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...

This report provides an overview of the actors involved in the generation and distribution of pirated content, how these actors are organized, and their financial motivations. It further reviews the peer-reviewed academic literature analyzing the harm caused by digital piracy, both to revenue in...

In this study we ask what drives the success or failure of various supply side antipiracy enforce-ment actions such as piracy website blocking. We do this in the context of three court-ordered events affecting consumers in the UK: We first study Internet Service Providers' blocking of 53 video...

Whether and how copyrights should be enforced in the digital age has become an important policy question and an important question for empirical research. In a prior study, we found that the court ordered blocking of the Pirate Bay website in the UK in April 2012 had only a small impact on total...

Much debate exists around the impact that illegal file sharing may have on the creative industries. Similarly, opinions differ regarding whether the producers of artistic works should be forced to accept any weakening of intellectual property rights resulting from illegal file sharing, or if...

We use panel data on digital song and album sales coupled with a quasi-random price experiment to determine own- and cross-price elasticities for songs and albums. We then develop a structural model of consumer demand to estimate welfare under various policy relevant counterfactual scenarios....

Digital piracy is a significant problem for the creative industries. Still, while there have been many academic studies showing that piracy hurts sales, there have been far fewer studies analyzing the effectiveness of anti-piracy measures in reversing this effect. This study attempts to address...

The availability of digital channels for media distribution has raised several important questions for marketers, notably whether digital distribution channels will cannibalize physical sales and whether legitimate digital distribution channels will dissuade consumers from using (illegitimate)...