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A sizable chunk of Internet traffic went dark yesterday. No, I'm not talking about a SOPA protest. The #91 Web site on the entire Internet, Megaupload, was taken down after U.S. authorities executed a warrant to seize its Virginia-based servers and arrest four of its proprietors in New Zealand. To give you some perspective: On Google AdPlanner's scale, Walmart.com is #97. Social document sharing service Scribd.com is #90. Huffington Post is #86.
To pretend it's a revelation that Megaupload trafficked in illicit material is like Claude Rains being "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" That said, its "front parlor," if you will, had many legitimate customers who had posted non-infringing files. So the big question that Colombia's NTN24 news anchor Mónica Fonseca* asked me was essentially, "What has happened to everyone's files?"
It's a familiar refrain from the music industry: revenue is down and piracy is to blame. That's the gist of the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) annual Digial Music Report, which points to a slowdown in the growth of digital music sales.
While digital music revenue has grown 1,000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing - only 6% last year, down from 9.2% growth in 2009. Digital sales comprise about a third of the industry's total revenue.
According to TorrentFreak, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) last week released their latest report, summing up the digital music landscape at the start of 2008. The IFPI claims in the report that for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads taking place. Or in other words, illegal downloading is happening at a rate that is 20 times that of legal downloading. This, says the IFPI, lead to US$3.7 billion in industry losses. But there are some big holes in that claim.
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