Internet piracy and book sales : a field experiment

Internet Piracy and Book Sales: A Field Experiment Michal Krawczyk Widespread Internet piracy continues to fuel the debate about the appropriate level of copyright enforcement. In this project we used experimental methods to study the effect which underlies calls for stringent anti-piracy measures, namely that infringement has detrimental impact on legal sales. Focusing on the book industry, we conducted a year-long large-scale controlled field experiment with pre-treatment pair matching. Half of the book titles received experimental treatment, in which a specialized agency would immediately remove any unauthorized copy appearing on the Internet. For the other half we merely registered such occurrences, but no countermeasures were taken. For all the titles we obtained print and e-book sales statistics from the publishers. We found that removal of unauthorized copies was an effective method of curbing piracy, but this had no bearing on legal sales.