Rolling Stone has the story of a new study claiming that file sharing (music downloading) does not affect record buying. One side, of course, quickly moves to denigrate the methodology, while the other side defends it. The problem, of course, is that the general public, not to mention the lawyers at the RIAA, don't have the expertise to understand and evaluate the study, nor the arguments against it.

What ends up happening is that we just side with whomever we sided with the last fifty times this came up. It doesn't really help that, even for those of us with a little statistics and a little economics in our background, we don't have a chance to make heads or tails of the paper, because it's apparently not easily available. It's probably in some journal somewhere, and Rolling Stone doesn't even bother to tell us what journal that is.