by Flemming Funch
From Mopsos:Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of UNC Chapel Hill just completed an extensive empirical analysis of p2p sharing which concludes thatDownloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Now that's interesting. Is the battle for IP protection based on false assumptions? Could it be after all about maintaining a status quo, so that intermediates who used to provide a valuable service before P2P technology existed can still make money even though the value of the service they provide has reduced dramatically? Could it be? Maintaining the status quo? Why would the music industry do such a thing? Because they in danger of going extinct, that is, and their model no longer makes sense. It is close to being a lie that file sharing hurts their sales. The analysis figured that maybe 5000 file sharing downloads might make one of them decide not to buy a CD. And other studies show that file sharing in many cases increase sales, making people buy a CD they wouldn't have been aware of without file sharing.
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