Slashdot Mirror
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!
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."
Nope, it is not a differing view on "society", but rather a differing view on "good".
For the society outside of the corporations, "good" is, generally, more creativity, i.e. less copyright. Less copyright means less monopoly, and less monopoly provides generally a better allocation of the resources of society. Of course, it'll make those lawyers, who want to succeed in the creative business work harder, but ain't that the American way anyway? Incidentally, this freedom may make people who invest in art more focused on the art itself as opposed to taking the easy way out -- owning copyrights and doing a failed remake after remake.
For the corporations, "good" is exactly the opposite. A corporation doesn't give a damn about what is good for society, as long as it benefits the corporate bottom line. Monopoly is the best way to insure a bottom line, especially in the view of the corporate owners (see, e.g. concepts like "economic moat"). So, a corporation will allocate resources not for new art, but for protection of lucrative copyrights, and for politics. Neither of which is good for art, or society.
If you take a look, you'll see that's exactly what's been happening in the decades since the ifpies and the wipos of the world came about.
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.
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 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.
"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
'Armchair Pirates' (lol) don't force anyone to give anything for free. They redistribute for free what they already have access to, if I was an artist I would say they would be doing me a favour by distributing my work for me. If you mean forcing people to give away for free by undermining copyright.. how is not asking for money worse than forcing people to give you money?
Basically you decide arbitrarily that studio recorded music should be free, and therefore as a sort of feedback loop that makes it inherently unworthy of any money. 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.
Firstly, information is already free. The law might want to change the way reality works but you're not going to win an argument by saying 'it's true because it's written down', even religions have gotten over that notion. What copyright puts a price on is your liberty, not the information it purports to protect. Even taxes have to benefit those who pay them in some way, copyright does nothing of the sort.
Oh, Market Validated. Now I see how I've been wrong.. because people have been paying for it they should be forced to pay for it! Uh, wait, lets think about what market means for a start. Markets are about exchange of goods. If I get given a copy of a song by someone then that is an exchange between me and them not me and the artist. If there are infinite goods available for exchange for free then the market value is zero. That doesn't stop you charging for it but people who buy it aren't paying the market value of the song.
Most Slashdotters are libertarians, but when it comes to stuff you want for free you all turn to commies.
Damn, now I know why you got modded troll.. although flamebait would have been more accurate. Maybe you should look up what libertarian and communism mean and realise that libertarian ideals are kinda the anti-hero of copyright. I'm not even sure how you think communism is relevant to anything in this thread at all.
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.
Holy crap, you're using a comparison with the oil industry to strengthen your argument for copyright? That's kinda like saying murder is OK because we have wars.
Good question. If you wanted things to be "fair", then by doing the replication, the only things you're sparing GM are the entire manufacturing costs. So if you wanted to be "fair", you'd pay GM the price of the car minus its manufacturing costs, so that it would get the same money to pay for its designers and whatever else that is paid for when you buy a car, minus the manufacturing.
The manufacturing costs are the only things to spare, they already designed the car so those costs have already been met (even if they had to take out a loan to do it). What I think you mean is that they would be denied a return on their investment, the question is should someone who never signed a contract with GM be obliged to provide a return on their investment.
If you didn't pay anything to GM because you think it's all in the manufacturing, GM wouldn't have any incentive to make any car if they're only going to sell one, and neither would any other car manufacturer, so you'd successfully kill the auto industry, and be doomed to replicate cars that were made before the replication craze started, which means that even in 200 years people would drive 20th and 21st century cars.
Leaving aside how you attribute the death of the auto industry to peoples intent rather than natural progression, why would we need the auto industry in its previous form at that point? There will still be plenty of incentive for new designs.. for example more eco-friendly cars and safer cars. When you run out of incentives there's no point in doing any more work, the question is not whether they will get paid, it is how. If you can't think how people would get the money considering we've done things from providing countrywide support networks funded by charity to putting a man on the moon funded by political desire then perhaps you should exercise your imagination more.
That's completely off topic. You're extrapolating on the situation of the analogy used to make a point that has little connection with the subject the analogy was used for. But sure, why not.
What was off topic?
So you have that car duplicator thing, and you don't want to pay the license I talked about to GM for duplicating their cars, am I right? So what's the incentive for GM to innovate anything if they're not gonna get any money for it? It pains me to even have to explain it (seriously, more people should read about Adam Smith, it's getting old always explaining why corporations do the things they do), but GM doesn't care about eco-friendly cars, or safer cars, it only cares about money. So where's the incentive if you don't pay GM something for their new cars? (Also, what's wrong with my license idea? Please address that).
The incentive is that their old business model doesn't work and they need a new one, they can always move to a different industry if they don't want to design cars. You still haven't explained why people won't pay them to design new cars if they want new car designs. If there is a market for it then people will pay for it, if there isn't then they won't. Not paying for something is only a problem if you made an exchange, if you copied their car design you have not made an exchange and therefore they are not damaged by your lack of patronage. If you told them you were going to pay them for a design and then didn't then that would be a problem as they have exchanged their time and effort for your promise of payment.
lol.. what? Are you trying to say that car makers should be publicly funded either through charity, or be entirely nationalised, paid for by tax payers money and told what to do by the government? Let me guess, would you use 5-year plans like communists do?
I'm saying that where people don't find a business model there is still money if there is a demand. If you insist on a business example then just look at building architects. The burden for funding is between those who want to invest in car designs and those who want to make money out of car designs. I am certainly NOT saying they should be funded in any particular way, you appear to be the only one saying that.
Seriously, it's getting painful to listen to people's suggestions that wouldn't begin to hold together if someone was mad enough to even try these.
Nobody is forcing you to look at the screen, are they? If it helps you feel better, I won't cry if you stop posting.
Insults? I thought you were just throwing wildly inaccurate statements into the mix, like calling me a troll for using a simile to show why I think your argument is poor. I find that ironic.
As you apparently couldn't understand my use of a simile I'll spell it out for you; The oil industry have a history of being far more evil bastards than anyone thinks the RIAA are. Using them as an example of why we should have the choice whether to pay people if they cannot set the price is, I would wager, counter-productive.
As well as that, oil is a limited resource governed by the effects of scarcity. If someone mined some oil and it was possible to copy that oil at no expense to the person who mined it then I certainly wouldn't be paying them for every bit of oil that got copied. If you would, then that's your call and I have no problem with that.