I’ve been saying this for years now but didn’t have hard evidence to back me up… file sharing (or as the RIAA calls it, intellectual property theft) doesn’t hurt sales, and therefore the industry is in fact NOT losing 3 billion dollars a year to it.

And now, the hard evidence. Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas have published a study in the Journal of Political Economy called The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis. As much as I’d love to quote the entire piece to you, I’d have to read it first, and it’s really dense and economisty; so I’ll quote from the opening paragraph instead.

Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period.

Hat tip to the Freakonomics blog for the link!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Copyright, Digital Wonderland, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.