Sorry for partial redundancy of my previous answer with Juan-Carlos' earlier message. As for the substance of Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Coleman Strumpf's work: 1) Apart from the issue of access to data for other analysis techniques, the 2004-2007 work on impact of sharing on sales possible weakness lies in the short period of study. Since then, many other studies have covered longer periods, with similar results (see below) 2) The 2010 paper "File Sharing and Copyright" covers a variety of subjects: - A meta-study analyzing all studies on relationship between sharing and commercial sales, concluding that the impact -if there is any- can account for no more than 20% of the reduction of sales. - An historical account of the growth of sharing traffic - A macro-economic study of the music sector during the last decade, showing that it fared well (see below) - A micro-economic model of individual investment in a musician career to the effect of demonstrating that file sharing can not act as a deterrent. I personnally value Oberholzer-Gee and Strump's work a lot. I nonetheless have two critics, one minor and one more important: - The minor critic regards the delineation of music economy sector. They include sales of music players such as iPods, which I find debatable. However they do not include very important parts of the music economy (teaching, instruments, amateur practice). I find similar results to theirs when including these activities and excluding players. - The more important critic regards diversity of attention to works. Without giving convincing evidence, the 2010 paper claims that the distribution of attention to works in sharing is as concentrated thant in commercial sales. I have documented evidence in several contexts (EMule sharing for all media in 2008 as collected by University Paris 6 Complex networks team, BitTorrent sharing of films and of all media in Hungary thanks to Bodo Balazs) demonstrating that the distribution of attention is much more diverse in sharing than in commercial sales. In particular, the shared of attention that goes to intermediate popularity works is much higher. Philippe Le 27/10/2010 12:38, Philippe Aigrain a écrit :
The Leibowitz paper is an answer to refutations (by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf) of critics previously addressed to their 2004-2007 papers. Since then Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf have published in the NBER Series another important paper:
Inbook (Oberholzer-Strumpf2010) Oberholzer-Gee, F. & Strumpf, K. Lerner, J. & Stern, S. (ed.) File-Sharing and Copyright NBER Series, 2010, 19-55.
This was also presented and debated at the Vienna Music Research Days (videos are on-line).
Philippe
Le 27/10/2010 11:20, Giovanni Battista Ramello a écrit :
Per quanto personalmente sia favorevole alle tesi sostenute, il lavoro di Oberholzer-Gee& Strumpf è oggetto di un forte dibattito giacché i dati usati non sono disponibili a chi ha chiesto di controllare le stime empiriche e sono stati sollevati , almeno nella comunità degli economisti, forti sospetti di addomesticamento che hanno un po' inquinato il valore del lavoro.
Per chi fosse interessato, lascio due link che rinviano alle critiche di Stan Liebowitz, grande protagonista del dibatto su economics of copyright
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1014399
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1155764
Cordiali saluti
Giovanni _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa@server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa