On this stormy summer afternoon, Liebowitz wears short pants and sits at a table in the kitchen of his new home, built on what was, not long ago, Collin County pastureland. Way out here, in the shining sprawl of a new strip-mall suburbia that exists not far from grazing cattle, lives a man whose research could prove that the recording industry is, as many always suspected, nothing more than a moneyed thug wielding the billy club of litigation.
In recent weeks, Liebowitz has become the journalist's go-to guy on the issue of online music distribution--a very sexy topic, especially if you're a college student with a broadband connection and a CD burner, a record-label exec terrified of losing your job or a politician taking big bucks from the music industry. In May, Liebowitz published a widely circulated and much-debated study on the subject, and his forthcoming book Rethinking the Networked Economy deals extensively with how the widespread circulation of "pirated" MP3s is--or, rather, isn't--damming the music industry's revenue stream. His study, published by the Cato Institute, garnered him considerable attention among fellow academics, industry folks on both sides of the issue and the mainstream media.
Liebowitz's is a straightforward reading of a complex issue: Despite the industry's claims to the contrary, the downloading of music on the Internet is not, at this moment, hurting the record industry. It might one day; it just ain't happening yet.
"The record industry is sort of sitting in a position where--and you can understand their position--they're saying, 'We don't want to take any chances. We don't want any technologies that might hurt us,'" Liebowitz says. "And I can even see their point. But I have often claimed that the new technologies they said were going to hurt them didn't hurt them."
But just try telling that to the Recording Industry Association of America, the music-biz trade group that, so far, has sued out of existence several music-swapping outlets, including Napster and AudioGalaxy, without offering any viable solutions of its own. Try telling that to the major labels that keep offering pricey and, ultimately, unsatisfying alternatives to file-sharing systems such as Kazaa and Gnutella. Just last week, Pressplay, a joint venture between Vivendi Universal and Sony, announced you could download and burn all the content you wanted for $180 a year--even though you'd have access to the back catalogs of just the two labels, and even then, not all their artists.
And try telling politicians like Representative Howard Berman that file-sharing isn't bad for business. Berman, a California Democrat with financial backing from the music business, just last week introduced legislation that would give the recording industry the right to hack into computer networks if it thought someone was "stealing" copyrighted material. He has the support of the RIAA, which long ago started treating consumers like thieves, anyway. Never has an industry had such contempt for its patrons.
"But my work is not purely altruistic," says Liebowitz, who made his name in the early '80s writing about the impact of photocopying on the publishing industry. "I came back to this subject for largely selfish reasons, because this is a hot topic. I've always liked technology, so that was a good fit. I used to have a stereo system--that was the only thing I spent money on. Then the stereo got replaced by a computer...and the 'network effect' stuff came along, and it was like, 'Whoa, I can write about my favorite subject.'"
Liebowitz, an affable and engaging man with a love for classic rock (more Jefferson Airplane than Black Sabbath), is the rare economist who actually tries to make his research applicable and accessible outside the stuffy, rarefied world of academia. He came to academia through the side door: He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1971, where he'd been an economics major, only to sell ice cream in Brooklyn and Staten Island after another vendor had been stabbed. He had long hair, no suit, an unemployed girlfriend and no idea what to do next. Next thing he knew, Liebowitz was at UCLA studying economics, and he was born again--a convert to the faith of Keynes and Smith. Now, he's the kind of prof every college student prays for, the economist who speaks in everyday language; has little use for charts and graphs, since they're meaningless in The Real World; and preaches the religion of economics primarily to help consumers understand how the marketplace really works.
