This paper develops a simple model of piracy to analyze its effects on prices and welfare and to study the optimal enforcement policy. A monopolist produces an information good (involving a “large” development cost and a “small” reproduction cost) that is sold to two groups of consumers differing in their valuation of the good. We distinguish two settings: one in which the monopoly is regulated...

Software piracy or ‘softlifting’, the unauthorized use or illegal copying of computer software seems to be a persistent and truly global phenomenon, in spite of international efforts to reduce it. Could the battle against it be won by just merely accepting international standards for the protection of intellectual property rights? The answer to this question is the main focus of this research. ...

security, content protection, digital rights management, trust, privacy, piracy Piracy of digital content is considered a serious problem by content companies. Digital Rights Management is considered a potential solution to this problem. In this paper we study to what degree DRM can live up to this expectation. We conclude that given the current and foreseeable state of technology the content p...

This article integrates previously missing components of government quality into the governancepiracy nexus in exploring governance mechanisms by which global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are effectively transmitted from international to the national level in the battle against piracy. It assesses the best governance tools in the fight against piracy and upholding of Intellectual Prope...

This paper presents a multi-channel search model, where each channel consists of multiple firms that are ex ante homogeneous to consumers. Consumers, nevertheless, ex ante can tell channels apart in the following aspects: search costs, product quality, product availability and price distributions. We first analyze the channel selection problem, i.e. which channel a consumer searches first. We s...

Information goods piracy is a pervasive problem as advanced information and communication technologies become so inexpensive and so easy to access. This problem, if not alleviated, can pose a serious loss to society as it can reduce information goods providers’ incentives to develop information goods or threaten the use and growth of the Internet as a distribution media for valued digital infor...

It is commonly believed that piracy of information goods leads to lower profits, which translate to lower incentives to invest in innovation, and eventually to lower quality products. Manufacturers, policy-makers, and researchers, all claim that inadequate piracy enforcement efforts translate to lower investments in product development. However, we find many practical examples that contradict t...

Understanding the relationship between copyright policy and consumer behavior is an increasingly important topic for participants in digital media markets. In this paper we seek to study how consumer behavior changes when Internet Service Providers are required to block access to major piracy websites. We do this in the context of two court-ordered events affecting consumers in the UK: The bloc...

Hardware obfuscation is a technique to conceal the design frommalicious insider and outsider adversaries. Obfuscation techniques transform the original design such that the obfuscated version is functionally equivalent to the original design, but it does not reveal the design details and is much harder to reverse-engineer [1]. As discussed earlier in Chap.1, the business model of distributed an...