Tyler Cowen's got a post up offering an economist's perspective on filesharing (link via BTD). Its three parts are short, and so will be my responses.

1. In ten year's time, what will happen to the DVD and pay-for-view trades? ... a song download can be a loss leader for an entire CD or a concert tour. Downloading an entire movie does not prompt a person to spend money in comparable fashion.

No argument here. I believe that filesharing will flatten musicians' incomes, and that -- counterintuitively -- this will actually raise the quality of the product available by improving the signal/noise ratio of the marketplace. But for movies, this is going to be a real problem. Technology may democratize the process in the same way that it has music, letting anyone with a couple thousand dollars produce a professional-quality product. But it seems likely that the barriers to entry will still remain relatively higher, and certain types of movies -- effects-heavy scifi epics spring to mind -- will doubtless be selected against as their high budgets create a substantial base cost and their tech-savvy fanbase steals the final product freely.

2. Perhaps we can make file-sharing services identify (and block) illegally traded files.

This badly misunderstands the technical situation. Certainly you can legislate such a thing, but until US IP law extends across the globe (and enforcement improves by orders of magnitude) this is pragmatically untenable. The industry can respond in an ad-hoc manner by both finding and prosecuting violators and injecting junk into P2P networks. But the collective distributed intelligence of thousands of users will filter out that junk and find new ways to trade their files, and there *are* decent ways to make finding violators sufficiently difficult to be effectively impossible. The next increase in processing power and bandwidth may not revolutionize the way we trade media in terms of speed -- it could be that the revolution will lie in bringing truly anonymous FreeNet-style systems up to current technology's speeds.

3. I question the almost universal disdain for the "Micky Mouse" copyright extension act... Economic research indicates that current cash flow is a very good predictor of investment. So the revenue in fact stimulates additional investment in creative outputs... We are fooling ourselves if we deny that the extension will benefit artistic output, at least in the United States.

From an economic standpoint, perhaps -- if we're going to measure artistic output by some kind of universal metric, then yes, Disney keeping the rights to Mickey will result in them getting more money, which will result in more Mickey utilization. But surely that can't be considered useful artistic output -- once we're 75 years out, who cares how good the cartoon mouse on your Taco Bell commemorative cup is? I suppose commercial Mickey-driven success may result in more money being invested in Disney, which could then presumably be spent on the creation of new characters. But I think you'd have to show that this would increase the content industry's total share of the investment pie -- and I'm not convinced of that.

Even if it does, is it worthwhile? We don't give NEA grants to NBC, after all. Improving society's creative output is a worthwhile goal that we can talk about implementing, but are we really so sure that it's a good idea to rob from the commons in order to provide an intellectual subsidy to entrenched copyright holders? It seems like an awfully regressive way to subsidize the arts. I can't say I'm convinced.