[Infowarrior] - Report Suggests RIAA's Lawsuit-Happy Strategy Still Not Working

[Richard Forno]

Report Suggests RIAA's Lawsuit-Happy Strategy Still Not Working

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070928/124523.shtml

Marginal Revolution links to a new paper by economist Stan Liebowitz on the
economic effects of file sharing on the recording industry. It's a response
to an earlier paper that argued peer-to-peer file sharing has had little
impact on CD sales. Leibowitz digs into the arguments and finds a number of
problems. For example, one of the arguments in the original paper depends on
the assumption that college kids use peer-to-peer networks less during the
summer than during the school year. Unfortunately, Liebowitz presents data
suggesting that's not true: in two of the three years they studied,
file-sharing activity was actually slightly higher in the summer than the
rest of the year. Liebowitz also faults the authors for failing to release
their full datasets; he says he was unable to replicate several of their
results using publicly available data. In the end, Liebowitz makes a pretty
convincing case that file-sharing technologies are hurting the recording
industry: industry revenues in the United States fell by a third from 1999
to 2005. Of course, Liebowitz's data also suggests that the RIAA's current
strategy of suing everyone in sight‹which they launched in 2003‹isn't
working so well either: revenues continued to fall between 2003 and 2005.
They've tried suing technologists and suing customers, and neither has saved
them. Maybe it's time they tried some more creative approaches that don't
involve hiring lots of lawyers.

It's also worth noting that neither study looks at trends in the overall
music industry, which includes not just CD sales but concerts, T-shirt
sales, sponsorship contracts, musical instruments, music lessons, and so
forth. These are all important part of the music industry, and some of them
have been doing quite well lately. As people use peer-to-peer networks to
discover more music they love, they're likely to be inspired to spend more
money on these other music-related products and services. As long as plenty
of good music is being created and listened to, then the copyright system is
working the way it's supposed to, even if the people who ship little plastic
discs around the country aren't making as much money as they used to.