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Harvard Study Says Weak Copyright Benefits Society
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist summarizes
an important new study on file sharing from economists Felix
Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. The Harvard Business School working paper
finds that given the increase in artistic production along with the
greater public
access conclude that 'weaker copyright protection, it seems, has
benefited society.' The authors point out that file sharing may not
result in
reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for
'complements' such as concerts or author speaking tours increases."
These kind of studies are largely pointless. We already know this, and the media industry will not believe it regardless of how many studies come to this conclusion.
Now, where's a media frenzy when you need one? Anyone on here work for a major news corporation?
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
The media industry is not society. Why would they care if society benefits if their bottom line does not also benefit?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
laws are not passed to benefit society, laws are bought to protect business models.
+1 fashionably cynical
A similar study has been conducted before in the Netherlands: Downloading benefits the Dutch economy (in Dutch, Google Translation). This study had been ordered by the department of Education, Culture and Science, the department of Economic Affairs and the Justice department.
A downloaded movie, CD or game is not equal to a product not sold, say the researchers. Also, "Amongst downloaders of music and film, the percentage of buyers is as high as with non-downloaders, in games, the percentage of buyers even higher. Music downloaders are also more likely to concerts and buy more merchandise. Downloaders buy more games than gamers who never downloaded and movies downloaders buy more DVDs than non-downloaders."
What if you're an artist but only want to create art and not tour all over the place just to make money? I realise that most musicians seem to like doing concerts, but what if that's not what you want to do and just want to record albums?
You just got troll'd!
Thanks to http://www.artmineur.fr/ !
I think the primary concern is the different views on society that citizens, politicians and corporations have. A report that says that something is good for society isn't so clear cut as you'd like.
For corporations, long copyrights are good for society - they couldn't make quality music otherwise and people want quality music!
Lobbyists persuading politicians means that long copyrights are beneficial for society as well. After all, how would artists make a living otherwise? Very common argument these days and more or less what the common man is thinking, too.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
Copyright was invented to allow creators to get an income from their creations before the creations are released to the public domain. The state should have stood firm in keeping the copyright protection short. However they didn't, but instead succumbed to the "industry" interests. This resulted to turning every creation in a cash-cow with no expiry date, which obviously hinders innovation and creation: there is little incentive to create a second good work since the first one you created will provide you and your descendants with a steady flow of cash for the next 200 years.
I understand that the above is a bit simplified because it omits the role of the "industry" in the flow of cash. The "industry" pimps will absorb much of the cash intended for the creator (after all, they forced him to sell them for pennies the copyright of his work). This will keep the creator going because he doesn't really earn that much to retire. But it will also degrade his output because he knows that even if he does really-really good with his next creation, it is the "industry" pimps that will get the most out of his work.
Still quite simplified, but I think you get my point: You can't grant quasi-perpetual copyright protection (google "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act") and still expect the same amount of innovative creations.
The study says "Piracy (filesharing) was the driving force behind increased creative output" -- more movies, songs etc., which is complete nonsense. The real reason is the cost of producing and distributing art has dropped due to new software for creating the art and using the web for distribution.
The study encourages artists to use complements -- "speaking tours, concerts, t-shirts etc." to make income. Well, that only works for famous, top 5% artists. What about the remaining 95%? They are not famous enough to make any income from such "complements."
Lawyers and especially that of Politicians who are also Lawyers.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Leerchers will remix existing art WHY?
Because according to you, NOBODY will create new art (which is what a remix is), so therefore no remixing.
But if there's no remixing of art, there's then no reason for new art not to be created.
But if there's new art, it will be remixed so people won't make new art.
But if there's remixing, that IS new art.
So they won't remix.
But it there's no remixing of art, there's no reason for new art not to be created.
.
.
.
I am not trying to defend pirates at all here.
But I was just telling somebody about that possibility last week.
I had just watched an interview with an old theater actor which is pretty wealthy today. He said he made most of his money acting in theaters almost everyday, 2 or 3 shows a day. He said: "That was real work, there was almost no TV or movies in those times."
