Did Piracy Drop When Limewire Vanished?

Last October, the big music labels got the courts to shut down Limewire, one of the best-known file-sharing services on the Web. Normally, shutting down a piracy site is simply a whack-a-mole exercise, but research firm NPD says this time is different: It says peer-to-peer filesharing in the U.S. dropped from 12 percent of Web users to 9 percent between Q3 of 2010 and Q4. These numbers are from a self-reported survey, so use as much salt as you’d like.