Ups and Downs; Economic and Cultural Effects of File Sharing on Music, Film and Games

Huygen, Annelies; Helberger, Natali; Poort, Joost; Rutten, Paul; Eijk, N.A.N.M. van

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1350451

Cited by 23 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…First, copyright infringement performed by individuals (as opposed to 'for profit') is a civil matter in the UK and most other countries, so does not fall under 'cybercrime'. Second, there has long been debate about whether illicit online copying actually depresses CD sales; an early study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf concluded that the people who did most file-sharing also bought the most CDs [48], while a thorough study by the Dutch government [24] concluded that copyright infringement through downloading pirated entertainment products gives a net social gain (for each dollar lost by the music industry, consumers gained two dollars' worth of value). On a broader scale, the transformation brought about by technology has meant that instead of people buying music an album at a time from a record company for £15 they now buy it a track at a time from Apple for 79p.…”

Section: Copyright-infringing Music and Videomentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

Anderson

Barton²,

Böhme

et al. 2013

The Economics of Information Security and Privacy

411

285

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In this paper we present what we believe to be the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. It was prepared in response to a request from the UK Ministry of Defence following scepticism that previous studies had hyped the problem. For each of the main categories of cybercrime we set out what is and is not known of the direct costs, indirect costs and defence costs -both to the UK and to the world as a whole. We distinguish carefully between traditional crimes that are now 'cyber' because they are conducted online (such as tax and welfare fraud); transitional crimes whose modus operandi has changed substantially as a result of the move online (such as credit card fraud); new crimes that owe their existence to the Internet; and what we might call platform crimes such as the provision of botnets which facilitate other crimes rather than being used to extract money from victims directly. As far as direct costs are concerned, we find that traditional offences such as tax and welfare fraud cost the typical citizen in the low hundreds of pounds/Euros/dollars a year; transitional frauds cost a few pounds/Euros/dollars; while the new computer crimes cost in the tens of pence/cents. However, the indirect costs and defence costs are much higher for transitional and new crimes. For the former they may be roughly comparable to what the criminals earn, while for the latter they may be an order of magnitude more. As a striking example, the botnet behind a third of the spam sent in 2010 earned its owners around US$2.7m, while worldwide expenditures on spam prevention probably exceeded a billion dollars. We are extremely inefficient at fighting cybercrime; or to put it another way, cybercrooks are like terrorists or metal thieves in that their activities impose disproportionate costs on society. Some of the reasons for this are well-known: cybercrimes are global and have strong externalities, while traditional crimes such as burglary and car theft are local, and the associated equilibria have emerged after many years of optimisation. As for the more direct question of what should be done, our figures suggest that we should spend less in anticipation of cybercrime (on antivirus, firewalls, etc.) and more in response -that is, on the prosaic business of hunting down cyber-criminals and throwing them in jail.

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Section: Copyright-infringing Music and Videomentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

Anderson

Barton²,

Böhme

et al. 2013

The Economics of Information Security and Privacy

411

285

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A more recent study [21] commissioned by the Dutch government, argues that even when buying and le-sharing sometimes go hand in hand, they are not mutually exclusive, i.e., there is no direct relationship between downloading les protected by copyright and purchasing music in physical format . One of the ndings points that le sharers are not more or less willing to buy music that other people, and those le sharers that buy music do not buy more or less music than non le sharers, but they acquire more value added products, like concert tickets and promotional items (licensing ).…”

Section: Eects Of Sampling On Sales: Theoretical and Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With current levels of u, let's assume C 12 0. From [21] we can x p s (u) = (0.7, 0.4). The best case sampling probability should be close to one for the CPI site and not very far from the actual value for P2P networks, so let's use …”

Section: Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

P2P Business and Legal Models for Increasing Accessibility to Popular Culture

Altman

Wong

Rojas-Mora

2010

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Recent publications have reached conicting conclusions on wheather allowing users to have unlimitted free access for downloading music and lms is benetial or not for the content provider industrty. Not only do models dier in their conclusions, but there has also not been an agreement on the validity of data on the impact of free access to music and lms using P2P on the prots of CPIs and on the demand for CDs and DVDs. We provide in this paper a model that allows to study this question using elementary mathematical tools. In particular, it includes the eect of sampling on the the willingness to buy. Preliminary numerical experiments show that benets are maximized by avoiding any control measures against unauthorized sampling over P2P networks.

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“…Although IFPI (2010: 10) blames file © 2013 The Author(s) sharing for the decline in sales of non-digital products (vinyl and CDs), the market itself increasingly prefers digital products as demonstrated by the 12 per cent growth in 2009 of 'global digital revenues … totalling US$ 4.2 billion' and with digital channels now accounting for '27 per cent of music sales, up from 21 per cent in 2008'. Furthermore, IFPI (2010: 18) ignores studies that show file sharers more likely than non-sharers to purchase digital entertainment media and services (for example, Andersen and Frenz's (2007) survey of Canadian file-sharers' purchasing habits and research by Huygen et al (2009) identifying the 'strongly positive' economic implications of file sharing for 'welfare' in the Netherlands). IFPI (2010: 18) highlights one study of young British online consumers, which revealed that almost one in four file sharers 'typically spend nothing on music'; the flip side is that three in four file sharers also purchase music, a tendency evinced in P2P forums where some people liken downloaded or streamed tracks to radio, enabling people to try before they buy.…”

Section: Big Content Vs the Swarm: Ordering Attempts In The Informatimentioning

confidence: 99%

The tangled hydra: developments in transglobal peer‐to‐peer culture

Rimini¹

2013

Global Networks

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Internet‐enabled file sharing via peer‐to‐peer (P2P) systems is a transglobal activity involving millions of people circulating vast amounts of information. ‘Anonymous peers’ exchange data via autonomous networks that are simultaneously external to, and embedded within, market structures. A transnational alliance of technology and media industries and governments employs technological barriers, legal instruments and, belatedly, commercial alternatives to constrain the phenomenon. Such ‘digital enclosures’ trigger productive rebellious acts by programmers, intellectual property activists and file sharers inhabiting overlapping informal networks. Escalating cycles of retaliation and resistance spawn further disorder in the informational domain. The period 2009–12 has been a watershed for technological trends, landmark legal battles and supranational treaties. However, scant attention is paid to how ‘digital piracy’ disturbs the logic of capital by instituting material practices that tolerate contradictory positions on free culture and electronic freedom, creating new contexts for social experimentation and recomposition.

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Ups and Downs; Economic and Cultural Effects of File Sharing on Music, Film and Games

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

P2P Business and Legal Models for Increasing Accessibility to Popular Culture

The tangled hydra: developments in transglobal peer‐to‐peer culture

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