He added: "Pay was god, because not that many people would be crazy enough to do it, but we had a lot of fun and I enjoyed every minute of it".
I then envisioned things like a return of the pendulum, which sometimes seems like something natural in society. Nowadays, a limited set of actors get work making movies/TV shows and get paid the big bucks. Either you get famous and make millions or you starve. A lot more actors/musicians would get work if they had to do live shows. I can see how more diversity, thus availability would benefit society. Of course, the big names would lose but this is another story already largely covered here before..
I guess the point I am trying to make is that even if technology is involved, like with nature, society seem sometimes driven by a magical hand that cause a return of the pendulum at some point when we have reached a breaking point in one direction ;-)) Like nature, society sometimes seem to tend to come back to an equilibrium by itself !!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The authors fail to take into account that the displacement rate would very easily be affected by the ease of filesharing which is a function of its legality. They treat the displacement rate as fixed.
At the present, there are many instances where individuals buy instead of download. For simplicity, this can be separated into three groups: 1) People who could very easily have downloaded (they have a fast internet connection, the required software and the knowledge how to) yet still choose to buy, 2) People who could not easily have downloaded for physical reasons (e.g. lack of speedy internet connection), 3) People who could not have downloaded for reasons of mental blocks, for example, lack of understanding of how to apply cracks, or worry over being caught.
If downloading is make legal, there is likely to be an explosion of technologies to enable filesharing and make it even easier for group 1, and remove all barriers for group 3. Group 2 should dwindle over time in line with the spread of fast broadband. Off the top of my head you would be highly likely to see a couple of NEW technologies;
1) a cell phone app that lets you take a picture of the front of a DVD cover, and automatically schedule its downloading to your computer.
2) a program that shows you the release dates of software or music ahead for the next year, letting you one-click the automatic scheduling for whenever it's available up to six months ahead.
each of these could have a very significant impact on the displacement rate itself. If no. 1 was available, I can honestly say that I would never buy a DVD again unless I was swimming in cash and feeling extremely lazy. If you treat the displacement rate as NOT being a function of ease which is partly a function of the legality of filesharing, you're an idiot.
This is a study that looks at other study's major findings, they are:
Illegal burning of DVDs and downloading make up 5.2% of movie viewing; unpaid consumption reduces paid consumption by 3.5%.
For every pirated CD, sales fall by 0.42 units. Estimated effect is not robust to including year fixed effects and estimating separate displacement effects for high- and low-income countries.
Students with faster internet connections are more likely to sample music; sampling increases the propensity to buy.
Free broadcasts of movies on TV increase DVD sales on Amazon by 118% during the first week after the broadcast. Piracy does not affect this increase in demand.
This should be the main product we pay for! Concerts, Exhibition, wherever the artist is there...
You said: What if you're an artist but only want to create art and not tour all over the place just to make money? I realise that most musicians seem to like doing concerts, but what if that's not what you want to do and just want to record albums?
So? If you only like making albums, make albums. But don't expect to be paid to do what you WANT to do. Just like the GP wants to play RPG's and hang out with their friends, but isn't going to get paid for that.
And it DEFINITELY isn't "I'm talking about artists getting a cut of the money on albums they sell. If the market will buy, it means you created value, value which you should get."
It's about "he doesn't want to do work that pays, he wants paying for work he does want to do".
Well Boo Hoo.
Captcha appropriate: violins.
Here's a small one for you.
Most of the people working in the record industry are just there to get the media to the stores. Since it costs very little to put songs on the internet, the business model of selling the songs in stores doesn't make sense. The record industry is dieing slowly because of this. Fortunately. artists are not in the same predicament. They have more then just that one way(which wasn't that much either) of making money.
Get a job like the rest of us? You can't just label yourself an artist and go around whining about loss of income if you don't want to go the extra mile. I'm terribly sorry for people's overly romantic view of stardom, but it just sucks, especially if you're not a star (yet).
By the way, pretty much any artist has a side job. In my experience, the more serious the job is, the less serious the artist is about being an artist and vice versa. There is only a very limited subset of artists that can make a living from their art.
It exploits the majority (consumers) and the creators (artists) to protect the minority (middlemen).
