8 comments

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  Commons Music

  3 years ago

  Let's also not forget that a great number of albums and DVDs are leaked by people who are working for the production companies. The DVD or CD leaks before it ever gets to the point where DRM is involved. The industry insiders are the ones leaking this stuff, more often than not. Consider the early Star Wars III download, which came from someone at either Fox or Lucasfilm.
  
  In these cases, DRM doesn't do anything at all.
• 

  Steve R.

  3 years ago

  Please see the paper "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis" by Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf.
  
  They concluded that free "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, ..."
  
  http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_Ma...
  -------------------------------------------------
  Regretfully your drug analogy is flawed. If the US government stops 90% of the drugs entering the country consumption will NOT decline by 90%. What will happen is that the drug importers will increase their drug imports to make up for the "lost" inventory. If US cocaine consumption is 10 pounds then the importers will import 100 pounds knowing that they will "loose" 90 pounds. Also if the price of 10 pounds of cocaine (riskfree) is $10 and $.80 is the cost of production, then new price for 10 pounds of cocaine could rise to about $100 to cover the $80 cost of production and allowing for a $20 profit (risk adjusted). My example of course is simplistic.
• 

  Tim

  3 years ago

  Steve, that's what I had in mind about "all else being equal." As you explain quite well, all else is not equal. But I didn't want to get into a digression about the (non) effectiveness of the drug war.
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  amonynous

  3 years ago

  The writings of Singleton and others of that ilk puzzle me. Have these people never witnessed peer-to-peer downloading? Have they never ripped a DRM'd CD? Sometimes it appears they are trying to analyse policy in a near-total vacuum of first-hand information about how the real world works.
  
  I am very interested to see what their response to the intuitively obvious and observably true reality situation you have described. I think you've nailed them.
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  Tim

  3 years ago

  Perhaps the PFF crowd has avoided experimenting with peer-to-peer and circumvention software due to ethical concerns. I have to admit I don't have much first-hand experience with them myself.
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  Steve R.

  3 years ago

  Tim: Thanks for the response. I sort of overlooked stating the significance of the Oberholzer and Strumpf paper. What they demonstrated is that existing free sharing of music has not significantly affected music sales in an adverse manner. What this means is that we have existing data that already supports the position that implementing DRM technologies will not protect the music companies. As you point out DRM cracked music will be out in the public domain for free sharing very very very quickly.
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  Tim

  3 years ago

  Steve: an excellent point. Thanks!
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  amonynous

  3 years ago

  Tim, I confess I haven't used peer-to-peer for anything in years, so I can't tell you how well Kazaa or Gnutella or Limewire works. I know friends have no trouble getting television shows there. The video quality is pretty poor, that much I can say.
  
  If, like Singleton, I wrote articles attempting to influence policy, I would certainly inform myself about it. If a person feels it is unethical to experiment with it, that person could still learn a lot by reading discussion forums populated by people who do. Or watching over someone's shoulder. There is no substitute for first-hand knowledge. Maybe that would open their eyes.