In a landmark event, Western District of Virginia Judge James P. Jones ruled in favor of torrent admin Daniel Dove, 27, against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In his 16-page resolution, Jones overturned the initial ruling which convicted Dove with conspiracy and copyright infringement.
In response to this decision, recording industry including Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG, and Vivendi Universal said that the main reason for its declining sales is that people are continuously sharing files, which makes this activity illegal.
While it cannot be denied that recording and music industries are experiencing declining sales, file-sharers should not be the one to blame. As most countries are now suffering from economic recession, any dispensable commodity will inevitably experience low sales as consumers will try to spend less.
And dispensable commodities include music and movie CDs.
It has long been claimed by movie and music industry that file-sharing is the primary reason for its declining sales. But contrary to this, economic experts believe people who download music and movie contents for free will not necessary spend money to acquire these, saying there is really no correlation between the slumping sales and increase of downloaded materials.
There are many cases wherein judges ruled in favor file-sharers and torrent admins as recording industry failed to provide hard proof regarding the correlation between loss of sales and popularity of torrent sites.
Just recently, RIAA withdraw its lawsuit against more than 35,000 file-sharers. But despite this event, the industry is planning other ways to track down people who will download music and movie contents.