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Dutch Study Says Filesharing Has Positive Economic Effects
An anonymous reader writes "In a study conducted by TNO for the Dutch government the economic effects of filesharing are found to be positive. According to the 146 page report (available for download, but in Dutch) filesharing is good for the prosperity of the Dutch: with filesharing more media are available, even though this costs the media industry some profit. One of the most noticeable conclusions is that downloading and buying are not mutually exclusive: downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders, but they buy more DVDs and games then people who don't download. They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise."
So, assuming this study is accurate, there are two conclusions one could come to:
1) Downloading opens people to things they would not know about, causing them to buy more. So, downloading should be allowed as advertisement.
2) The people who download are the most fervent fans. So, downloading should be allowed as a means to not drive them away.
Any others? /I was a a 1) when I stopped downloading, and consuming, all RIAA media.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
I think the first response by american institutions will be:
"It has a positive benefit for the dutch because they are stealing from us. Which clearly proves it has a negative benefit for us".
We should also point out the frequently cited possibility that downloaders' propensity to purchase is positively correlated with downloading (the so-called sampling effect). Google around for this and you will find at least 10 papers that discuss it.
Example: http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/p2p_summary.html
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
The music industry doesn't care if the end result of file sharing is good for the economy (which I can easily agree it probably is) because they don't make money from the economy as a whole. They don't care if fans of music (including file sharers) are more inclined to pay outrageous prices to see a concert - most music companies don't make money from concert proceeds. For me, however, POLITICIANS should be paying attention to this information. Sure, they may have some lobbyist chewing their ear out about how bad file sharing is and that it must be stopped before the end of the world comes as a result but they need to be shown the bigger picture so that they can make the best decision for the people.
I know. I know. I can hope that there are still some politicians who are actually interested in doing the right thing for the people they represent...
It applies here. The article claims that people who download music and movies tend to buy more music and movies than those who do not download.
Perhaps the link is simply that the people who download music and movies are the ones who _like_ music and movies. The real question is "How much would these same people be buying if piracy were not an option?"
The article is also full of the same generalities and excuses that pirates love to make, from "Lots of people are just trying it" to "People who pirate music probably go to more concerts and probably buy more merchandise."
Some people think that the only way to truly determine the effects of filesharing on media purchase would be to perform a significant number of intrusive case studies to see how filesharing availability has affected individual spending over time... but that's not really true. All you need to do is analyze the overall market and look at the filesharing trends vs. the market economy.
We -know- that file sharing is bad for big record labels, but is it bad for the economy as a whole? I don't think we know, yet. I hoped this article would present some kind of study with a definitive answer, but all I see is a rehashing of the same tired, fallacy-ridden arguments... except this time in Dutch.
Is your screen 40-columns wide or what?
then there CAN be causation.
Hell, look at the "piracy is killing us" bollocks. Not even correlation to back that up. If anything, a correlation stating the reverse.
So, if there is no causal link between P2P and increasing sales, how did sales of CDs increase with Old Napster and drop sharply when Old Napster stopped? If there were a causal link between P2P and dropping sales, the sales would have gone UP EVEN MORE when napster shut down.
And since sales went down, there must then be an even BIGGER cause for a sales drop that meant that with napster gone, the sales figures would have been EVEN WORSE.
AND that item has to kick in about the right time.
Got anything?
No???
I believe he refers to what this colonizing has done to the colonies.
So what they've discovered here is that people who are really interested in music (i.e. they download a lot of it) tend to buy more music than people who are not that into it (i.e. they download very little). This is not surprising ("obvious" would be a better word), nor does it say anything definitive about the effect of downloading on sales, because (all together now) correlation does not equal causation.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And that's why capitalism sucks. Business model is based on maximizing profits instead of the good of the public. I'd much rather have an economic model that depends on the good will of the public than the good will of private corporations.
What you say is true.
Those rights were created so that society would benefit, not so the individuals would benefit.
The point of those rights was to encourage the creation of new works.
The rights have been expanded to the point that they now frequently prevent the creation of new works.
I think we should respect those rights as far as they promote new works and not any further.
I am particularly against paying money to encourage artists who are dead to make new works.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Music downloads are just a form of free advertising. Hell, people are falling all over themselves to write software to do it, set up websites to promote it and use them to get the music. The music industry doesn't have to do a thing. There's still a ton of money to be made on merchandising, touring, advertising, etc.. If only the music industry could just grasp this very basic point...
