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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."
...but where's the torrent?
since 15th century, dutch speaking countries (low countries) have led the world in modern and visionary concepts, in areas ranging from humanism to trade. erasmus, spinoza and more. and now this ....
a little big nation. kudos.
Read radical news here
This is the evidence to wwhat I've suspected all along - file sharing is patriotic and the RIAA is trying to destroy the economy by undermining media sales with their spamigation method!
This is definitely the case for me. I'll download an mp3 or two, and if I like them, I'll go out and buy their album (normally directly from the band if Im able to), and go to their shows if they play locally, buy their merchandise, etc.
I've discovered a lot of great music from filesharing, that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise, and went on to buy their stuff.
This is the final proof that pirates are destroying the economy!
Pirates are like terrorists!
And they pervert children to pirate more!
Pirates steal music and musicians everywhere are suiciding because they're so poor.
Did you already forget the article? Or do I have to blabber about children and wars for a while until I totally misdirect your atten... Until we really concentrate on the pirate comunist music thieves.
Double Dutch?
File sharing net positive economic impact
.. For society as a whole is against this turnover of the sector the benefits of the large group of downloaders who would otherwise never have to purchase. On balance, there is a significant welfare gains.
The economic effects of file sharing on the Dutch welfare in the short and long term net positive. Consumers will benefit as a result of file sharing access to a wide range of cultural products. On the other hand, a fall in turnover from the sale of sound recordings, DVDs and games as a result is plausible.
This is reflected in joint research by TNO, SEO Economic Research and the Institute for Information Law (IViR) to the economic and cultural consequences of file sharing for music, movies and games on behalf of the Ministries of Education, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Justice. The analysis was conducted on the basis of a study of statistics and scientific literature, interviews with fervent downloaders, a representative survey of the population and a number of informational workshops in the sector.
Estimates of the volume of the global download unauthorized movement vary widely. The world is in any case, many billions of files per year, a substantial part of international Internet traffic. Some 4.7 million Dutch Internet users aged 15 and older in the last 12 months unpaid ever downloaded. Citizens see the download and share music, movies and games as a general social acceptance, but know little of the technology and regulations that it faces. Regulatory unclear
It appears that there are many unclear about the admissibility of download. The download for personal use of copyrighted music and movies may. Downloading games is prohibited. In the case of p2p networks is often not only downloaded, but material, often automatically, again made available to others. This upload files without the permission of the owner, as such not allowed.
The effects of unpaid downloading the purchase of paid content are difficult to determine. Download and buy are not mutually exclusive: an average music downloaders buy more DVDs and more games than people who never download. Even more downloaders go to concerts and buy more merchandise. Net profit prosperity
For the music industry is that downloaded pictures of 1-to-1 can be translated into lost sales. Many consumers who download music would not be in the same amount at current prices to buy and download unpaid not feasible. There are people who download music and get to know where to buy if they like. Although there are also positive effects on the purchasing behavior of downloading, is a negative impact on the turnover of the sectors likely. This is particularly true for the sale of recordings, especially as downloading music has become the most established. In addition, there are differences between artists known artists seem to have more damage, while relatively unknown artists may even benefit when exchanging files increased their awareness
New business models emerging The music and film industries face the challenge to match their offerings with the changing consumer demand. New business models are emerging. The music is made for new movements to tap revenubronnen (concerts, merchandise and sponsorship). There is a place for music recordings, but in future it does not seem possible only on the basis of recorded music to run a profitable business. Within the film industry to grow the markets visit cinema and DVD sales still. DVD rental has fallen. Over time this can change quickly if the Internet is available. Again, there are important new business models. The game industry is growing boisterous, especially the console games and their hardware-software combination content. Here is file sharing on the watch less than eg PC games, where turnover is now stagnating. A related official platform game has so many advantages that it is not inconceivable that this industry is the file-sharing practice the music industry now faces a far greater extent could avert or circumvent.
She made the willows dance
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
Not spending money on music = Spending money on something else
If people don't spend a thousand "dollars" on music, they might buy a new TV... TVs are probably bringing more money to the Dutch economy than buying songs online where not even a penny is going back to the country's economy...
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...
And to do something in return I'll give you my attempt at translating the interesting parts of the article (which is quite interesting). Note that the net effect on the content industry is still negative, and the net gain for Dutch prosperity is positive, this might be because quite a bit of the losses are outside the country. It can also be seen as a proof of the failure of the normal free market model to give an optimal allocation of resources in the case of near-zero marginal costs.
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File sharing has positive net effect on economy
The economyic effects of file sharing on Dutch prosperity on long and short term are positive. Consumers obtain access to a wide range of cultural products due to file sharing. On the other hand it is likely that there is a decrease of turnover in the sales.
This was shown by a joint study of TNO, SEO Economic Research, and the Institute for Information Rights (IViR) into the economic and social consequences of file sharing for music, films, and games ordered by the Ministries of Education & Culture, Economic Affairs, and Justice. This analysis is conducted based on a study of statistics and recent scientific literatur, interviews with frequent downloaders, a representative survey of the Dutch population and a number of informative workshops with the [media] sector.
Estimates of the volume of global unauthorised downloading are widely divergent. The global count is at least several billion files per year, a substantial part of the international Internet traffic. Around 4.7 million Dutch Internet users of 15 years and older have downloaded something without authorisation in the past year. Citizens view downloading and sharing of music, films, and games as socially accepted, but know little of the technique and regulation involved.
[...]
Net prosperity gain
For the music industry the downloaded recordings cannot be translated 1-on-1 into lost sales. Many downloading consumers would not have bought the same amount of music [that they downloaded] against current prices if downloaded would not be possible. Additionally, there are people who download music in order to get to know it and buy it if they like it.
Although there are also positive effects of downloading music on sales, a negative effect on the turnover of the involved sectors is likely. This is especially the case for music because downloading music has become the most normal. There is a differentiated effect based on the artist: well-known artist are most impacted negatively, while relatively unknown artists can even profit when file sharing increases their reknown. For society at large the lost turnover of the [media] sector is opposed to the gains by the large group of downloaders that would otherwise not have made a purchase. The net effect on prosperity is substantial.
Rise of new business models
The music and film industry are faced by the challenge of matching their supply with the changed consumer demand. New business models are on the rise. The music industry is moving to use new sources of revenue (concerts, merchanise, sponsoring). There is a place for music recordings, but in the future it will probably become impossible to run a company on music recordings alone. Within the movie industry the markets of cinema and DVD sales are still growing. DVD rentals are down strongly. In the longer term this might change as faster internet becomes available. Here also new business models are important. The gaming industry is growing in spurts, especially console games and their combination of hardware and software. Especially here file sharing is less prevalent than in e.g. PC games, where turnover is stagnating. A platform bound official game has so many advantages that it is not inconceivable that this branch will be able to aboid file sharing to a larger degree than the music industry.
That American corporate/government policy would have it backwards?
This works because the Dutch still generally care about private property rights, and have a sense of the need to reward people for hard work. The "entitlement mentality" has not fully set in because most of Dutch society is still working from the older mindset, but slowly we are seeing this falling away across the Western world. Give it another 100 years, and it's doubtful that this will be true.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers. In every other area of the economy, you don't get access to the goods and services until you pay for them or come to an understanding that allows you to get them for free. Why should this be any different?
One of the things we need to face up to here is that in another century or two, manufacturing technology will be advanced enough to allow people to fabricate complex physical goods from raw materials. What will happen when any good on the store can be replicated at the cost of materials? I suspect that a pirate culture would end up meeting with utter disaster here.
So really, we need to face up to the fact that we need a culture that says "you don't deserve it just because you can't pay for it or don't want to pay for it." That sort of thing would pay dividends in other areas, since such a culture would also tend to promote an attitude that you have no right to tell others what to do on most things.
We -know- that file sharing is bad for big record labels...
No, we don't.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Small (niche) content producers benefit from file sharing. 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. Therefor I think that it's fair to share files. Look how much the big corps. earn and how much the musician/actor/director etc earn. The revenues are too large to complain.
I've posted this before but when Napster was in its height, I bought more CDs in the year I used Napster than in the 13 previous years I owned CD players. I downloaded a LOT of music (I'd search for the letter A, download, listen to bits of tracks, then go out and purchase new CDs with the tracks I liked, etc.) and discovered a lot of new and old acts I would never have been otherwise exposed to, in genres ranging from rap to country; jazz to pop, and everything in between. I also tracked down tracks I remembered listening to on 8-track when I was a toddler but couldn't remember anything other than most of the tracks had names of foods in them - it turned out the album I was looking for was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' Whipped Cream and other Delights -- and the specific track I was trying to find was Taste of Honey. Well, the next day I actually went into work late because I had to run out and find and buy that CD. I felt like I was in heaven - I had tracked[sic] down a childhood favorite! I played that 8-track so much I wore my parents' copy out. It took me a long, long time using Napster to find that song. Then, I'd export the list to a spreadsheet, delete everything and download more to try. The vast majority of tracks I'd play I'd think "crap" but there were many, many downloaded tracks that would prompt me to go out and buy the CD. On the way to work, I would usually listen to top 40 radio, too - and buying what I liked.
