Of people who download copyrighted music online, why do some people obtain their music lawfully from sites like iTunes while other people obtain it unlawfully from sources such as peer-to-peer networks? In a new paper, Marc Bellemare and Andrew Holmberg try to answer these questions using an empirical study of the views of college students. Their survey was completed by about 300 undergraduates at what the paper describes as a private university in the South (presumably Duke University, where one of the authors is a professor). Their basic finding: “While the average student’s willingness to pay for legal music certainly matters in explaining music piracy, the threat of litigation as well as the average student’s degree of morality matter just as much.”
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October 18, 2009, 3:53 pmMark N. says:
I wish they had included material factors as well. For example, a hypothesis: people who mainly listen to music on a device that integrates conveniently with a seller of commercial downloads, like the iPod’s integration with iTunes, purchase music at a greater rate than people who listen to music primarily on devices with no such specific integration, like a desktop or laptop computer.
October 18, 2009, 4:15 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Their survey was completed by about 300 undergraduates
Questionably small sample. Having only too recently been an undergrad at a very large institution, I can say with all candor that it’s not the threat of litigation, morality (on college campuses?), or integration devices – although they all may play a very large part for a very, very small amount of people – its money: $$$ dollar dollar bills y’all.
William of Ockham strikes again.
October 18, 2009, 4:29 pmMike says:
I certainly hope that the study recognizes that there are multiple dimensions of “morality.” Suppose there is a student who thinks that copyright laws are unjust, as many students do, but he refuses to download illegally out of a respect for authority. What is his “degree of morality?”
October 18, 2009, 4:29 pmMike McDougal says:
That seems likely to be an important factor. Many people are not opposed to buying music but dislike the iTunes ecosystem. There are, of course, alternatives (e.g., Amazon). But it’s often easier — and cheaper — for a person to get the music illicitly.
October 18, 2009, 4:46 pmMike McDougal says:
For college students, I would tend to agree that money is the primary factor. That was my primary consideration in college, which wasn’t too long ago. Now, as a busy professional, my primary consideration is time. I have very little tolerance for cumbersome online transactions.
October 18, 2009, 4:49 pmOrin Kerr says:
Superskeptic,
Can you point to where you think the study erred? To the extent you think 5% of a population isn’t big enough to get a sense of the attitudes at that institution, what percentage do you think is enough to be accurate?
October 18, 2009, 4:51 pmTaeyoung says:
That’s an interesting result, but I suspect these factors really only come into play with music, now that DRM-free MP3s are available at low cost from multiple sources (Amazon and iTunes, as well as a few other smaller sites). For other media, I suspect that simple availability predominates massively over cost, litigation risk, or morality factors. TV shows and movies, for example, are not available for purchase in easy-to-use downloadable formats — it’s either streaming (like Hulu) or loaded with DRM preventing the user from backing it up or moving it between media devices — so there’s huge traffic in TV shows and movies across filesharing networks. This research might help model what will happen in the future, when a legal alternative is available for those kinds of media, though, so that’s kind of interesting.
October 18, 2009, 4:57 pmMike McDougal says:
Big money.
October 18, 2009, 4:57 pmAndy Bolen says:
moral considerations are what led me to stop downloading pirated music a few years ago. a lot of friends from my religious community started out using napster, etc. illegitimately and ultimately decided it was wrong to steal intellectual property and reformed. (this will probably sound silly to a lot of people, but i bet we conscientious objectors comprise some significant subset of the population.)
October 18, 2009, 4:58 pmSueSimp says:
Mike — the study measured “morality” based upon a five question test that mostly focused on whether or not it was never/sometimes/always acceptable to either disregard a government regulation, e.g. “In order to increase profits, a general manager used a production process which exceeded legal limits for environmental pollution,” or to do what your boss tells you when you believe your boss’ position might endanger others, e.g. “Because of pressure from his brokerage firm, a stockbroker recommended a type of bond which he did not consider a good investment.”
