Net music piracy does not harm record sales'

Internet piracy of music is not responsible for the decline in CD sales, say the researchers behind a major new statistical study.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee at Harvard Business School in Massachusetts and Koleman Strumpf at the University of North Carolina track millions of music files downloaded through the OpenNap network file sharing and compared them with CD sales of music itself .

The music industry often claims that illegal file-trading is responsible for the reduction of legal music sales. The industry says that this argument is the reason for their legal campaign to sue individual file traders over the past year.

However, the researchers conclude: "Most cases, file sharing can explain a small part of this decline."