Page:United States Reports, Volume 545.djvu/1014

 , J., concurring (file sharing has caused a decline in music sales), and Press Release, Informa Telecoms & Media, Steady Download Growth Defies P2P (Dec. 6, 2004), http://www.informatm.com (citing Informa Media Group Report, Music on the Internet (5th ed. 2004)) (estimating total lost sales to the music industry in the range of $2 billion annually), with F. Oberholzer & K. Strumpf, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis 24 (Mar. 2004), www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf (academic study concluding that “file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album”), and D. McGuire, Study: File Sharing No Threat to Music Sales (Mar. 29, 2004), dyn/A34300-2004Mar29?language=printer http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp dyn/A34300-2004Mar29?language=printer (discussing mixed evidence).

The extent to which related production has actually and resultingly declined remains uncertain, though there is good reason to believe that the decline, if any, is not substantial. See, e.g., M. Madden, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Artists, Musicians, and the Internet 21 (Dec. 5, 2004), http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Artists.Musicians_Report.pdf (nearly 70% of musicians believe that file sharing is a minor threat or no threat at all to creative industries); Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, 114 Yale L.J. 273, 351–352 (2004) (“Much of the actual ﬂow of revenue to artists—from performances and other sources—is stable even assuming a complete displacement of the CD market by peer to peer distribution …. [I]t would be silly to think that music, a cultural form without which no human society has existed, will cease to be in our world [because of illegal file swapping]”).

More importantly, copyright holders at least potentially have other tools available to reduce piracy and to abate whatever threat it poses to creative production. As today’s opinion makes clear, a copyright holder may proceed against