File Sharing and Copyright

By Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Koleman Strumpf. Innovation Policy and the Economy, 2010

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of Internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books, and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of authors to produce new works. We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a88f6a9ed8b0f66793c5f24567a128dd7a363f3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Tyler W. Moore
2. Ross J. Anderson
3. Rainer Böhme

In Strategy and Management

1. Tyler W. Moore
2. Ross J. Anderson
3. Rainer Böhme
4. Eric Budish

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime (2012, background): “Second, there has long been debate about whether illicit online copying actually depresses CD sales; an early study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf concluded that the people who did most file-sharing also bought the most CDs [48], while a thorough study by the Dutch government [24] concl”