Di 4 mesi fa, mi era sfuggito. juan carlos File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society By Nate Anderson <http://arstechnica.com/author/nate-anderson/> | Last updated 4 months ago Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US... and managed to benefit all of us at the same time. "Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology," write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. "Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." Weaker is stronger? Peer-to-peer file-sharing on the Internet has certainly weakened copyright, but that's not necessarily a bad thing unless one equates "stronger copyright" with "better copyright." According to the US Constitution, copyright is about promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts"; it's not about enriching authors, except as a means of promoting said "Progress." When we think about copyright, the most pertinent question to ask is not whether some change would produce less money for rightsholders, but whether some change would /remove incentives to create/. Has file-sharing reduced creators' incentives? Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf presented a recent paper at a music business conference in Vienna <http://musicbusinessresearch.wordpress.com/vienna-music-business-research-da...> that tried to answer this question empirically. By charting the production of new books, new music albums, and new feature films over the last decade, the authors tried to see whether creative output went up or down in correlation with file-sharing. “Data on the supply of new works are consistent with our argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers,” they write in their paper, “File-sharing and Copyright <http://musicbusinessresearch.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/paper-felix-oberhol...>" (PDF). [...] Continua qui: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/file-sharing-has-weakened-co...