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...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...

In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch...

Software is a good with very special economic characteristics. Taking a general definition of software as its starting-point, this article systematically elaborates the central qualities of the commodity which have implications for its production and cost structure, the demand, the...

Im Zuge der wachsenden ökonomischen Bedeutung von Wissen sowie technologischer Veränderungen durch das Internet ist die Regulierung von Eigentums- und Nutzungsrechten an nicht stofflichen Gütern vermehrt zum Gegenstand transnationaler Auseinandersetzungen geworden. Wurden diese Konflikte...

Why do people who normally refrain from committing illegalities become digital pirates? In this paper we use a theoretical model of digital piracy combined with a game-theoretic mechanism of social norm formation to argue that no social stigma is attached to digital piracy because the latter has...

We apply the property rights theory of Grossman-Hart-Moore in the music industry and study the optimal allocation of copyright between the artists who create music and the labels who promote and distribute it. Digital technology opens up a role for new intermediaries. We find that entry of...