Fighting Fire with Fire: Commercial Piracy and the Role of File Sharing on Copyright Protection Policy for Digital Goods

Digital piracy has become a major issue for the global information goods economy. The threat and the damage caused by piracy are widespread and span the entire range of information goods from music and movies to software. Each year, the industry’s losses to piracy amount to billions of dollars. According to the BSA/IDC 2009 Global Software Piracy Report (BSA/IDC 2009), software piracy caused a revenue loss of more than 50 billion dollars in the world in 2008, and that for every two dollars’ worth of software purchased legitimately, more than one dollar’s worth was obtained illegally. Some 35 percent of all music discs sold worldwide are illegal copies costing the industry $4.6 Billion (IFPI 2005), and the movie industry’s annual losses to piracy reached $6.1 Billion (MPA-LEK 2008). Further, each year the affected industries spend millions of dollars in direct costs of fighting piracy through activities such as litigation and publicity campaigns.