People pirating free album

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 19 Oct 2007 at 12:34

Despite Radiohead's new album being free to download after the band invited listeners to pay whatever they wanted, a study reveals that thousands of users are still pirating it from peer to peer sites.

Big Champagne, a peer to peer analyst company, claims it monitored 240,000 BitTorrent downloads of In Rainbows on the day it was released, and estimates that there are around 100,000 new torrent downloads each day. That means illegal copies of the record will soon exceed the 1.2 million acquired from the band's official website so far.

Big Champagne's chief executive Eric Garland says that it is not unusual for peer to peer downloads to exceed sales, but he was surprised that it was the case with the Radiohead album. He says he can only put it down to habit.

"People don't know Radiohead's site," he tells Forbes in an interview. "They do know their favourite BitTorrent site and they use it every day. It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version."

He added that price does not appear to be a factor, which could prove a powerful counterpoint to the argument that record companies could eliminate file sharing simply by cutting the price of CDs and downloads.

"If people normally choose peer to peer over authorised channels because P2P is cheaper, we would expect customers to shift toward the authorised channel when it offers a zero price," notes Professor Ed Felten, a digital content and DRM expert on his blog.

"But if people choose peer to peer for convenience, then we'd expect a shift toward more peer to peer use for this album, because people have fewer moral qualms about peer to peer downloading this album than they would for a normal album."