Re: [dvd-discuss] "Research: File-sharing not killing CD sales"

[Michael A Rolenz <Michael.A.Rolenz(at)aero.org>]

owner-dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu wrote on 03/31/2004
07:09:55 AM:

> This article might be of interest...
> 
> http://cio-today.newsfactor.com/perl/story/23577.html?
> u=tatn2000&p=NFNSS_89f98eac356d475e3d113b26705fdc05


The paper is at     http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Additional material at  http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharingSl(Ariz).doc


The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical
Analysis (with F. Oberholzer).
Status: draft is circulating (comments welcome!).
Current version: 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.




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