It is truly crippling to see the mental fails that keep being propogated by the press and even supposedly academia here. "Piracy (filesharing) was the driving force behind increased creative output". It's simply not true that one caused the other. There isn't an artist or an amorphous group of artists who are outputting more per artist because they are thinking ex-ante "shit I'm going to get paid less than I used to so I better produce more". That might work for widgets and industry but for artistic output? Total rubbish. I'm not entering into the debate about the pros and cons of filesharing by the way but this sort of causative fail is just depressing and so utterly prevalent.
It had always been that way through history. All performing artists (actors, musicians, dancers etc) were paid for their live performances (surprising, huh?). The advent of technology that enabled the recording of performances gave the illusion that one (studio) performance should be enough to make a living and be rich. However this was a situation that worked only temporarily. It worked because the demand for the creations of the artists was high and the mass-copying machines were too expensive and controlled by few distribution companies.
While this situation worked, laws were passed to extend copyrights. The distribution companies were able to pass the law because nobody in the society cared. It was a case of company defending their copyrighted work from other companies. The average Joe couldn't think of a vinyl copying machine (and those who could knew that they wouldn't be able to afford it), so he didn't really care to object extending copyrights. It seemed fair at that time. However now the technology for copying performances exists, so the game now is the (super-extended) copyright holders vs the society. The copyright holders are so gonna lose and they know it. They just try to make a buck while they can.
And the artists? Well, since the artists have already been deprived from the copyright of their work, it's all over touring for them like the old days. Not that they don't like it.
GPL functions because Copyright law has teeth.
If those teeth are removed, then the GPL must also lose some muscle.
For example, if copyright expired after 7 years then any GPL'd thing that hasn't been worked on since 2002 would be game for Microsoft to pick up and use (because the copyright has expired.)
Actually, that makes me wonder... if copyright was as short as 7 years, does that mean if someone downloaded a version of Linux in 2000 that the copyright on that particular work would now be expired and they'd be able to use it however they liked? The point being that if the copyright has expired then surely the accompanying license must also expire.
Remember, GPL only works because of Copyright law... so if you take that away (or weaken it), what's left?
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I wish people would actually read the constitution.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," : not to promote the interests of monied pockets of power.
"securing limited Time to Authors and Inventors," : limited time (we've gone over this time and time again), but *Authors* and *Inventors*
The people that wrote the constitution were damn smart people. Too bad we stopped listening. Copyright is supposed to benefit all of us so of course a limited copyright span that balances the rights of *Authors* (not Corporations) vs. the public is the best. Here's to another study that didn't need to be done.
This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
"Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy, but so what? Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners, we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sgt. Bilko, they'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney."
"Your honor, you take away our right to steal ideas, where are they gonna come from?"
You said that you were talking about someone who doesn't want to tour, then said you said it was all about getting paid for an album.
Nope, you were talking about someone who didn't want to tour.
So don't.
Don't expect to be paid for the work you WANT to do if nobody is willing to pay you to do it.
"You can't just say "this should be free, make it free" for something that's not free and that the market validated as something you can ask money for."
You also can't say "I was talking about getting paid for albums" when you said "what if someone doesn't want to tour?". They don't HAVE to tour, just like they don't HAVE to get paid for making albums.
Tell you what, if the artist creates by their personal hand EACH AND EVERY COPY, distributes it and ensures quality control on the recording and its copy, then this is when he did something to get the copy to us and he can ask to be paid.
But if I take MY CD recorder, MY blank CDR, use MY time to create MY copy, why the hell should I pay HIM for MY work?
Weak Copyright Benefits Society, but it harm the creators.
Creators are now like the horse in animal farm. He work the hardest, contributed the most.
And everyone just give him a medal of honour. Give him empty words like "Good job, well done."
No materialistic rewards, just a medal of honour.
I suggest creators all around the world kill themselves instead of working hard to create high quality creations for these anti-copyright garbage who want to exploit you and give you empty words as rewards.
BTW 99% of Harvard students are garbage. Please know this fact.
1. The data indicates that file sharing has not discouraged creativity, as the evidence shows significant increases in cultural production.
