The File Sharing Experiment project tries to demonstrate how file sharing actually helps the music, movie, and software industry, and hopes to convince them that their money would be better spent taking advantage of this market rather than trying to exterminate it.

People are encouraged to add to the file sharing database the item(s) and price(s) they have purchased, and would not have bought if they hadn’t first downloaded/shared identical or related files.

When I checked this morning, there was some 298822.02 dollars in reported sales and the site has been up for one week.

As Matt Haughey reminds: You could find anything on Napster, but rarely could you find complete albums, so the service had the effect of promoting CD sales. I would often surf others’ music lists whenever I noticed things I liked, download the things I hadn’t ever heard of, then I’d end up buying CDs from Amazon.

From Creative Commoms Weblog.