A Belgian weekly ran a sidebar that caught the eye of both BoingBoing and Alan Cross. The cause of the 5 deaths and dozens of injuries from the stage collapse at the Pukkelpop concert is file sharing.
The insurance-industry argument goes something like this:
- File-sharing reduces record sales.
- Reduced record sales mean greater demand for live concerts.
- If people just bought recordings of music, their demand for attending concerts would diminish.
- If concert attendance drops, the size of the stages would drop, so that when the stages do collapse, the number of people crushed by them would also drop.
"Oh," said Josh, "I hadn't thought of that." - and promptly vanished in a puff of derp.
