It must be nice to make silly grand statements that have no historical precedent and then pretend that they are true.

You’ve been warned.
*cracks knuckles*

5 filesharing panics before the internet

Books – Economic history of copyright in Europe and the US:

Now, let’s look at the US since we’ve gotten the introductions out of the way, shall we?

Effects of Copyright Piracy

The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon’s Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama.

…

What were the effects of piracy? First, did the American industry suffer from cheaper foreign books being dumped on the domestic market? This does not seem to have been the case. After controlling for the type of work, the cost of the work, and other variables, the prices of American books were lower than prices of foreign books. American book prices may have been lower to reflect lower perceived quality or other factors that caused imperfect substitutability between foreign and local products. As might be expected, prices were not exogenously and arbitrarily fixed, but varied in accordance with a publisher?s estimation of market factors such as the degree of competition and the responsiveness of demand to determinants. The reading public appears to have gained from the lack of copyright, which increased access to the superior products of more developed markets in Europe, and in the long run this likely improved both the demand and supply of domestic science and literature.

Movies – Pirates are the industry’s best customers:

The GfK source says that the study shows ?If you download films, you have an increased interest in the cinema?, which only highlights how stupid it would be for the authorities to carry out their implied threat of prosecuting Kino.to users.

Music – Hadopi cuts off nose to spite face

HADOPI is betting that warnings will be enough to push the percentage of file sharers down?a view the survey says is also shared by 33% of filesharers. That?s not an illogical assumption, and time will tell if it?s right. But the evidence suggests that there are lots of ways this bet could go wrong, even if HADOPI survives the inevitable judicial scrutiny in France and at the EU level (and growing political opposition). If piracy is a sampling and discovery tool for high spenders, then suppressing piracy could depress legal sales. If?as I?ll argue at more length in a subsequent post?we?re in a mostly zero-sum market in which consumers are maxed out on discretionary media expenditures, then enforcement won?t significantly expand but at best just cannibalize one media sector for another.

Games – Gabe Newell’s consistent stance:

So, AC, you’re not only wrong about past experience with piracy, but you’re wrong about the service issue that piracy solves. Care to change your argument or do you stand thoroughly debunked based on just a smidgen of data that proves you wrong?