Britney, meet Lady GaGa. Some schtick, different chick. Let's all thank them, and the hordes of copycat bimbo lip-synching strippers out there, for the "cultural producton".
Sidenote: What does it say about the credibility of the link, when they can't even get noun-verb agreement right? Data are plural, thus data "indicate"--they don't "indicates".
The Harvard Business School working paper finds that given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society."
Wait! Don't tell them that yet!
Look at the explosion of user generated content on the Internet. People everywhere are creating their own media and cutting out the traditional copyright CABAL precisely because the traditionalists are broken. As long as the buggy-whip manufacturers continue to believe that their business model is viable, they will not innovate. As long as they don't innovate, the silent hand of the market will continue to move artists out of the CABAL and into the independent new media space. As soon as the CABAL realizes they are failing because they are wrong, they might start trying to do just enough of the right thing to survive while retaining their payola, large venue control, and other forms of market manipulation.
Don't tip them off yet - let them die of chronic denial. :)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
its really all in the eye of the beholder.
However, being the nice person I am, you get to experience my world.
So if I hear a band that I really like (it doesn't happen often as i'm a blues rock fan and todays music.... uhmm... sucks) chances are that i'll download a song or two... although I can't remember the last time I downloaded a song by a new band
I digress... So if I were to do that, and enjoyed the song, I might enjoy 3 other songs max on the album... most CD's now days are just horrid vs the older days (i'm only thirtyish) when the whole album was a gem to listen to.
So if I really really really enjoy it, i'll buy the CD. Same with video games. The last CD I bought was a "best of" of Clapton's and the last video game was Call of Duty 4.
So... ignoring the video game perspective, I would think that if I were a fan of todays music (and I have done this following scenario) I would do as such...
1 - hear a song and maybe like it.
2 - download the album to see if its just a "one song album"
3 - if i'm happy with the results of 2, I might buy the CD.
HERES THE KICKER
4 - if I really like the band, i'll go to their concert and spend some serious cash.
So... who does my personal actions benefit? Lets see... we have the band itself... ticketmaster (the one big company), the local people selling stuff at the concert, whoever owns the land that i'm parking on, the convienience stores in between my house and the concert destination...
I'm sure there is more, but my point is that good music makes money. The RIAA just thinks they can "protect" garbage when they are actually just chasing their tail.
And no.. i'm not sorry for being long winded.
So the US are going to give up guns?
How about cars. You can run someone over or make a getaway from a bank robbery.
From TFA:
"In addition, artists receive a significant portion of their remuneration not in monetary form â" many of them enjoy fame, admiration, social status, and free beer in bars â" suggesting a reduction in monetary
incentives might possibly have a reduced impact on the quantity and quality of artistic
production."
To: Piracy Advocates
From: Some Ridiculous Handle Doesnt Make Me Less Anonymous or Cowardly
Re: Golden Rule
How would you feel if some Harvard Academic told you you must give away whatever it is you produce because some unspecified person may or may not decided to reward you with a free Coors in some unspecified dingy bar on some unspecified day?
These kind of studies are largely pointless. We already know this, and the media industry will not believe it regardless of how many studies come to this conclusion.
It is equally pointless to post a summary of this economic paper to slashdot. Everyone here "already knows" the answers.
Let me explain what it means when an economist says "society benefits". (By the way, I am one.) If a policy change causes Person A to lose $1 and Person B to gain $2, then "society benefits". If a policy change causes Persons A and B and C each to lose $1,000, but Person D gains $5,000, then "society benefits".
If you RTFpdf, you'll notice one argument they make: While file sharing may have caused the music industry (including artists) to lose money, sales of MP3 players skyrocketed! Therefore, it is plausible that "society benefited."
Now, see why it's not so simple? We may prefer artists to get $1, rather than Apple and Sandisk to get $2.
It gets even worse. The main argument of the paper is on page 6:
Three conditions need to hold for [file sharing] to undermine the
incentives for artistic production: [1] original works and copies on file-sharing networks
must be reasonably close substitutes; [2] artists and the entertainment industry must not be
able to shift from previous sources of income to the (similarly profitable) sale of
complements; and [3] falling incomes must be an important-enough motivator for artists to
reduce production. Only if all three conditions hold will file sharing hurt social welfare.
