This is the full version of the edited story that I wrote for PC Pro.

Anyone can download Radiohead's latest record without paying a penny after the band invited listeners to pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows. You might have thought then, that no-on would bother using p2p to grab a copy. You'd be wrong.

Big Champagne, a leading p2p analyst, recorded 240,000 BitTorrent downloads of In Rainbows on the day it was released and with 100,000 new torrent downloads each day, unauthorised copies of the record will soon exceed the 1.2 million acquired from the band's official website.

Big Champagne's chief executive Eric Garland said that is not unusual for p2p downloads to exceed sales, but he was somewhat surprised that this was the case with the Radiohead album. And he can only put it down to habit.

“People don't know Radiohead's site,” he said. “They do know their favourite BitTorrent site and they use it every day. It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”

He added that price does not appear to be a factor that affects how much an album is swapped over p2p - contrary to the popular argument that record companies could eliminate file sharing simply by cutting the price of CDs and downloads.

Others have noted that by letting users pay nothing, Radiohead have inadvertently devalued their music and legitimised file sharing.

Professor Ed Felten of Princeton University, a digital content and DRM expert, notes on his Freedom to Tinker blog, that the “clunkiness” of Radiohead's website is partly to blame.

“Radiohead’s site makes you click and click to get the music,” he writes. “First you have to click through a nearly content-free splash screen. Then you click through another splash screen telling you things you probably already knew. Then you click an “ORDER” button, and click away a dialog box telling you something you already knew. Then after some head scratching, you realise you need to click the “VIEW BASKET” button...,” and so on. You get the picture. What it all amounts to is getting the downloaders details so that they can later be sold concert tickets and merchandise, which is where most bands make their real money since record labels have no claim to a share.

Faced with that, p2p does look a lot more attractive.

“If people normally choose p2p over authorised channels because p2p is cheaper, we would expect customers to shift toward the authorised channel when it offers a zero price,” Felten writes. “But if people choose p2p for convenience, then we’d expect a shift toward more p2p use for this album, because people have fewer moral qualms about p2p downloading this album than they would for a normal album.”