Copyright protection grants creators monopolies – with their attendant harms – in order to provide incentives for continued creation. File sharing, which exploded with Napster’s appearance in 1999, effectively weakened copyright protection. Researchers have documented depressing effects of...

Global music sales have substantially fallen in the last four years. This paper uses a panel of country-level data to investigate the extent to which this is a consequence of file sharing. I find that countries with higher internet and broadband penetration have suffered higher drops in music...

Abstract The first file-sharing software, Napster, was shut down in 2001, but the copying technology’s impact on the music industry is still passionately debated. This paper uses micro-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the impact of Internet file sharing on music sales....

The music industry is undergoing extremely rapid structural change not of its own choosing and record labels will no longer be able to rely on coercive seven-record deals and business methods that have remained unchanged since the 1960s. This paper provides a case study of the 2000-2001 lawsuit...