s. cinar <a### [at] bcom> wrote:
> > >    "In 2005, music sales in the UK fell by 5%. Music piracy represents a
> > > significant global problem."

> >   That's quite an amusing sentence since it contains so many non-sequitur
> > fallacies.

> I don't think it's meant to be a logical deduction (it's *two separate*
> sentences), just statement of some facts.

  Maybe technically you could see it like that, but most people will see
a "because" between the two sentences, and I'm quite sure the writer more
or less implied that.

> That said, saying that sales would have declined anyway even if hundereds of
> millions of teenagers were not pirating music over the internet is, well,
> nonsense. Did piracy reduce sales? Sure. Was piracy avoidable in the
> Internet age? No, not with the current structure of the internet anyway. It
> seems inevitable to me that things will have to change, for better or worse.

  Nobody denies that music piracy happens. However, proving that music
piracy is the reason for decreased sales is quite much harder.

  If I'm not mistaken, something similar has happened before: Radio stations
started broadcasting music, and some time after music sales dropped quite
a lot. Of course the music industry, even today, likes to make a correlation.
What they don't like to mention is that this drop happened after 1929,
which is a much more likely explanation for the decreased sales.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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