Robert Hutton of Pollera Speaks to Commons Musician

A little over a week ago, I posted an article entitled, "Pollera & the CRIA Part Ways," a news article aggregated from Michael Geists's blog.

Well to my great surprise, in only the second comment on this blog, who would respond but Robert Hutton, Exec. VP of Pollera objecting to some of the things said in the article.  I'm all for being held accountable for my words, so I did my research and found that I should have done more research.  I mis/over-stated a some things that definitely deserve correction.

To start, the title of the article is misleading.  It implies a separation due to disagreement and I had no evidence of that aside from here-say.  Secondly, Robert objected to the phrase, "[Pollera] changed its stance on the interpretation of data" saying in his reply to Michael Geist:

"research firms do not publish client studies - the clients do, and hence, often interpretation is not under the researcher's control."

I could go on an on about the matter, but instead I'll provide you a bunch of links for an evening of reading enjoyment.

• "War of Words Erupt in Canadian Copyright Debate" from Zeropaid - the article that started this whole thing along with Robert's original comment (at the end of the article).
• Michael Geist's article, "Pollara Changes Its Tune On Music Downloading" and Robert's three comments about the article.
• Our article, "Pollera & the CRIA Part Ways."

Read through the comments on our article to to see the conversation between Michael and myself.  He provides some really interesting insights into the nature and biases of polling data.