Dr. Stan Liebowitz is an Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics and the Director of Property Rights and Innovation at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he began teaching in 1991. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from John Hopkins University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. He is known as an expert in copyright issues, which he has studied since 1979.
Published Works of Stan Liebowitz
Throughout his career, Dr. Liebowitz has published five books and more than 60 articles. One of his most widely acclaimed books, Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology, coauthored by Stephen Margolis, is full of insights and analysis of competition in the high-tech industries, including the finding that superior products dominate in high technology, even when inferior products are backed by a lot of money. They make a case that the danger to high tech is government intrusion, not a lack of competition.
Dr. Liebowitz has also written books and monographs, including Re-thinking the Networked Economy, Why Healthcare Costs Too Much, The Impact of Reprography on the Copyright System, Copyright Obligations for Cable Television: Pros and Cons, and The Relative Efficiency of Private and Public Broadcasting in Canada.
He has also written many scholarly articles and reviews for prestigious journals, such as the American Economic Review, Economic Inquiry, International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Canadian Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Review of Economics and Business, Research in Law and Economics, and Southern Economic Journal.
He has also written articles that have been featured in popular publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Investor’s Business Daily, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, American Civilization, and Orange County Register.
Career
In addition to his work at UT Dallas, Dr. Liebowitz has taught at North Carolina State University, University of Rochester, University of Chicago, and University of Western Ontario. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and he is a fellow at the Independent Institute. He has published for these Institutes as well.
The UT Dallas Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation was established in 2004, and it was one of the first think tanks to look at intellectual property rights from a digital perspective. Dr. Liebowitz is an expert in this field, as he has studied copyright issues since 1979. In addition, he has been cited as an expert on the economic impact of piracy, downloads, and file sharing in the digital domain. In fact, in 2005, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cited his paper on file sharing as part of his concurring opinion. He is considered to be an expert on the impact of file sharing.
Because of his expertise in this area, he was the president of the Society for Research on Copyright Issues. In addition, he has served on 13 advisory and editorial boards. He has also undertaken research on the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis, and he is currently researching file-sharing, the strength of copyright monopoly, and the role of bundling, which is a strategy that businesses use to sell several different items as a combined product.
Finally, Dr. Liebowitz has been called as an expert witness to testify in high profile court cases. He testified about the federal monopoly case against Microsoft, and he also testified that file-sharing caused harm in a case where Sony filed a lawsuit against Joel Tenenbaum for downloading music and distributing it to others via P2P networks such as Napster when he was in college. It was only the second file sharing case, and his testimony helped Sony and other recording studios receive compensation and damages for the unlawful file sharing of their copyrighted material.
