Digital products have the property that they can be copied almost costlessly. This makes them candidates for non-commercial copying by final consumers. Because the copy of a copy typically does not deteriorate in quality, copying products can become a wide-spread phenomenon - this can be...

This paper explores digital piracy, otherwise known as digital intellectual property theft. After addressing the causes ethics and responses to piracy, we explore the implications of piracy from a marketing perspective. Digital piracy is shown in the light of a model of the consumer journey in...

Illegal downloading of copyright materials by end-users had its heyday in the early 2000s, with music, television, and film studios desperately searching for a way to curb the tide of sharing. This chapter uses the example of Capitol Records v Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first file-sharing case to...

Digitalization is currently gaining wide scope not only in the EU but also throughout the world. The main reason for this, in addition to improving technology, is also the COVID-19 pandemic period, which played an integral role in the faster transition to digitalization. This process is also...

We study how private intellectual property rights protection affects equilibrium prices and profits in a duopoly competition between firms that offer a product variety of distinct qualities (vertical product differentiation) in a setup that is closely related to that put forward by Jain (2008),...

This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after...

I evaluate the substitution effects of pirated movies - the unlicensed online movies available on file-sharing websites - on their genuine counterparts, and explore the institutional and economic causes of China's high level of movie piracy. To do this, I build a dataset including information on...

This study extends the literature on fighting software piracy by investigating how Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) regimes interact with technology to mitigate software piracy when existing levels of piracy are considered. Two technology metrics (internet penetration rate and number of PC...

Starting from the analysis of the Law no 8/1996 on copyright and related rights in Romania, and continuing with the analysis of the main provisions of the European Union Directive 2001/29/EC on copyright and related rights in the information society and the European Union Directive 2009/24/EC on...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. China’s Economy and Success without Freedom -- Chapter 3. The American Economy and Institutions with Sino-U.S. Trade -- Chapter 4. Specific Problems in the U.S.-China Trade Relationship -- Chapter 5. Institutional Free Riding, etc.

I examine the relationship between publicly provided enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights and an authentic producer's strategies to influence entry of non-deceptive counterfeit products. I consider investment in supplemental private IP enforcement through the legal system, as well as...

This article highlights the limited protection available to sports webcasters and organizers against online piracy of their webcasts under the Indian copyright law. It posits that with growing popularity of digital viewership of sports events, this lacuna has created an uneven playing field...

I quantify the effects of private-network music sharing on aggregate album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of US sales and private-network downloads for 2,109 albums during 2008. Exogenous shocks to the network's sharing constraints address the simultaneity problem. In theory,...

This study examines the persistence of software piracy with internet penetration vis-à-vis of PC users, conditional on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) institutions. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 99 countries for the period 1994-2010 and the Generalised Method of Moments. The...

Chapter 1. What is Plagiarism and What is Musical Plagiarism? -- Chapter 2. Plagiarism the Old Fashioned Way: Steal from a Composition -- Chapter 3. Sampling, Samples and Library Music -- Chapter 4. Policy Issues -- Appendix.

This book is an economic analysis of plagiarism in music, focusing on social efficiency and questions of inequity in the revenue of authors/artists. The organisation into central chapters on the traditional literary aspect of composition and the technocratic problem of "sampling" will help...

Introduction and the road map -- What is the problem : copyright and creativity in crisis -- What is causing the problem : disruptive innovation -- What are creative industries afraid of : known risks -- What should creative industries be afraid of, but may not be aware of : unseen risks -- What...

Self-governance of common pool resources is presumed to work well in small, homogeneous communities where interaction is repeated, agents have low discount rates, and information about past performance is available. It is presumed to work poorly elsewhere. This paper provides a case study of...

Online copyright enforcement, in the form of either direct action against the supply-side (via website shutdowns) or the demand-side (via individual lawsuits against users), has not been very effective in reducing piracy. Regulators have therefore put forward the so called "follow the money"...

Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive dataset of copyright infringement incidences by firms. The data cover two field experiments run by a large...

Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive dataset of copyright infringement incidences by firms. The data cover two field experiments run by a large...

This paper quantifies the relationship between private-network file sharing activity and music sales in the BitTorrent era. Using a panel dataset of 2,251 albums' U.S. sales and file sharing downloads on a private network during 2008, I estimate the effect of file sharing on album sales....

Despite government policies targeting it, digital piracy remains rampant. Academic research has not reached a consensus on whether piracy is harmful to the affected firms or industries. This study constructs a new piracy index based on internet search frequency in China that reflects the...