RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later
On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people [...]
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster
In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the [...]
The Chilling Effects of the DMCA
This wasn’t the first time the DMCA had interfered with my security research. Back in 2001, my colleagues and I had had to withdraw a peer-reviewed paper about CD copy [...]
Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship: Evidence from Payments to Writers in the Romantic Period
Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of [...]
Open Wi-Fi and Copyright: A Primer for Network Operators
Open networks provide Internet access to the public. Users do not need to subscribe—they simply connect their devices, often over a wireless connection. For instance, the City of San Francisco [...]
Collateral Damages: Why Congress Needs To Fix Copyright Law’s Civil Penalties
In most areas of the law, we try to avoid this kind of unfairness [in payouts from civil litigation] and uncertainty by making sure that we tie penalties to the [...]
Unintended Consequences – 16 Years Under the DMCA
The “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. The law was ostensibly intended [...]
Streaming Reaches Flood Stages: Does Spotify Stimulate or Depress Music Sales?
Streaming music services have exploded in popularity in the past few years, variously raising optimism and concern about their impacts on recorded music revenue. On the one hand, streaming services [...]
Quality Predictability and the Welfare Benefits from New Products: Evidence from the Digitization of Recorded Music
We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. Digitization has expanded consumption opportunities by giving [...]
Copyright Enforcement: Evidence from Two Field Experiments
Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive dataset of copyright infringement [...]