Professor Geist's regular Toronto Star Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, HTML backup article, homepage version) is the first of a two-part look at the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on the music industry. The column provides a detailed examination of the Canadian Recording Industry Association's own numbers, concluding that the claims regarding P2P's impact on the industry are greatly exaggerated. In particular, the total losses since 1999 are much smaller than is frequently claimed and the evidence further suggests that there is only a tenuous link between the losses from the past five years and file sharing activity.