Copyright Infringement in the Market for Digital Images

The role that copyright protection plays in supporting creative industries, including film, music, videos, art, books, and photography is often debated among policy makers. Furthermore, new technologies for sharing creative goods create the potential for new forms of infringement, and challenge established methods of copyright enforcement. Drawing upon a new, extensive dataset on infringement and settlement efforts in the market for digital images, we establish several important facts about (i) the nature of copyright infringement, and (ii) efforts to settle instances of past infringement. The nature of copyright infringement in digital images differs in important ways from infringement in the markets for music and movies, which have been more extensively studied in the literature. First, opportunities for infringement are ubiquitous. An infringer need not actively log into a peer-to-peer file-sharing network to infringe; one need only right-click an image found via an online search. Relatedly, infringement of digital images is often unintentional. Unintentional infringement may arise either through misinformation about licensing obligations, or because third parties infringe on behalf of a user (e.g., a web designer includes an image on a firm’s website). Indeed, infringing users may be unsure of how to legitimately license an image found via online search. Finally, another important distinction is that businesses are typically the target customers