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Because more and more people encounter content that isn't advertised or played in the mass media. When there wasn't no Internet people had rely on the radio/tv/newspapers for bringing them the newest cultural content but now people can find suitable content for them self.
Which exactly why the media cartels are investing so much money and energy to fight it: They're becoming irrelevant.
It scares and angers them.
They had built themselves a vast and complicated system for controlling the creation and distribution of culture, and now the people are taking that power back!
You can't take the sky from me...
Barring government involvement to prop up the private corporations, capitalism IS an economic model that depends on the good will of the public. If the public doesn't buy, the corporations fail.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What worries the various *AA's is the opposite effect. When someone downloads the next big thing and discovers it's crap so they don't but it.
They would rather just have you buy everything sight unseen. It's not like you can take it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to simply copy the recorded work of an artist or musician.
Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to prevent someone from making a copy of any recorded work.
You can argue until you are blue in the fact that there is a major difference between copyright infringement and outright theft, but in the end, the entitlement mentality that justifies both on moral grounds is the same in both cases.
The justification isn't the same unless you've already made the assumption that copyright is a legitimate form of property. The moral argument supporting private property rights is a product of scarcity, which doesn't apply to copyrights. Even the pro-copyright crowd doesn't really treat copyrights as though they were property; differences include time limits, statutory damages, higher penalties than are imposed for outright theft, etc.
If the law simply set the same standards for damages for copyright infringement as for theft it would resolve the issue instantly, as there are no damages for copyright infringement -- not unless you consider competition itself to be a tort demanding recompense (the "lost sale" argument). It is copyright itself, not infringement, which demands justification.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
And I'm tired of seeing every study like this tagged as correlationisnotcausation. We understand, taggers. Yet you don't seem to understand that given a large enough number of samples, correlation implies causation. It's like you're saying, "Hey, I learned this clever, semi-alliterative phrase in eighth grade and I'm showing everybody how intelligent I am by abruptly and automatically stating it whenever there is any mention of a study correlating two things."
No existe.
Yeah, that's right. The difference between the broken window fallacy (or burglary as the OP suggested) is that in the case of burglary, the the person robbed is losing some income by having to replace the stolen items, or losing some income to replace the broken window. Despite what they claim, with P2P the media companies are not losing any income when someone pirates something, they just aren't making any more profit. Just because someone makes an unauthorized copy of the ones and zeros of some media, it doesn't mean the media company loses the ones and zeros that they created. If you could shut down pirating, the media companies might make some more income due to the lost sales, but this study suggests otherwise, there wouldn't be any increase in sales because people who pirate buy just as much or more crap, er...products, as those who don't.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
*Gasp* you mean the MafiAA's business model is predicated on the customer being too stupid/uninformed to know when what they are buying is worth the money?
For Shame! I would never have known... well actually I would, because I make it a point not to purchase anything without doing the research first.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
The media industry doesn't make money on the concerts. They make money on album sales.
We simply can't have those poor recording conglomerates losing out on profit margins while those mean old bands make more money on tour and evil pirates get to partake in entertainment! It's unthinkable!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Except it doesn't imply causation either. Correlation of that sort implies that there is some sort of meaningful relationship between the two. It does not imply a causal link in most cases.
What it implies is some sort of reliable link between the two. It could be a causal link, or it could be that there's a common precondition or it may be that it just is the natural consequence of a favorable environment for both.
But it certainly does not imply causation. It's that sort of thinking that's got people convinced that the link between smoking and lung cancer means that smoking causes lung cancer. Sure it probably does, but people have been looking hard for a long time and they still haven't demonstrated it.
There are definitely other possibilities and focusing on a link which may never yield a causal relation is just plain silly. It's already pretty well established that smoking causes heart disease and emphysema.
I'm getting tired of this stupid "correlation does not equal causation" phrase. It's a phrase people add to any article these days when it has any kind of statistics in it, probably because it looks cool.
While in general it is true, especially when comparing two completely unrelated subjects, that does not mean that there's no causation at all when comparing two sets of statistics. Chances are pretty good for example that downloading music and buying music are related, although it is of course unclear as to how much.
Well... at least the Dutch didn't make the natives in the East Indies go (almost) extinct. I'm not saying they did the right thing over there, but I don't agree with the claim that they're the very worst colonizers (both from the point of view of profit for the mother country or from the point of view of leaving the natives in peace and letting them keep their culture).
However, it is worth mentioning that the Dutch were the largest slave traders. But they bought and sold slaves all over the world (not only in their own colonies).