Piracy, it seems, is about more than price. That's one of the surprising discoveries to come out of an experiment by the British band Radiohead last week. On Thursday, the group made its latest album, In Rainbows, available for direct downloading from the Web at an unusual price: whatever fans feel like paying. Downloaders who want to pay nothing can enter "zero" in the site's price field and download the album for free.

But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn't been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just as they might with any other pirated album- the MP3s made available for download were only encoded at 160kbps - a far cry from CD quality and a lower bit-rate than digital downloads available from iTunes and other online music vendors. One can only hope that In Rainbows piracy doesn't discourage other artists from pursuing novel approaches to content distribution. However, if allowing consumers to name their own price for a digital download doesn't curb illegal file sharing, it seems unlikely that anything will.

This crap reads like a FUD campaign.

The number of "pirated" copies in circulation of In Rainbow as approved of by you or me is irrelevant, only Radiohead's opinion on it matters. And being that they allow you to pay zero for it I assume that they want you, the consumer, to pay what you actually think it's worth. Where you got it from then becomes irrelevant.

Further on the almost blatantly essential question to ask have been overlooked. How many sales have they made and how much money did they make? When we get to compare those figures with the traditional way of sales and distribution, only then, will we know if this has been a (financial) success or not.

I myself have paid for In Rainbows, it was worth £5 to me, with the total landing on £5.45 with handling. No, I am not happy with 160kbit mp3's and will definitely fish up a higher quality rip whenever I stumble across it.

Finally, there will always be pirates around, even when things are "free", for really what use is "free" when you do not or can not meet the requirements for it or when "free" comes with a choking collar.