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Music Is Now A “Public Good” Like Street Lighting.

image from 3.bp.blogspot.com How do you punish someone that doesn't believe what they're doing is wrong? Better yet, how do you tell someone that file sharing is immortal when they don't think that it should be illegal in the first place? These are the questions that Joe Cox, an economist from the University of Portsmouth Business School, found himself grappling with after he conducted his recent study. In it, he attempted to connect the dots between the motivations of file sharers and determine how those that shared content differed from those that made the content available. Why would someone with no financial incentive make creative works available for others to download? It doesn't have anything to do with money.


Instead, Cox found that "seeders" – as he referred to them in the study – are "motivated by feelings of altruism, community spirit and are seeking recognition among other members of the file sharing community." He also asserted that some derive pleasure from the "feeling of ‘getting one over on the system’ too."

To which Cox concluded that file sharers see themselves as "the Robin Hoods of the digital age." Considering these insights, he believed that it's going to be quite difficult to persuade file sharers to stop doing something they believe to be morally right. Despite the attempts of industry trade groups to campaign and advise file sharers of their illegal behavior, many remain unmoved in their position.

Due to this, Cox argues that we may have to consider funding the cultural industries through the public sector. Since the music and record industries can't exclude people from acquiring their content, he contends that music and movies are now public goods. "The characteristics of this are you can’t exclude people from enjoying the benefits of it if they don’t pay for it, and if any one person consumes the good it doesn’t affect anyone else’s ability to consume it too," he says. "Classic examples are things like street lighting or national defence."

"I would argue that these days music and movies are public goods. You can’t really exclude people from using them. The internet is giving them the availability to share this material at will and it’s virtually impossible to stop that. And with the digital nature of material, you can make perfect reproductions and share it to others. What economists say will happen if you have a public good and look to the free market, the market won’t provide any output because everyone will just look to free-ride, and not pay themselves. But if no-one pays the good doesn’t get produced." (Read on.)

Hypebot will be interviewing Joe Cox soon, what should we ask him?

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12 Comments

  1. Here’s my question that no one has been able to answer: If we don’t pay for music, the songwriter (who makes a living off writing songs) won’t get paid. Music as we know won’t exist. All we will have is crappy music by artists that they think they can write. So why can’t someone start explaining to people that stealing music isn’t about the artist or the label, its about the song writer and the people in the industry who are trying to make a living off of music. Killing music, Kills jobs which then in turn brings the economy back to the gutter. Music can not be a free good if we want it to stick around.

  2. Joe Cox and his ilk are best left to academia, where they can do their thinking without doing any harm.
    Here’s what I would ask him: is intellectual property a public good? Because that’s what music is. Also, ask him what he thinks of copyright in general. In other words, is it beneficial to economic growth to protect people’s art from being copied by anyone who feels like it and is able to? One last question: what about patent law?
    Here’s my take: http://cerebellumblues.squarespace.com/blog/2010/10/9/music-theft-and-the-culture-of-free.html

  3. First of all, this is an editorially irresponsible headline. One guy posits a theory and it turns into a statement of fact? Silly.
    Electricity is not the product of someone’s own personal imagination; neither is national defense. To call music a “public good” conveniently ignores its origins as a personal, creative work produced without public funding; the analogy is deeply flawed and effectively nonsensical.
    No amount of wishing will make right the act of taking something for free that was not intended for free. Merely arguing that a position can’t be wrong because apparently too many people believe otherwise is morally irresponsible. Behaviors that predominate during “wild west” periods of time are not by any means the ones that rule the day once civilization is established. I for one am happy I don’t need to strap on my six-shooter every time I leave my house.

  4. Agreed. In other news, my mailman says that if we share music then the best music ever will come out. Get on it, hypebot.

  5. It’s an interesting point of view, but the real reason people aren’t paying for music is twofold: otherwise law abiding citizens take music on the internet because 1) they can, and 2) no one stops them. It’s not public good, but common law that we need to be thinking about. The PC/MAC operating system isn’t property aware, the cable/ISP network isn’t property aware, the servers aren’t property aware, search engines aren’t property aware. Switch to a property aware system and then lets talk about public goods…

  6. I’ll agree with the “if the music isn’t paid for, then they can’t produce more music.”
    What about other media that is public domain? Like books and literature? These are just as easily shared (“stolen”)online, copied from libraries, loaned out, etc.

  7. In a world where music is a public good like street lighting, every music is in the public domain. Every kind of street lighting looks somewhat the same, but that’s not the case for music – unless we consider the music from 2 radio stations of the same format or songs that have their lyrics taken from the list of most popular words in hit singles. These days, even the repertoire of two individual buskers is more likely to be different from one another’s than that of two format radio stations of the same format. Statistics can be a great equalizer but when it comes to a cultural product, it can also create a big bore. And people don’t buy boring stuff for entertainment. So every format radio signal should be a public good, but buskers should be thrown some money into their hats.
    Anyway, in the old days when the record industry came into being, publishers took a mass of songs from the public domain and copyrighted them to pseudonymous composers, coming up with ficticious types such as Deaderick Malone, whereas the real authors and their heirs never received any royalties. Let’s not go back there, music business.

  8. In eeconomics a “public good” is a kind of product with two properties
    1. non-rival – Consuming the product does not diminish it’s value to others.
    non-excludable – It is impossible or extremely expensive to stop anyone from using the product once it is provided.
    It has nothing at all to do with good or bad.

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