"Weaker copyright leads to more artistic production." This is in shorthand the findings of Felix Oberholzer‐Gee from Harvard University and Koleman Strumpf from the University of Kansas in their most recent paper on "File Sharing and Copyright" (Chicago Journal on Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 10, Nr. 1, pp. 19–55):

Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

Moreover, they find that as files haring grows, the demand for complements to protected works raises, for instance, the demand for concerts. Equally, concert prices go up. So in the end, the income of artists has increased, not decreased.

And again, they dismantle the myth of file sharing having a massive impact on record sales: "Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing."