Fighting Software Piracy: Which IPRs Laws Matter in Africa?

The proliferation of technology to produce pirated software has prompted key questions in policy decision making on how to tackle the situation. The paper will employ Dynamic panel Generalized Methods of Moments and Two Stage Least Squares to address this. IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) laws are instrumented with government quality dynamics to assess their incidence on software piracy. In essence, government quality variables are used as instrumental variables in investigating the role of IPRs laws on software piracy. The following findings are established. (1) Government institutions are crucial in enforcing IPRs laws in the fight against software piracy. (2) Main IP laws enacted by the legislature and Multilateral IP laws are most effective in combating piracy. (3) IPRs laws, WIPO Treaties and Bilateral Treaties do not have significant negative incidences on software piracy. Policy implications are discussed.