Digital Music and Public Goods (original) (raw)

2016

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 ...

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