The economics of IPR protection policies

In this paper, we model competition between legal and pirate products. In our framework, the government affects this competition through police spending and taxes on legal products. Therefore, the government can choose the combination of spending and taxes that best fits its goals. We find that governments that focus entirely on eradicating piracy use lower levels of taxes and police spending than governments that focus on maximizing consumption, consumer surplus, welfare or government size. This result highlights the importance of demand side policies in the fight against piracy and posts a challenge to the traditional solo approach of supply side policies.