“An economist says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn’t — and he doesn’t know why … On May 15, the Cato Institute published a new paper by Liebowitz, ‘Policing Pirates in the Networked Age,’ that takes a comprehensive look at the history of the recording industry’s battle with piracy. In the paper, Liebowitz argues persuasively that record industry experts failed to prove their assertion that Napster was gutting industry revenues. But he also argues that eventually, digital downloading will be a serious threat to those revenues. Both topics will be part of his upcoming book, ‘Rethinking the Networked Economy,’ due to be published in August. But the specifics of those arguments may be somewhat altered from their form in the Cato paper, because when Salon caught up with Liebowitz, he was reexamining his data and wondering, Why isn’t the record industry hurting more, already?…”
Click here to read Salon Magazine’s interview with Liebowitz.
