Sharing drives economies

The Dutch government, in cooperation with the Dutch research institute TNO, has recently conducted a survey into the economic effects of file sharing on the music industry. The results are quite surprising as they’ve concluded that illegally downloading music (which is allowed in Holland) has a positive effect on the music industry. If it would no longer be possible to download music, the sales of CD’s would further decrease. Quite the perspective change, or not?

Posts FreedomLab. Lawrence Lessig in his book Remix, points to Dan Bricklin’s piece The Cornucopia of the Commons

The networked architecture of Napster created value as a by product of people geting what they wanted in a vast interconnected database

In fact 57 million people were sharing when Napster was shut down. Were all these people criminals? And Lessig also points out that research shows even when people where sharing analogue bespoke taped playlists, this drove music sales. The music companies in a Straight Line approach to business have defeated themselves, beaten themselves up and lots of other people. Before a company like Warners through the Harry Potter fandom debacle, realised that there might, just might be another way of doing things and engaging with a fanbase.

In fact Lessig goes into a great deal of detail about the economics of sharing music. As the music companies have been espcially pernicious in their pursuit of copyright infringment.

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Posted in: Culture, Distribution, Economics, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Law, Marketing, Music, Participation, Social Networks, Trends

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