Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:
> [...]. This isn't a case of selling spark plugs on 
> Sunday: real entities suffer real financial harm.

Left to be proven, entirely.

The CD market has reached a point of maturity, where it's not suprising 
demands lowers. The majors have used very extensive marketing to sell 
their products instead of working on the roots and the quality of 
product, it's not surprising it backfires.
This can explain declining sales as well as piracy.

About piracy itself, on one side the number of songs downloaded has 
almost no relation with the number of songs the pirate would really have 
been willing to pay for if the piracy option had not been available.

But what's more, downloading does make publicity for artists and spurge 
interest for music, and that can actually lead to buy more music that if 
you were not downloading.

At the end, it requires detailled analyze to say if it's more harming 
than beneficial economically (for exemple, it's clear than the pirating 
of some of Microsoft's product has helped Microsoft crush competition, 
because users are either using a legal version of the Microsoft product, 
or a pirated copy, but almost never the competition's cheaper 
alternatives), and it shows they are ways in which smart music's market 
actors could use it to their benefits instead of fighting it.

This of course is not intended to say anything about the legality of 
piracy, just about whether it does necessarily have a huge negative 
economic impact.