Felix Oberholzer, Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf, UNC Chapel Hill, March 2004:
A longstanding economic question is the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world’s downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales."
(52 pages, pdf).
Zusammenfassung:
Zusammenfassende Einführung und Link zu einer wissenschaftlichen Studie, die den behaupteten Zusammenhang zwischen Musikdownloads und Rückgang der Umsatzzahlen der Tonträgerindustrie untersucht - mit dem Ergebnis, dass der Effekt "gegen Null" gehen, also vernachlässigbar sein dürfte.
simons, 21.12.2004, Topic 3.. Music and Copyright -
