The Doctor Is (Back) In
In the news again are those fine Professors of P2P, Harvard’s Felix Oberholzer and UNC’s Koleman Strumpf. Regular Week in Review readers recall the stir they caused three years ago when their paper on P2P (PDF) clearly showed file-sharing caused no appreciable drop in overall record sales . Of course swappers (and tapers before them) had been saying this for years, but until the professors researched the issue and released their findings in March of that year, there hadn’t been much in the way of up to date empirical evidence to back those claims.
The paper changed all that and it’s making waves all over again because an influential journal will soon be publishing it, some 35 months after it was written. Although it may seem like a long time, the Professor says it’s normal in the rarefied world of elite peer-reviewed periodicals.
“Lead times at academic journals are quite long, in particular at the very best publications such as the Journal of Political Economy,” Oberholzer told me this week, referring to the prestigious 115 year-old bimonthly. Still, three years is a stretch and things can change over time so it’s important the verdict stands. Not to worry assured the doc, “The paper is the one that you saw, with some revisions, but it has only been published now.”
That’s crucial, because it means that when this intensive peer review process ended the conclusion held firm: file sharing does not lead to losses in record sales.
Since copying isn’t stealing, and sharing isn’t piracy, it’s hard to imagine any justification for the over-the-top response to casual non-commercial swapping that pollutes Microsoft’s Vista with DRM, that cripples the First Amendment with the DMCA and that promotes the endless number of court-clogging civil suits that criminalize and stigmatize an entire generation of people who aren’t doing anything wrong.
That is what must be explained now.
In the news again are those fine Professors of P2P, Harvard’s Felix Oberholzer and UNC’s Koleman Strumpf. Regular Week in Review readers recall the stir they caused three years ago when their paper on P2P (PDF) clearly showed file-sharing caused no appreciable drop in overall record sales . Of course swappers (and tapers before them) had been saying this for years, but until the professors researched the issue and released their findings in March of that year, there hadn’t been much in the way of up to date empirical evidence to back those claims.
The paper changed all that and it’s making waves all over again because an influential journal will soon be publishing it, some 35 months after it was written. Although it may seem like a long time, the Professor says it’s normal in the rarefied world of elite peer-reviewed periodicals.
“Lead times at academic journals are quite long, in particular at the very best publications such as the Journal of Political Economy,” Oberholzer told me this week, referring to the prestigious 115 year-old bimonthly. Still, three years is a stretch and things can change over time so it’s important the verdict stands. Not to worry assured the doc, “The paper is the one that you saw, with some revisions, but it has only been published now.”
That’s crucial, because it means that when this intensive peer review process ended the conclusion held firm: file sharing does not lead to losses in record sales.
Since copying isn’t stealing, and sharing isn’t piracy, it’s hard to imagine any justification for the over-the-top response to casual non-commercial swapping that pollutes Microsoft’s Vista with DRM, that cripples the First Amendment with the DMCA and that promotes the endless number of court-clogging civil suits that criminalize and stigmatize an entire generation of people who aren’t doing anything wrong.
That is what must be explained now.
posted by JackSpratts at 1:35 PM
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