A paper from University of Kansas economist Koleman Strumpf (whose work we've featured here for years) empirically examines the impact of file-sharing on box-office revenues. Read the rest

One year ago today Group whose Wikipedia entry was deleted for non-notability threatens lawsuit against Wikipedian who participated in the discussion: Benjamin Mako Hill writes, "Last year, I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that led to the deletion of an article about the "Institute for Cultural Diplomacy." Because I edit Wikipedia using my real name, the ICD was able to track me down. Over the last month or so, they threated me with legal action and have now gotten their lawyers involved."

Five years ago today South Korea prepares to nuke its technological competitiveness with a three-strikes copyright rule: Joe sez, "South Korea is arguably one of the world's most internet-connected countries. Regrettably, the corrupt dinosaurs in the Korean National Assembly have just passed a bill in-committee to use a "three strikes" law against ISP connections there."

Ten years ago today Empirical data on file-sharing's effect on album sales: Koleman Strumpf, a conservative, Cato-affiliated economist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just co-authored a paper on the effects of file-sharing on album sales, based on the first-ever empirical data analysis in the field. Read the rest

Suw Charman has written an excellent article for the Guardian on my pal Koleman Strumpf's empirical, quantitative research on the effect of downloading on record sales (he concluded that it doesn't really have one), and the music industry's content-free bluster in reply.

"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.

"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...

"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."

Link (Thanks, Suw!) Read the rest

Koleman Strumpf, the co-author of the first-ever empirical study on the impact of file-sharing on record sales, has found himself on the receiving end of a withering attack from the music industry who argue that their bought-and-paid-for, non-empirical "research" trumps his analysis, attacking his conclusions.

Two years ago, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee set out to research the matter. Strumpf's interest was piqued by the Napster trial, where the recording industry alleged copyright violations that led to the demise of the pioneering Web site in 2001. In the testimony, experts argued that music downloads had to be the cause of slumping sales.

Strumpf read the studies they cited. They were horrible, he said.

"I was like, 'Boy, this is pretty amazing,' " said Strumpf, a Philadelphia native. "Nobody has done a serious study."

Link (Thanks, Thomas!) Read the rest

Alberto Escarlate of thep2pweblog points us to an audio interview with Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer -- the two economists who made headlines last week when they published "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." Here's the interview: Link (in RealAudio only, ugh) Read the rest

Koleman Strumpf, a conservative, Cato-affiliated economist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just co-authored a paper on the effects of file-sharing on album sales, based on the first-ever empirical data analysis in the field. Koleman watched the file requests on OpenNap servers (to get numbers on which albums' tracks are being downloaded) and compared them to the sales-figures for each album, correlating file-sharing popularity against sales data. His conclusion: file-sharing isn't killing record sales.

We analyze a large file sharing dataset which includes 0.01% of the world’s downloads from the last third of 2002. We focus on users located in the U.S. Their audio downloads are matched to the album they were released on, for which we have concurrent U.S. weekly sales data. This allows us to consider the relationship between downloads and sales. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using technical features related to file sharing (such as network congestion or song length) and international school holidays, both of which are plausibly exogenous to sales. We are able to obtain relatively precise estimates because the data contain over ten thousand album-weeks...

Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale...high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing.

369K PDF Link (Thanks, Koleman!) Read the rest