There were many, many others and I was buying up to 15 CDs a week at one point. I would literally go to Best Buy, Strawberries (now defunct) or drive down to RI to Luke's Records every single day and I'd buy 3 to 5 CDs. That was every work day, on the way home from work, or if I found something I really "had" to have, shift my schedule and work a later day and buy it on the way to work. Granted, I had a lot more "disposable" income then, but were it not for the RIAA turning against its biggest "fan base"/"consumer base" I'd still be buying at least 3 to 5 CDs a week.
As soon as the RIAA started making noise about filing suits I quit not only using Napster, but I also quit listening to top 40 radio. In fact for quite a few years I listened to only Christian talk radio and the local big classical station (then WCRB 102.5 and 99.5, now it's just on 99.5).
I only recently started purchasing CDs but my purchases are very few and far between, and it is usually based on recommendations of my favorite artists (for example: Dave Gilmour recommended Radiohead for folks who like Pink Floyd, since fans are clamoring for more), or on what I find on Pandora or what friends in bands or who are composers expose me to. :) I also check out Youtube a bit, but the RIAA labels are trying to alienate me even further by demanding that obvious Fair Use projects are being removed at their demand.
The RIAA has lost me as a big-spending customer. I track down USED CDs now, on the rare occasions I do buy.
They need to embrace models such as the original Napster; I am NOT happy with the rip quality of downloads - I used it to sample music at random, and would discover whole new worlds of music that appeal to me in genres you normally couldn't PAY me to listen to (e/g. rap, country) because I could try it for free and then go out and buy the perfect-quality product on CD. I'd always shop around though - I nearly always refused to pay more than $15 per CD.
That's a lot of revenue the RIAA has "lost" - and because I don't expose myself to top 40 radio, I'm not even tempted to buy new material. I have most of the old material I want. RIAA members, are you reading this? That's up to $225 per week I'm not spending on music now, and the temptation truly is not there because I don't expose myself to stations where payola drives the play lists.
Now, I spend my entertainment dollars on DVDs and cable TV.
I might consider iTunes when I upgrade to an iPhone - I hate Windows (it's installed on my desktop ONLY for games) but might put Tiger on my
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
...big grain of salt needed.
While TNO has been in the far past a research *company* with a respected name, nowadays they are more and more on the hand of whoever it is that pays them to do a study.
When I saw this headline in Dutch papers, it clearly was that "more and more people are downloading without paying". Maybe somewhere in the appendix, it read that they would buy songs when downloading.
TNO was the same agency that approved our voting computers multiple times in a row - the same ones that are forbidden right now.
TNO also researched the chip used for the public transport system in The Netherlands, and approved its security multiple times.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
They aren't saying "maybe they go to more concerts and buy more CDs", they're saying "they do go to more concerts and buy more CDs." Maybe they'd spend even more money if they couldn't download, but we'll never know. What we do know is that if you convince them to stop listening to music, or you throw them in jail for life, the music industry will lose a lot of money. And how on earth is your idea of "just look and see if market trends match filesharing trends" not a severe case of "Correlation is not Causation," which you so decry? Who cares if they buy more CDs than anybody else BECAUSE they download. Whats important is that if you arrest them, you lose the biggest buyers of music. My Dad torrents like a fiend. He has thousands of CDs. He wrote a program that queries CDDB and stores all the IDs in a database, and writes an ID in marker on the spines, so he can find them quickly with binary search. (Alphabetical doesn't work with so many, since if you buy another "A" CD, you have to shift everything over and they won't fit. With an autoincrement ID you can just add them to the end as you buy them. I think he syncs the DB to his Palm, so when at a store he can see if he already owns a CD, because who can remember that many thousand CDs? He has wall to wall, floor to ceiling shelving, all filled with CD after CD. He hops onto P2P apps and looks for new music and he buys all their CDs if he likes it. For every 10 anecdotes you may have about poor moneyless friends who torrent a lot and could never afford all their CDs even if they were forced to stop downloading, my Dad cancels them all out single handedly. Such is the power of dual incomes once the kids leave home and pay their own way through university ;) It's not just music. He downloads movies and TV shows by the bucketful. Has hundreds of movies on DVD, and many over again on BluRay now. Many of them are still shrinkwrapped until my brother borrows them! (Criminal, sharing DVDs and CDs in blatant violation of USC 107 or whatever, good thing we're in Canada where its legal to share disks with friends and family).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
You give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right not to have their music/words/ideas copied. This isn't food or medicine where you could argue they need it to survive. No one needs to make music for a living.
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
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