Music Pirates Not So Evil After All?

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a branch of the Australian music industry is reporting that illegal music sharing may not be such a horrible thing after all. "The study, conducted by two researchers at the University of London for the Canadian Government, found people downloaded songs illegally because they wanted to hear them before buying or because they were not available in stores. 'We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P (peer-to-peer) download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year,' the researchers found." While I wouldn't hold my breath to suddenly see the RIAA offering all their music for free, it would be nice to get some people to start thinking through things before reaching for the beatstick.