Digital Music and Public Goods

Abstract

In the summer of 2000 — which, for purposes of historical orientation, predated the release of both iTunes and the iPod — the file-sharing service Napster found itself in Federal Court accused of contributing to copyright infringement. Lawyers representing the United States recording industry asserted that Napster had “deliberately buil[t] a business based almost exclusively on piracy” (Menn, 2003, p. 234). This characterization of file-sharing as “piracy” implies that a person who downloaded a digital music file from Napster had thereby committed an act of theft. Napster in its original guise has long since passed, but the idea that peer-to-peer file-sharing is theft lingers on. It can function as a background assumption in debates over the copying of music that is digitally encoded in data files, to which I will refer hereafter simply as “digital music.” Consider the following exchange in 2012 between Emily White and David Lowery. White, who was born in 1991, asserts that she has ripped thousands of songs from friends’ CDs and hard drives but that she has not illegally downloaded any of this music. Although White is concerned about musicians failing to be paid as a result of this sort of music exchange, she seems to think that her file-ripping is not a sort of theft (White, 2012). Lowery, who was playing guitar in the band Cracker when White was born, disagrees. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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