Source: IFPI, “IFPI Digital Music Report-2008,” January 24, 2008, pg. 18.

According to Agence France Presse, original music producers account for 5 to 10 percent of sales in the $200 million music market in Bangladesh. The remaining $180 million are sales of pirated copies. Source: Shafiq Alam, AFP, ” Bangladesh music producers take law into own hands to fight piracy,” Yahoo News, August 17, 2006.

The IFPI states that the ratio of unlicensed digital tracks downloaded to licensed tracks is about 20 to 1. Source: IFPI, “Digital Music Report 2008-Summary,” January 24, 2008.

Source: Verne Koptoff, “Recording industry threatens to sue students,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 2008, (accessed: January 22, 2008)

As of October 2007, the market in illegal downloading of music was growing at a rate of 60 percent a year, and was ten times the size of the legal downloading services. Source: Joseph Menn, ” File-sharing verdict a triump for record labels,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2007.

Bloomberg News reported that more than half of U.S. college students downloaded music and movies in 2006. Collectively, college students accounted for 1.3 billion illegal downloads in 2006. Two thirds of their music were obtained thorough illegal downloads. Source: Don Jeffrey, ” Music industry steps up Campus Anti-Piracy Campaign (Update3), Bloomberg.com, March 21, 2007, and Amy [...]

In China in 2006, one-fifth of searches on baidu.com was for unlicensed MP3’s. Baidu.com is China’s leading search engine with 50 percent of online searches conducted through its website. Source: Clive Thompson, ” Google in China: The Big Disconnect,” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey stated on Friday that sales of counterfeit goods and piracy are funding terrorist groups around the world. From the AP: Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned Friday that the huge profits generated from piracy and counterfeiting are increasingly flowing into the coffers of terrorist groups. In remarks to Silicon Valley executives at the Tech [...]

From the Guardian’s Victor Keegan’s “Why piracy isn’t such a bad thing for music”: The industry claims there are 20 illegal downloads for every legal one, yet it is clearly not affecting the real world on that scale. If a teenager downloads 20,000 tracks, what does he or she do with them? Sell them to others, [...]

The Washington Post reported on the how online music community imeen.com went from being labeled a pirate organization to a marketing tool for Warner Music. From the Washington Post: For many music-oriented Web start-ups, a copyright lawsuit can be a death sentence. But for Imeem, getting sued by one of the biggest record labels played a pivotal [...]