The increasing pervasiveness of the internet, broadband connections and the emergence of digital compression technologies have dramatically changed the face of digital music piracy. Digitally compressed music files are essentially a perfect public economic good, and illegal copying of these files has increasingly become rampant. This paper presents a study on the behavioral dynamics which impac...

Software piracy, the unauthorized copying of computer software, poses a significant threat to the computer industry. In recent years, progress has been made to reduce software piracy. However, computer software is greatly susceptible to theft and software vendors worldwide lost a staggering $50 billion due to piracy this past year [4]. This paper outlines research in progress that will provide ...

Piracy is commonly considered to be detrimental to firms’ profit unless there exist strong network effects in the product market. This study offers an alternative perspective on the potential benefits of piracy. We show that piracy attracts the most price sensitive consumers. Piracy could be beneficial to firms in this case because it removes these customers from the market, therefore reducing ...

This paper develops a simple model of software piracy to analyze the short-run effects of piracy on software usage and the long-run effects on development incentives. We consider two types of costs associated with piracy: the reproduction cost that is constant across users and the degradation cost that is proportional to consumers’ valuation of the original product. We show that the effects of ...

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 consequences of digital piracy, using a base model and several extensions (with consumer sampling, n...

Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta GA 30322 Abstract Our research reconciles analytical and empirical approaches to piracy and through a panel of 53 countries over a period of 11 years, we empirically show that piracy is indeed a two-stage behavior as suggested by extant analytical models. Global piracy has two non-monetary cost components; moral costs that are representative o...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the link between piracy and software protection, taking piracy determinants in cross–country regressions as basic reference. For that purpose, we use a panel data set for 24 countries over three years, 1994, 1997 and 2000, relating piracy rates to an index of software protection, per capita income and a set of country fixed effects. Results display that...

The Business Software Alliance and their counterparts in the global market are determined to make significant progress in curbing the Software Piracy globally. Their aggressive pursuit in their endeavor has produced results in bringing down the piracy rate. However, despite the highly net-ready Chile being part of the Latin American region still leads in the software piracy rate. In this study,...

To date, researchers have shown that males are more likely to pirate software from the Internet than females (Hollinger, 1993; Hinduja, 2001, 2003). The purpose of this paper is to determine if low self-control or social learning theory can reduce the gender gap in software piracy. Using a nonrandom sample of college students, in four individual structural equation models, this study provides i...

This paper covers various aspects of film piracy over the Internet. In order to successfully deal with this matter, it is needed to recognize motivational factors related to film piracy. Thus, this study discusses group factors that could motivate individuals to engage in pirate activities. Furthermore, the paper discusses the theoretical effect on box office revenues and explains it on a propo...