That's the name of a new study in the Journal of Political Economy. I came across a summary of the study here:
quote:"Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero."
Emphasis mine.
I'm not linking this to claim that copyright infringement is legitimate or legal; I'm linking it to support my claim that contraty to what the RIAA would have you believe, P2P is probably not responsible for the slump in CD shipments (and hence, sales) that just so happened to correspond with the DVD explosion. This has been debated here in the past, so I thought I'd post a link to some actual research on the subject.
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
I only buy music CD's if I have already heard the music and determined that I like it well enough to own the professionally-produced official copy. While I do not engage in file-sharing, I often decide I really like a musical piece when I hear it played as part of a collection of themes. For example, when I heard the John Dunbar theme from the movie Dances With Wolves in a compilation of movie themes, only then did I decide to order the official soundtrack recording from the movie. Oddly enough, I had watched the movie several times (I own the DVD), but the music just kind of blended in with the drama, and I never really noticed it that much.
I think that the net effect of file sharing is to advertise the music to a wider audience.
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
Thanks for sharing, twink.
Posted by Stephan (Member # 7549) on :
We already know they DRM only hurts those who buy movies and music from legit sources. Why do they spend so much time and money trying to fight this stuff? Its all going to be "on demand" one day anways right from your cable/internet provider.
Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :
Does file sharing still happen? If so, where?
From what little I've heard, it sounds like all of the big ones (Limewire, Kazaa, Morpheus) have been neutered.
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
I'm pretty sure it runs rampant on college campuses. Granted, I left college 6 years ago, but I would be highly skeptical if it wasn't still going on.
I do agree that this kind of sharing doesn't affect much, though.
Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :
Limewire has? In what way?
Edit: I should note that I use Limewire pretty frequently and haven't noticed it being "neutered". I use it because iTunes protected format pisses me off and I don't feel like wasting the CD-R's or the time to burn and rip them all back as mp3s. It's much easier just to go to Limewire and download copies of the songs I need in mp3 format (after I've downloaded them from iTunes and decided I like them).