Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, in their recent paper on file-sharing, provide numerous additional tests and facts to support their overall conclusion that file-sharing has a benign impact on record sales. In this note I attempt to replicate their additional tests and check their...

Through a stroke of luck, a referee report in the review process at the JPE has been positively identified as the Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf (O/S) response to my earlier comment. Regardless of the response's provenance, what counts is whether it solidly refuted my comment. This 'sequel' analyzes the...

This is a lengthy critique of the empirical findings, factual claims, and logic of the empirical examination of file-sharing by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf. It is written for a general audience and provides details of calculations, data, and industry measurements that allow...

This paper is an analysis of the economics underlying the Betamax case. It was written in 1985 but never published. With the renewed interest in copying and copyright in recent years, and because it has been cited and appeared on some reading lists, I thought it might be useful to make it available

Although previous forms of copying have been found to often have benign effects on copyright owners the rise in file-sharing has coincided with a steep decline in the sale of sound recordings. This paper attempts to empirically examine the extent, if any, to which file-sharing has caused the...

The impact of copying, in the form of file-sharing, has become a stormy policy issue. Previous copying technologies have mostly failed to live up to the extravagant predictions of harm that arose with those new technologies although precise measurements of copying's impact was rarely...

New Internet-based technologies appear to threaten the ability of copyright owners to collect revenues for their intellectual creations, as epitomized by the recent public trials and tribulations experienced by Napster. As a response, new legislation against pirating and new technologies to...

Why did the dot.coms burn and die? The answer is that they followed the advice given to them by a set of economists preaching that being first to market was the key to success thanks to lock-in effects. I explore these events and this thinking in this paper

This paper surveys the extant literature on the impact of file-sharing. It begins by examining the theory behind the impact of file-sharing. One novelty from this analysis is the finding that the effect of 'sampling' of copyrighted materials can be expected to have a negative impact on copyright...

This paper investigates the impact of unauthorized downloading of MP3 files on the recording industry. Although the no longer extant Napster was the most famous system used for such downloading, its progeny have continued to allow millions of music listeners to download music (and other) files...