COPYCENSE

"The battle over digital copyrights and illegal file sharing is often portrayed as a struggle between Internet scofflaws and greedy corporations. Online music junkies with no sense of the marketplace, the argument goes, want to download, copy and share copyrighted materials without restriction. The recording industry, on the other hand, wants to squeeze dollars – by lawsuit and legislation, if necessary – from its property.

"A survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an arm of the Pew Research Center in Washington, aims to change that. The report, ‘Artists, Musicians and the Internet,’ combines and compares the opinions of three groups: the general public, those who identify themselves as artists of various stripes (including filmmakers, writers and digital artists) and a somewhat more self-selecting category of musicians.

"Most notably, it is the first large-scale snapshot of what the people who actually produce the goods that downloaders seek (and that the industry jealously guards) think about the Internet and file-sharing."

Tom Zeller Jr. Pew File-Sharing Survey Gives a Voice to Artists. The New York Times. Dec. 6, 2004.

Mary Madden. Artists, Musicians and the Internet (.pdf) Pew Internet and American Life Project. Dec. 5, 2004.

(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)

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