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...

I quantify the effects of private-network music sharing on aggregate album sales in the BitTorrent era using a panel of US sales and private-network downloads for 2,109 albums during 2008. Exogenous shocks to the network's sharing constraints address the simultaneity problem. In theory,...

Regulators across the globe have imposed penalties on consumers for digital piracy consumption. Contrary to expectations, however, digital piracy consumption has continued to grow since the inception of these regulations. We develop a simple model of competition between a copyright holder and a...