This is from Digital Music News.
Most people who advocate for anti-piracy laws do so because they think the artist deserves it. In that sense this is an interesting graph. It is very probable that artists gain from the shift from selling albums to concerts tickets, since they earn a much higher portion of income from concert tickets.
But if you think about that popular rationale for more than five seconds, it is very hard to hold onto consistently. I always have a mind fit when I see that big anti-piracy picture show up at the beginning of a dvd. “Piracy is not a Victimless Crime”. Every positive economic change has been at the expense of at least some producers. Tractors put some farmhands out of work -- machines and factory workers – Youtube and TV broadcasters -- Microsoft Word and secretaries – Starbucks and coffee maker manufacturers -- the internet and music artists, but that doesn’t mean they were victims of our crimes.
If downloading Lady Gaga’s new album is theft, then why isn’t reading this blog? Why isn’t repeating an idea I had to your friends? Intellectual Property laws can’t be justified by appeals to justice. Because ideas can’t be stolen, they can only be multiplied. When one person gains an idea, another person hasn’t lost it. That is the single best aspect about ideas. You own the disk and the computer, the only thing that you might be “stealing” is an idea of a song, and you’re stealing that when you sing it in the shower.
In general, not letting prices fall (even to free) doesn’t make economic sense. If something can be produced for free, it should be produced for free. Your punishing multitudes of consumers for the sake of a few producers. If Star Trek Food Replicators were invented, it would be spectacular even though some chefs would would lose out. It would be outrageous to say, “we have food replicators now, but you must not replicate food, because the people who make that food deserve your money”.
There is a better rationale for anti-piracy laws than appealing to make-work bias or justice. Simply put, if the producer can’t capture the total net benefit in the price, they won’t produce as much as is efficient. Something that is expensive to produce, but cheap to replicate, not enough will be produced. If it costs millions to put a new dish into the replicator, there wouldn’t be any food to replicate. That makes some sense. But in entails that we care about the music industry as a whole, not just artists. So the graph above isn’t relevant.
