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Big in Japan

The Globe and Mail has a story today about the success of Canadian music in Japan with Canadian artists consistently topping the charts. That's great news and good story on its own.  Too bad that the Globe again tries to link the story to file sharing.  In this case, it repeats the claim that the Canadian sales are falling apart (without referencing the fact that the 35 percent first quarter decline is misleading or acknowledging the revenues generated by the private copying levy) and contrasts that with Japan, which it says "has one of the lowest piracy rates in the industrialized world and illegal downloading is less common." It turns out that the Japanese P2P claims aren't entirely accurate either as last year, the Recording Industry Association of Japan released a study it said indicated that file sharing was on the rise in Japan.  It is worth noting that this is second article in the Globe this week that uncritically repeats the industry line, as on Tuesday there was an article titled "the music industry's piracy tune gets old" that proceeded to simply repeat an IPI study on the economic impact of file sharing that has been criticized elsewhere.

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