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Re: [dvd-discuss] "Research: File-sharing not killing CD sales"





owner-dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu wrote on 03/31/2004 07:09:55 AM:

> This article might be of interest...
>
> http://cio-today.newsfactor.com/perl/story/23577.html?
> u=tatn2000&p=NFNSS_89f98eac356d475e3d113b26705fdc05



The paper is at     http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Additional material at  http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharingSl(Ariz).doc


The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis (with F. Oberholzer).
Status: draft is circulating (comments welcome!). Current version: March 2004.

A longstanding economic question is the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.




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