Economic Impact
There is still ongoing discussion about the economic impact of P2P file sharing. Norbert Michel, a Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said that because of "econometric and data issues, studies thus far have produced disparate estimates of file sharing's impact on album sales."
In the book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler states that peer-to-peer file sharing is economically efficient and that the users pay the full transaction cost and marginal cost of such sharing even if it "throws a monkey wrench into the particular way in which our society has chosen to pay musicians and re-cording executives. This trades off efficiency for longer-term incentive effects for the recording industry. However, it is efficient within the normal meaning of the term in economics in a way that it would not have been had Jack and Jane used subsidized computers or network connections".
Read more about this topic: Peer-to-peer File Sharing
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