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 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...

This paper quantifies the relationship between private-network file sharing activity and music sales in the BitTorrent era. Using a panel dataset of 2,251 albums' U.S. sales and file sharing downloads on a private network during 2008, I estimate the effect of file sharing on album sales....

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,...

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic model to solve for the optimal pricing policy of the music recording companies in the presence of P2P file-sharing networks eroding their CD sales. We employ a policy iteration algorithm on a discretized state space to numerically compute the optimal price...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly differentiated, demands are interdependent because the copying technology...

Contemporary copyright infringement has significantly changed in the digital era, and due to the unique attributes of internet piracy and method of exchange, traditional regulatory approaches are ineffective. The characteristics of digital goods enable users to almost costlessly copy and...