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...

I evaluate the substitution effects of pirated movies - the unlicensed online movies available on file-sharing websites - on their genuine counterparts, and explore the institutional and economic causes of China's high level of movie piracy. To do this, I build a dataset including information on...

Online copyright enforcement, in the form of either direct action against the supply-side (via website shutdowns) or the demand-side (via individual lawsuits against users), has not been very effective in reducing piracy. Regulators have therefore put forward the so called "follow the money"...

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,...