Sounds like, "Let's declare victory and withdraw."
The CEO of the RIAA tells USA Today, "The problem has not been eliminated," said Mitch Bainwol. "But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing thriving business and file-trading is flat."
Not so fast groove-boy.
Eric Garland, chief of BigChampagne, says his servers and trackers are seeing more file-sharing. "Nearly 10 million people," he told the newspaper, up from 8.7 million a year ago. Now, maybe they're not swapping as many music tracks, because online stores are selling millions and millions, but they're downloading something - and it's probably not all games, warez, and videos.
Album sales are down 3% this year, but Bainwol is putting on a happy face. He says digital sales are up 77%, making up for the shortfall.
At least Bainwol didn't also say "Mission Accomplished."
TechDirt headlines the storry, "RIAA Now Reaches Denial Stage." A reader commented, "I fix peoples PC's in the home, and I have found more instances of P2P file share clients on peoples' home machines today then I did before the lawsuits began."
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