last ten years.
But, as Feargal points out in his right to reply, the most recent stats on the loss of revenue caused by downloading didn't come from the record industry, but the government's IP Office. He also adds that while some past claims made by the record industry about the impact of P2P, both in terms of direct lost revenue and the fact it is single handedly destroying the industry, were unwise, that doesn't mean that any efforts to protect online copyrights should be immediately dismissed.
And if you just give up trying to make money out of intellectual property rights, then the industry really will lose millions, and an actually quite good creative investment system will be lost. And he's right too you know. Look at us, going all conciliatory on you.
Anyway, you don't need me to tell you all this, go read the articles yourself...