I am a criminal. I break the law almost every day and I’m not sorry about it.
I download music, films, books and any other forms of digital media that I want. When I download, I don’t pause or give consideration for intellectual property laws. I’ll bet I’m not alone and that most people my age break intellectual property laws. It is my opinion that these laws are stupid and should be overturned immediately.
The prohibition of downloading accessible media carries no objective benefit to society and a variety of costs. In contrast, downloading and sharing of digital content provides a unique potential for wealth creation and impose no systematic costs upon society.
You might ask, aren’t the artists harmed through lower profits? In so far as consumers perceive pirated media as a substitute for copyrighted media then yes, profits are lower when individuals choose pirated material rather than copyrighted material.
But empirically, pirates don’t perceive downloaded media as a substitute for legitimate. While downloading for free, illegal users spend larger sums legally than those who do not download. Simply put, the benefits of downloading digital media far outweigh the costs.
In economic terms, digital media is a nearly magical substance that could potentially change the world for the better, forever. Digital content has unique qualities, the likes of which have never existed in the course of economic nor human history.
Traditional resources are scarce. Private property rights, exchange contracts and monetary systems are coping devices to resolve the challenges associated with scarcity. We own things, we trade them through explicit contracts and we express value in quantitative financial terms all to avoid the costs associated with scarcity and the conflicts that arise from it.
When these institutions are absent or poorly defined, the tragedy of the commons takes hold. Think of how fast beer runs out at a keg party as opposed to a bar where you pay per drink or a BYOB event. When no individuals own the stock of common resources, incentives are arranged for each individual to consume as much and as fast as possible. Because beer is scarce, the end result is a quickly empty keg.
Species extinctions, air pollution, road congestion and infrastructure decline—the problems of missing property rights amidst resource scarcity are some of today’s most pressing social issues.
For digital media there is no tragedy of the commons. When digital files are commonly accessible, everyone is motivated to use and use quickly just like at the keg party. But the Internet keg does not run dry. Instead, as each person uses it, the common stock grows and diversifies. It gets better and more complex.
Intellectual property laws make sharing and communicating more difficult. File sharers are harmed directly by criminal sanctions and future users miss out from the lower amounts of digital content. Society itself suffers from less communication and less cultural sharing and interaction than would exist without pesky intellectual property law.
Dan D’Amico is an associate professor of economics.
He can be reached at
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