So the morality ranking is not flat out measuring a “respect for authority,” but it is sort of gauging out whether the test subjects were sticklers for the rules or the type to disregard a rule when they think the rule’s not worth following.
And while I know there are a million different variables and the study could not include them all (i.e., likelihood piracy will result in your computer getting a virus, whether or not you own an mp3 player, whether they respect the artist, etc.), I do think it was a big mistake for the experiment to be based on “the most popular song downloaded from iTunes last week.” For one, a song of that sort of fleeting popularity is going to be easy to find without pirating, on YouTube or some such, and the desire to want a permanent copy is decreased. Second, I’d be dollars to donuts the rates of piracy among music genres differ significantly.
So I’m not really sure knowing that Frat dudes are more likely to pirate Flo Rida’s “Right Round” gives much useful information on whether or not, in general, the threat of a law suit deters privacy. It just does for this particular song.
October 18, 2009, 5:03 pm24AheadDotCom says:
[Deleted by OK on civility grounds. Please don't use curse words in a post, even if just describing what a hypothetical person would say.]
October 18, 2009, 5:16 pmTaeyoung says:
I think the sample set for the litigation risk factor looks kind of odd — at least, it’s something that I think would bear a bit more examination purely on its own. The underlying population appears to be rather more skewed than for the other factors, e.g. with a median of 1%, 75% at 5% or less, and then a sharp tail rising to the 7 respondents who apparently believe that there is a 75%+ chance the RIAA will get you if you pirate music.
50%+ of their population appears to be essentially irrelevant to their 1% increase in subjective likelihood of lawsuit => 0.4% decrease in willingness to pirate, because at least 50% of their population believes there is a 1% or less chance of getting sued. If that were our entire population (~150 people, all estimating a 1% or less chance of getting sued), the 0.4% would, I think, be the equivalent of one person deciding not to pirate because of that litigation risk — basically random noise. Indeed, for the 75% of their population who gave a subjective assessment of 5% or less, how reliable is that subjective assessment? I mean, it’s practically random at that level — 1% and 5% clearly reflect different subjective assessments, but how do you fill in the space between? Are there people who assess a 3.375% risk of getting sued? Is that level of granularity at all meaningful?
Meanwhile, the high average subjective litigation risk (9%) is apparently driven largely by the 7 subjects who think the RIAA knows everything they do online. I don’t know exactly how these particular statistical tests work, but it seems to me that slight variations just in the number of people assessing the litigation risk in the 75%+ range, as well as what percentage put the risk at, in that 25% range, could drive significant variation in that overall correlation, despite their being outliers for the general population.
So anyhow — I think the data there are a bit skewed, and the litigation risk conclusion, at least, is weaker than the other conclusions they draw.
October 18, 2009, 5:27 pmChrisTS says:
But why would anyone download music of an artist s/he did not like?
October 18, 2009, 5:31 pmTaeyoung says:
You can like someone’s art or music and still think he’s a terrible person. See, e.g. Roman Polanski, since he’s in the news these days.
October 18, 2009, 5:33 pmChrisTS says:
I’m with Andy Bolen on this. It’s theft. Period.
My kids continue to do it, mocking ‘Mom, the Ethics Prof.’
I’m looking forward to the day when they
October 18, 2009, 5:36 pmhave to pay to replace their own computers, which regularly crash under the viruses they download along with the music they are stealing.
SueSimp says:
Taeyoung — that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Unless these were 300 undergrad statistics majors, I sort of assume the 75% that put the odds at 5% or less just wanted a number that meant “exceedingly unlikely but at least theoretically possible, so I can’t say 0%.”
And the 7 subjects who put the risk at 75% or above should have been discarded. Not even Duke kids would believe that; they weren’t taking the survey seriously.
October 18, 2009, 5:36 pmChrisTS says:
[Deleted by Ok on civility grounds. Folks, I would prefer it if you didn't refer to unpopular people, even just hypothetical ones, as "a-holes." It coarsens the blog.]
October 18, 2009, 5:38 pmChrisTS says:
oh, Sue, I hope there are no Duke grads prowling these pages. :-)
October 18, 2009, 5:39 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Choosing Lawful Versus … | Games Space says:
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October 18, 2009, 6:00 pm24AheadDotCom says:
I deeply and sincerely apologize for coarsening the level of this blog and lowering its level. To make amends, let me provide my earlier comment, with the highly – extremely – offensive parts replaced with kind, civil terms:
I wonder how many of them were thinking, “That ‘artist’ is such an [person that I the hypothetical speaker do not think is a good person] that I would feel bad about giving them money and in fact I’d like to take it away from them. On the other hand, this ‘artist’ isn’t an [person that I the hypothetical speaker do not think is a good person] and I don’t mind.” I don’t d/l music of any kind, but that would definitely be a large component were I to d/l the legal variety.
P.S. Thanks to OK for the spirited opposition to SoniaS!
October 18, 2009, 6:08 pmCato The Elder says:
I listen to plenty of music nowadays just by Googling the lyrics to a random song I’ve heard, then listening to them on Youtube for a short while on loop. For me, it takes out a good chunk of that muddled middle of songs that I definitely wouldn’t buy, but might possibly download for free. Then, like others have mentioned, those I do like I buy from ITunes primarily because of the ecosystem of integration between the program, my IPhone, and my MBook Pro. It seems to me that these developments should have readily diminished quite a bit of music piracy from the Napster days.
October 18, 2009, 6:11 pmKevin says:
Orin Kerr says:
Unless the fraction of people surveyed in the population is very high, the percent surveyed does not really matter for getting statistically significant results; it is the absolute number surveyed that matters. 300 people will give a margin of error in excess of 5% when they answer a Yes/No question at about 50% Yes/50% No (assuming you have a random sample – if the rate at which people agree to answer your survey is related to their view on the topic you are surveying then you have a whole different (and much worse) problem on top of just random sampling error).
October 18, 2009, 6:14 pmChrisTS says:
Oh no, I’ve been deleted!
OK: in my own defense, I was using the a-h meme in response to someone else who used it to describe kids’ possible attitudes toward some musicians.
See:
In fact, I really dislike the a** word and its many compounds.
October 18, 2009, 6:16 pmKharn says:
A portion of people realize most modern music is junk, and isn’t worth the $15 for a CD with two good songs and eight that barely qualify as filler. Those that are opposed to Apple also have very limited choices for downloading a large number of “legal” singles. Plus there is a question of when do you truly own the song? What if the service you bought it from goes bankrupt and shuts down the servers?
There are also those that believe since an artist only gets a few pennies from each CD but a much higher cut from concert ticket sales that its ok to download a CD if you go to their concerts whenever they’re within a reasonable distance.
Or you get the people that believe record companies are horrible organizations exploiting artists and thus refuse to contribute any money towards them.
October 18, 2009, 6:33 pmEvilDave says:
Agreed, there is a sizable percentage of people (especially from the Comp Sci/Engineering and Science backgrounds [FN1]) that feel that copyright in its current form is not only “unjust” but immoral (in the same sense that Segregation was immoral). These people are usually informed enough to believe that the Copyright Deal was broken by the 1976 extension and that Eldred was so wrongly decided as to impair the dignity of the court and the respect for its authority.
Some of these people would gladly adhere to a “reasonable” copyright term (e.g., 14 + 14 years). Others are merely copyright abolitionists.
These people view illegal downloading as a form of civil disobedience.
You may feel that their view is wrong-headed, but were does their moral view fall on “degree of morality” scale?
[FN1]
October 18, 2009, 7:47 pmIt should be noted that these groups live in a culture where taking a portion of someone else’s work (e.g., a function definition) without attribution is perfectly acceptable. Source code, in this world and at an function/object level (vs. in total), is meant to be copied and re-arranged to create new works.
While stealing a whole program (or the majority thereof) would be wrong, copying a function (e.g., to format a string of text) would not be.
Avatar says:
Naturally price sensitivity comes into the picture.
At 1c/song (100 songs for $1), I would pay for quite a bit of music. At a dime a song, I’d still probably get anything that I even remotely liked hearing on the radio. At ~$1/song, I have to be fairly discriminating, and the appeal of “hey, free song, just breaking the law” goes up a lot. At more than $2/song my music consumption stops entirely. (If you’re a fan of Japanese denpa, that’s not even a whole lot… $30/album is typical and it goes up from there.)
Ironically, there’s a bunch of sources for legit MP3s that aren’t Apple; they’re just not advertised well. Wal-Mart will happily sell you DRM-free music for a bit less than Apple, but they don’t advertise it much. And, of course, there’s exclusivity deals and the like… it’s early days yet when it comes to digital distribution.
But the key factor is going to be disposable income, no? I’m a lot more likely to buy MP3s than I was back in college, simply because I’ve got plenty of room in the entertainment budget.
October 18, 2009, 7:48 pmOrin Kerr says:
So they’re violating the law — to their personal benefit — out of worry that existing law will impair respect for the law? That is very magnanimous of them.
October 18, 2009, 7:53 pmChrisTS says:
Orin Kerr:
YO!
I’m still sitting here under the ignominy of being labeled a bad-mouth for using someone else’s words! Will I ever be released?
:-)
[OK Comments: Okay, just this once. ;-) ]
October 18, 2009, 8:02 pmChrisTS says:
I don’t think ‘magnamimous’ is the right word, here. Something along the lines of ‘self-justifying’ and/or ‘illogical’ might be better.
October 18, 2009, 8:04 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Professor Kerr,
On top of what others said in defense of my position (I’m no statistician), I simply feel that my experience in college tells me a whole lot more about the obvious “situtation on the ground” than a study of 300 Duke kids does. (Full disclosure, took a trip south one time in college, stopped at Duke, they weren’t much fun). I can’t say with certainty what number of students I would find acceptable really, but 300 at one school doesn’t satisfy me prima facie. The obvious answer is that it was new technology, available, and most importantly – free. Sure, I’ll concede that there are moral implications, specific tech reasons to or not to download (I don’t mainly because of viruses and computer space) or whatever, but the most obvious reason to download free music is because it’s free. I don’t really need the study to understand that because I lived it.
October 18, 2009, 8:08 pmTaeyoung says:
I’m sure you’re being ironic here, but that’s true of pretty much every instance of civil disobedience, no? I mean, in the order of motivations, unjust laws impairing respect for the terrible majesty of the Law is probably a distant second to a dissident’s general sense that the law is wrong, but I think people who engage in civil disobedience genuinely do think that highlighting the wrongness of the law through civil disobedience is, in fact, doing the law a favour. In the long run. Even if, at the same time, they’d like to be able to smoke pot/own firearms/sit in the front of the bus, and the law as currently written is frustrating those personal ambitions.
October 18, 2009, 8:29 pmOrin Kerr says:
Taeyong,
Generally speaking, the idea of civil disobedience is to publicly violate the law in order to be punished — with the idea that public refusal to violate the law and the resulting punishment will publicize the unjust nature of the law.
In this case, however, the individuals are not seeking to be punished or wanting any publicity. Rather, they want cool stuff for free and they’re taking it, even though it violates the law. That’s not civil disobedience, but rather garden-variety acting out of self-interest.
October 18, 2009, 8:38 pmMaureen says:
I would think that “not possessing a credit card” would tend to make you a freeloader by default. And “is reluctant to download grabby, annoying iTunes onto small, slow computer” would certainly be a factor against using iTunes.
Of course, “absolutely none of my favorite artists are on iTunes” would also do it.
October 18, 2009, 8:42 pmTaeyoung says:
When I think about it, you’re right. When I think about it some more, I realise I was projecting my own prejudices onto the situation — to wit, that I find defendants who simply disobey the laws they disagree with and get caught (e.g. medical marijuana users) significantly more sympathetic than the kind of breast-beaters who actively promote themselves as test cases and seek to make a public spectacle of their arrest. Even though the latter are, as you say, the real “civil disobedience” cases.
October 18, 2009, 10:02 pmChrisTS says:
Free at last; free at last!
(Apologies to MLK Jr.))
October 18, 2009, 10:42 pmSarah says:
Why I think college/high school students will choose to download illegally:
1. It’s free, and legal downloads aren’t (except in a handful of artist cases.)
2. It’s easy, and legal downloads aren’t (or at least, didn’t used to be.)
3. Everyone does it (seriously.)
4. Thumbing one’s nose at authority (especially the RIAA, who are absolute thugs.)
Why they will choose not to download illegally:
1. It’s now relatively easy to get cheap downloads.
2. They have money now.
3. Illegal downloads make them feel guilty.
4. Getting sued is a freaking lot of trouble for a copy of “Let it Be” that wasn’t even ripped right.
5. They already have a lot of songs, and new music is mostly lame anyhow.
When I was a sophomore in college, the only game in town was Napster. The industry did an incomprehensibly awful job of transitioning to a download structure (they’re still not there, but between iTunes and Wal-Mart, it’s like being a thousand years ahead of where we were.) Then they started stalking kids and suing confused housewives and generally making themselves disliked. I mean, seriously – in 1999 and 2000, if you didn’t download illegally, you were probably still listening to (free) mix tapes/CDs from your friends and (free) radio. Or spending all your money on music – some of my friends did that; they would rather own yet another album by the Goo Goo Dolls than ever go out to eat.
After graduation, I had a job, Wal-Mart had selected albums for $5, and I had this sudden attachment to the idea of staying on the nice bright line between me and the black market for, you know, everything. I think most of my classmates were in a similar position. Plus, the stuff most easily available illegally is the stuff that’s popular with young people and alternative types; a lot of older students and graduates just aren’t into the stuff you can get on BitTorrent. I know it’s a LOT easier getting clean copies of most older Broadway soundtracks on Wal-Mart because my still-getting-illegal-stuff acquaintances are always really enthusiastic when they find out I have those MP3s and they’re not messed up.
(and I really, really think the cost thing comes first – if you are taking out loans at 8.5% interest just to eat, and think that getting a $75 paycheck for a week’s worth of work is like being rich for the first time, a $1 song is just insane.)
October 18, 2009, 11:05 pmarbitraryaardvark says:
The issue isn’t the threat of litigation – actual litigation is vanishingly small, more chance of being struck by lightening or eaten by a shark. The real danger is the threat of the threat of litigation. That small chance that you will get a “send us $3,000 in unmarked bills in a brown paper sack or we will sue you” letter.
October 18, 2009, 11:16 pmI had a roommate once who got a cease and desist letter from the record companies.
He was running Sid’s Music Server, back in the early days of the internet. He had an online list of rare music recordings, stuff such as concert bootlegs, and people could order one for a few bucks and he’d send them a tape in the mail. He ceased and desisted. Sid was my first federal case – he got a ticket on his way to his job on an army base.
Ricardo says:
This is a private university where the average family income of the sample was $45,000 and yet only 30% had illegally downloaded their last song. The other 70% downloaded legally. Interestingly, they don’t find a stable relationship between willingness to pay and income.
October 19, 2009, 5:15 ampirates who don't do anything says:
Did the survey ask how many people pay to join a service that supplies illegal downloads, but then get a conscience attack and never download anything?
