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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
This discussion seems to me to be getting deeper into the real issues than past ones.
As for my view, since 40 percent of books are pulped, I don't see the harm in in shoplifting a few of those from Barnes and Noble. And yet it is wrong.
One piracy harm is that a lot of authors feel violated, comparable to how they would feel if burglarized. True, if the pirate was really careful and discrete, the author will have no way to know. But pirates are not that discrete, so authors do know about them.
Piracy is also comparable to insider trading. The victims don't know when they've been victimized by successful inside traders, and there are academic disagreements about how much, if any, harm these victims suffer, but they are still victims. |
I'm not going to address analogies to theft, because I think that has been debated to death on this board.
On the feeling of violation, I don't think you can base a punishment on that. You can't stand it when your neighbors have sex; it horrifies and completely disgusts you and it's all you can think of for days after you witness it through their open bedroom window. You call the police a number of times, and eventually your neighbors get the hint and start closing their blinds. But now you know, you just know (!) that every time they close their blinds they're having sex and it's terrible, and you feel violated. Should your irrational feeling of violation be the basis of policy decisions? I would say no.
Insider trading is an interesting example. Most would agree that it distorts markets and does cause real economic harm. However, if evidence showed that it caused no harm at all, and even resulted in an overall economic benefit, I would be in favour of it.
Speaking of which, here's an oldie but a goodie: A 2013 study from the European Commission (
here) found the following:
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Perhaps surprisingly, our results present no evidence of digital music sales displacement. While we find important cross country dierences in the effects of downloading on music purchases, our findings suggest a rather small complementarity between these two music consumption channels. It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them. The complementarity effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the sales of digital music.
Taken at face value, our findings indicate that digital music piracy does not displace legal music purchases in digital format. This means that although there is trespassing of private property rights, there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music revenues.
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