Last Friday Germany passed a copyright law which bans consumers from copying DVDs and music, even for personal use, thereby criminalizing a huge swath of the computer literate population. We’ll see how enforcement goes. In the meantime, Britain’s Guardian Unlimited ran a thought provoking column arguing against just these sorts of restrictions. The author, Cory Doctorow, begins with a pretty self-evident truth:
The more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information — for better or for worse.
He goes on to conclude that open access to information (besides being inevitable) will have real economic benefits.
To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the economic activity that the internet enables — not the stuff that it impedes…. Look to all the garage crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com…. Look to all the salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming intermediaries.
The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates.
Which sounds grand, except if you’re a music company exec. For those interested in the fate of the music companies in the age of file sharing, this week the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog is holding a quorum of top economists on the issue. It’s fascinating, in depth, and includes this statement by Koleman Strumpf, a professor of business economics at the University of Kansas Business School: “While linking the two seems tantalizing — file sharing rose to prominence at roughly the same time that record sales started to fall — there is surprisingly little evidence to support the claim that file sharing has significantly hurt record sales.”