Translation: Social welfare goes down if:
[1] the mp3's you share are just as good as the one's you'd rip yourself.
[2] the extra concert/tshirt revenues you make are less than the revenue lost to file sharing.
[3] Some artists would have to quit the business if their pay goes down.
[1] and [3] are laughably true. One could debate whether [2] is true, but certainly there are artists who make good music, but would not survive when the music execs tell them they have to bring in more revenue from concerts.
So now in order to make sure I make a profit on my paintings I have to book a speaking tour? Or I need to lecture on my crappy little casual game software. This is bullshite and pointless.
Why bother
You mean like a Coke and a fistful of fries? Supersize me!
... it cares only about benefiting itself. IP is the new Last Frontier of land grabs, and unlike actual land they can create an infinite amount of the stuff to control.
Professional musicians still make their living by performing live, like they've done for thousands of years. Even the famous ones. Theoretically a recording contract gets you royalties from sales of records, but in a standard recording contract all the expenses of recording, manufacturing, packaging, distributing and marketing the record are deducted from the royalties, so the musician generally gets ZERO actual cash. Except for a tiny minority who have the clout and business savvy to negotiate their own contracts, even well established musicians still get their income by performing. A century of recording technology hasn't changed that basic fact. So if you only want to record and not perform, better think of it as a hobby.
There is nothing fair about someone being to take control of other people's computers away from them just because he produced something that can be easily represented digitally. Those people (specifically, everyone else in the world) paid good money for their computers. Their computers are their property. They should be able to make use of the features of those computers, including data duplication. It is not fair that someone can take that control away from everyone in the world just because he wants to make music for a living.
But none of that matters. Your notion that laws are primarily motivated by the inclination to create fairness is simple naive idealism. It is not fair that some people can work easy jobs and make gobs of money while other people have to work very difficult jobs to barely scrape by, yet our legal system has many laws in place to directly perpetuate this unfairness. It is not fair that a musician can record a song once and receive money from it for the next 70 years where a cook cannot make a meal once and receive money from it for the next 70 years. It is not fair that anyone has more money or property than anyone else. But that doesn't matter.
Capitalism is not fair. It isn't supposed to be. It instead emphasizes utilitarianism. The greater good for the greater number is a more achievable, and more worthy, goal that total fairness to everyone. So that is what we aim for, and that serves as sound justification for many of our laws.
Of course, plenty of laws that get passed aren't even based on this justification, but rather the desires of the wealthy and powerful (which are usually at odds with the desires of the poor and powerless). That too, is unfair, though it often gets pushed through. Those who suffer from it resist, and if they can resist well enough, the laws get repealed. And the battle goes on.
The current copyright culture is quite disgusting. I think that only the creator of the creation should have any copyright claims. The sale/lease of this claim should not be allowed. When copyright is genuinely appropriate, the creator should be credited and be compensated in an appropriate manner for the use of their work. Once any information is public, it is public and copyright terms should always push for the sharing and the use of the information. The creator must not be bitter, stubborn or too egotistical to inhibit progress. If such is a concern, keep your creation private in your basement until you are ready and agree to share it with the public. Do not release your creation to inhibit the creation of the next person. I'm not rewriting the rules here, but you get a general sense of my argument hopefully. Today all copyrights and patents serve is big lazy business who absolutely had nothing to do with the creation in the first place.
Bank Account Number 2753 9482 6732
Routing Number 103000143
Password gep493m
Social Security Number 428636487
Credit Card Number 4268 1664 7623 9264
These belong to user name Opportunity02
Weak copyright is beneficial.
Feel free to copy this information
and use it.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
from the article:
"Our approach, however, reflects the original intent of copyright protection, which was conceived not as a welfare program for authors but to encourage the creation of new works."
Yes, we all know that the vast majority of authors are invited on speaking tours, so they should give their books away. The very wording used in this summary points to a biased study. Not surprising.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide