Friday, January 11, 2002

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Stan Liebowitz Economics Professor Backs Technology to Protect Copyrighted Materials By ANDREA L. FOSTER Stan Liebowitz, a professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues in support of technologies that limit consumers' access to copyrighted material in a forthcoming book tentatively titled Internet Cents and Nonsense. Unlike many intellectual-property scholars, Mr. Liebowitz says that such "digital rights management" technologies would not give too much power to the creators of new works. He believes that charging consumers each and every time they want to use digital material is an efficient economic model. Mr. Liebowitz's book is due to be published later this year by Amacom Books. Q. How would digital-rights management apply to college students who want quick and cheap access to digital music? A. They'd have quick, digital access. It wouldn't necessarily be free. ... The way digital rights should work when people have confidence that it works is that [computer software] would basically say, Give us your credit card, or something like that, and every time you want to play our song, you can pay a little amount for a few pennies, or whatever they want to charge. Or you can pay us some fixed sum now, and that will allow you to use it as often as you want, and put it on your stereo, and whatnot. Q. What incentive do college students have to use that model when they can listen to music for free using peer-to-peer file-sharing services, such as KaZaA? A. If you don't care at all about whether you're being honest about things, there's no doubt that right now it's a better deal getting it for free. There are some advantages in the system that's being proposed. Right now, if you want to find an entire album, it's easy to find the main songs, but it may not be that easy to find somewhat more obscure songs. You have to spend a certain amount of time searching. ... Once your time starts becoming worthwhile, you might say, "Gee, I'd rather go out and spend $5 and have one place where I can just download the whole thing in one spot than spend the next 45 minutes downloading it from these different places, and searching for it, and making sure it's the right sound resolution." Q. Do college students really care about obeying the rules? A. Not too much. But right now, the fact is that the record companies aren't losing anything from college students doing what they're doing because they're still going out ... and buying CD's. And that's largely the case because a lot of them still really want to play it on their CD players. Q. If record companies aren't suffering from students downloading music for free, then why are the Recording Industry Association of America and its agents sending letters to colleges warning them that students are violating copyright law? A. [Record companies] do take the principle very seriously that no one should be allowed to use unauthorized copies with impunity. And part of what's going on is [that they are] trying to defend that principle. But the fact of the matter is that they have in many instances in the past got all upset and worried about the harm that was going to be done, and nothing happened. ... They're writing letters, but it's not that costly. The fact of the matter is that if they really can see harm, I think they'll spend a lot more resources to try to stop that activity, and maybe try to actually bring cases against students. Q. You say that the recording industry hasn't provided evidence that Napster and peer-to-peer file-sharing services have harmed them. Is it that the evidence isn't available, or is it that the industry hasn't been able to find it? A. We don't have the data available to get a really good understanding of what was happening. The numbers that we do have say, Gee, there was this tremendous amount of downloading, and it didn't seem to have an impact [on CD sales]. We need to find out why. Q. You also mention that it was short-sighted for the recording and motion-picture industries to go after Napster because it was supplanted by peer-to-peer file-sharing services, which could be much more difficult to shut down. What would have been the best strategy for the industries to pursue? A. They should have held off and let people keep using Napster [instead of forcing] them into these other alternatives, which they should have known were going to be harder to control. And then they could have had discussions with Napster to figure out if there was a way to get users who were using Napster to continue to use it, but maybe figure out a system where some form of payment could be made. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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