Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
By " scholarly consensus", I don't mean scientific certainty but that a substantial majority of scholars have reached a particular conclusion concerning a factual issue. Here, 14 studies have concluded that piracy causes significant harm against 5 that says it doesn't and 3 that can't say one way or another.
If this was a ball game, I'd call that an ass-whupping. Since we're talking academic studies, I call it scholarly consensus.  |
We're so close to agreeing on...something, I can feel it!
The difference is, in evolution pretty much all reputable scientists agree, and this is backed by hard experimentation; there really isn't a legitimate controversy, just a manufactured one. With piracy, it's harder because it's not based on experimentation but a review of industry statistics, which can be reported a number of different ways and what's really being looked at is correlation between music/ebook/whatever sales and piracy rates. With piracy, there's no consensus because you have a number of studies from reputable economists and scholars that do come to vastly different conclusions. And unfortunately, more studies don't necessarily mean "consensus", unless the studies of one side can be easily shown to be based on bad assumptions or bad data.
So right now, we can basically say with confidence that piracy either causes no harm or causes infinity dollars harm.