I suspect it never happens, not only because it’s rare to pay for the buffet and not eat a thing, but also because no such site/service exists, as far as I know. The whole idea of illegal sites is to avoid paying money. I doubt anyone charges money, perhaps less than legal sites, only to offer “illegal” copies of songs. That market exists for counterfeit hard copies, such as DVDs, but not downloads, does it?
Why does this matter? If no such site exists, then that demolishes the entire premise of Judge Moore’s dissent last week in the Sixth Circuit case about probably cause to check out the computer of the guy who subscribed to a kiddie-porn site. She compared it to music downloads, but without an analogous site, her comparison fails.
October 19, 2009, 3:56 pmCato The Elder says:
Nice reference to the Veggie Tales song!
October 19, 2009, 6:40 pmbbbeard says:
Orin said:
Your remark suggests you don’t understand one of the basic principles of sampling theory: the accuracy of inference from a sample depends on the sample size, but not on the percentage of the population represented by a sample. That’s why a sample of 1000 can capture trends in a population of 300,000,000. 300 is on the low side for anything but a lopsided vote (the relative error goes as 1/sqrt(N)) — however, I don’t think that’s one of the major flaws in the study, even if the 300 were self-selected.
I don’t dispute the relevance of price to a population notoriously income-deprived but upwardly mobile. So the major conclusion, that lowering the price will raise the proportion of music obtained legally, seems plausible.
However, I seriously dispute several of the foundational premises underlying the study. The authors write
As others have pointed out, iTunes is deliberately enmeshed in an “ecosystem” of proprietary applications and hardware. If you buy into that model of music economics, as some do, you may find that tolerable. I don’t. Apple supposedly removed DRM restrictions on songs downloaded from iTunes in April 2009. But Apple still tries to maintain proprietary hooks and barriers to trade. For example, consider the way the Palm Pre has been treated by Apple. The story from Wikipedia:
So I think Bellemare and Holmberg are being willfully ignorant of the “transaction costs” of adopting the iTunes model of commerce.
And even if Apple has lifted the onerous DRM that users hate, there is no guarantee that they will not reimpose it in the future — indeed, B&H advocate a return to stricter enforcement of copyrights. There are numerous complications to integrating songs purchased on iTunes with the user’s library of non-DRM, non-iTunes songs. I, for one, have over 30 GB of MP3s that I have ripped from CDs I own, and I move this library from computer to computer freely. I’m on approximately my seventh generation of computer since I started accumulating MP3s — a feat that Steve Jobs would have outlawed.
What the article does not address is the fundamental difference between digital copying and physical theft. To understand the irrelevance of copyright to students’ (or any downloader’s) attitudes toward “piracy”, you have to appreciate that digital “theft” comprises an act of copying, while physical theft removes an object from the owner’s possession. Calling someone a “pirate” for making a copy makes as much sense as calling someone a “racist” for owning a black cat.
Digital copying at worst is malem prohibitem, not malem in sei. There is a widespread belief that copyright laws have been constructed by corrupt politicians solely for the benefit of corporations. They no longer exist to promote creativity and enrich the culture, but merely to strengthen a tired business model. I’m willing to consider downloading free music a form of civil disobedience, even if it is one that benefits the disobeyer — just as I pursued driving 70 mph when the national speed limit was absurdly set to 55. Sure, it benefited me — but if we all had followed your advice we’d all still be crawling along at 55 mph! The massive de facto civil disobedience by our nation of speeders helped to abrogate that idiotic policy.
I once read that there are over 60 million people who have downloaded “illegal” MP3s. If that’s anywhere close to true (and I think it’s an underestimate), this should be a clue that the simplistic model of “morality” pushed by the authors and the RIAA has not gained universal acceptance.
BBB
October 20, 2009, 2:00 amarlimansy says:
All are amazing, i am very confuse which one to select but i have 2 PCs and 1 laptop at my home so i will install 5 to each.Thanks for sharing nice list.
November 6, 2009, 8:07 pm