by Trichordist Editor

…it will henceforth be very difficult to dislodge Smith and Telang’s conclusion that piracy does economic harm to content creators…

Copyright and Technology

Back in 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a meta-study of the economic effects of intellectual property infringement (including counterfeit goods as well as copyrighted works).  The GAO concluded that IP infringement is a problem for the economy, but it’s not possible to quantify the extent of the damage — and may never be.  It looked at many existing studies and found bias or methodological problems in every one.

More recently, Michael Smith and Rahul Telang, two professors at Carnegie-Mellon University, published another meta-study that serves as a sort of rejoinder to the GAO study.  This was the subject of Prof. Smith’s talk at the recent Digital Book World (DBW) conference in NYC.

Assessing the Academic Literature Regarding the Impact of Media Piracy on Sales summarizes what has been a growing body of studies on the economic effects of so-called media piracy.  Their conclusion is that piracy does have…

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