One of the blogs I follow is Passive Guy (at his site called the Passive Voice), partly because he has a really good site for the latest news on the ebook front with several excerpts / re-tweets a day. And one of his posts today caught my eye given the whole Megaupload thing in the past week — the post was entitled “Piracy Does Depress Sales”. The post is an excerpt from another site by an attorney named Terry Hart, linking to a study by Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas entitled “The Metric is the Message: How Much of the Decline in Sound Recording Sales is Due to File-Sharing?”. The claim from Liebowitz? That *all* of the decline in record sales could be attributed to file-sharing.

Now many of my readers know that I did a MA in public policy. Which means I also did graduate-level stats and economics courses. So, when I see an academic making such bold claims, two things happen — first, my interest is piqued … maybe they have some ground-breaking analysis and research to support this argument, after all it’s “published” and their careers depend on on it, and if not, maybe at least an innovative approach; second, my BS detector goes haywire.… Read the rest