filesharing, kulturvielfalt und industrietod

Freunde, ich weiß nicht, ob ihr's schon wisst, aber: Die Popkomm wurde abgesagt. Sie stirbt den Filesharing-Tod.
Zumindest ist das die Diagnose von Dieter Gorny, Chef des Bundesverbandes Musikindustrie:

"Viele Unternehmen können es sich wegen des Diebstahls [sic!] im Internet nicht mehr leisten, an der Popkomm teilzunehmen."

Einige Kommentatoren, die man zu diesem angekündigten Nicht-Ereignis lesen kann, finden Gornys Argumentation fadenscheinig, die Popkomm sei eh schon lange tot gewesen und filesharing habe damit wenig zu tun. Zu lesen unter anderem hier und hier.

Interessant in diesem Zusammenhang ist eine jüngst erschienene Studie der Harvard Business School, die einen kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen filesharing-Praxis und Musik-Verkäufen nicht feststellen kann (Herr Gorny stellt diesen in jeder seiner Äußerungen mehrfach fest).
Die Studie stellt darüber hinaus die Frage, ob sich für die Kulturproduktion Anreizverluste aus der filesharing-Praxis ergeben und verneint vorsichtig. Die Zahl von Musikproduktionen habe sich seit 2000 schließlich nahezu verdoppelt.

Das differenzierte Fazit der Wissenschaftler:

File-sharing technology considerably weakened copyright protection, first of music and software and increasingly of movies, games, and books. The policy discussion surrounding file sharing has largely focused on the legality of the new technology and the question whether or not declining sales in music are due to file sharing. While these are important questions, in our view, the debate has been overly narrow. Copyright exists to encourage innovation and the creation of new works; in other words to promote social welfare. The question to ask is thus whether the new technology has undermined the incentives to create, market, and distribute entertainment. Sales displacement is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for harm to occur. We also need to know whether income from complementary products offset the decline in income from copyrighted works. And even if income fell, welfare may not suffer if artists do not respond to weaker monetary incentives.

As our survey indicates, the empirical evidence on sales displacement is mixed.
While some studies find evidence of a substitution effect, other findings, in particular the papers using actual file-sharing data, suggest that piracy and music sales are largely unrelated. In contrast, there is clear evidence that income from complements has risen in recent years. For example, concert sales have increased more than music sales have fallen. Similarly, a fraction of consumer electronics purchases and internet-related expenditures are due to file sharing. Unfortunately, we know little about the distribution of these impacts. How markets for complimentary goods have responded to file sharing remains an area of inquiry that is largely unexplored in academic research.

The same holds true for the question how artists would respond to weaker monetary incentives. Looking at aggregate output – the number of recordings, books, and movies produced every year – we see no evidence that file sharing has discouraged the production of artistic works. However, as with income from complementary goods, aggregate statistics need to be interpreted with some care. For example, digital formats not only encouraged file sharing; digital technology also lowered the cost of producing movies and music and they allowed artists to reach their audience in novel ways. The observed increase in output is in part due to these changes. The response of artists to technology-induced changes in income is a second area that we would like to single out as important for future research.

As this essay has made clear, we do not yet have a full understanding of the mechanisms by which file sharing may have altered the incentives to produce entertainment. However, in the industry with the largest purported impact – music – consumer access to recordings has vastly improved since the advent of file haring. Since 2000, the number of recordings produced has more than doubled. In our view, this makes it difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection has had a negative impact on artists’ incentives to be creative.

Studie "Filesharing & Copyright" (PDF, 46 Seiten)

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