QotW3: Sharing, Copyright & Creative Culture

After going through all the required readings, I have summarized the issues between content creators and the general public to be about money. The content creators say, after so much of their hard work and creativity, they have no advantage received for it and so they do it believe in it anymore. They would rather be a doctor, research in science where it is highly paid and gives fame. Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA argued that this would rob artists of their livelihood and stifles innovation. However in June 2005, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf have found file-sharing has only a limited effect on album sales. In fact, they can safely and “statistically reject the null that even a quarter of the recent sales decline stems from file sharing.” Theirs was an experiment based on empirical evidence “exploiting temporal and spatial variation in the intensity of file-sharing.” In the Literature, it was noted that people who download might not necessarily buy the same albums given that downloading technology did not exist. My idea is that given the downloading technology, the sampling of new and interesting albums are done online instead adding to the royalties.

How about the general public? Why do they want to download free stuff from the net? There is a very simple reason why downloading might perform better than sales. It is simply because it is free. If something is free, everybody wants it, whether they need it or not is not important. If it is within reach, convenient, they would want it. It is just the way the world works. If it is in the public interest to make information free a.k.a. freedom of media, the good news is it is already free for access. It is free for access as long as you pay for it; there are no sections of it left behind. Everybody pays 17.90 for an album; there is no price tag discrimination between whites, black, Asians.

Basically copyright issues are somehow correlated to the economic gains, but are mistakenly trying to be seen as causality.

My question is: is the real issue between those who ripped off work and call it their own or general public who downloads copyrighted work? It seems like the Australian Government recently amended the copyright act so “consumers can tape their favourite episode of The Bill or download a track from a CD to their computer and then onto their MP3 player without infringing on copyright.” But if it is okay to download copyright material, but illegal to rip if off and copy it to others or allow others to freely download, then where do we get the material to download?

If it is okay to be on the receiving end of P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing, have you stopped and think where P2P copies originate from? From the original copyright material of course! The irony. It’s just like Singapore Government saying it is okay to chew bubblegum but illegal to sell them. Without bubblegum for sale, where do we get the bubblegum to chew? Our personal packets can only last a neighborhood across the border to be exact.

A very famous rule of Economics is the law of supply and demand. Even though photocopying a textbook is illegal because it infringes copyright, but selling the copy made definitely requires getting arrester and fined heavily. So the local bookshop does not want to do this business because it is illegal. The train of thoughts of a normal consumer would go like this, “If Bookshop A would not copy our textbooks for us, we would simply go to Bookshop B, or C, or D…” There is no stopping them. It is true this is a consumer world.

My recommendation to the people who collect royalties and fights for patent rights would be to go along with the flow instead of staying put and whine about all the injustice in the world. The introduction of downloading music online at a fee per track is a very good example of rising from the chaos. When retail prices were ripped to the bare minimum by Black Friday or online auction sites, instead of responding negatively, Amazon.com chose to follow suit. They created a similar scheme of their own and the response was massive. They might not have earned much but it sure created awareness to their site and probably signed up more long-term customers, some of which may still be buying from their site today.


Bibliography

Remix culture: a rights nightmare. ABC: Catapult. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/indepth/s1645533.htm

Brady, K. S. (2007). Copyright FAQ: 25 Common Myths and Misconceptions. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://users.goldengate.net/%7Ekbrady/copyright.html

Oberholzer-Gee, F, & Strumpf, K (2005). The Effect Of File Sharing On Record Sales. Retrieved February 1, 2007, from http://www.unc.edu/%7Ecigar/papers/FileSharing_June2005_final.pdf.