IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ipt/decwpa/2015-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Taking down copyright-infringing websites is a way to reduce consumption of pirated media content and increase licensed consumption. We analyze the consequences of the shutdown of the most popular German video streaming website - kino.to - in June 2011. Using individual-level clickstream data, we find that the shutdown led to significant but short-lived declines in piracy levels. The existence of alternative sources of unlicensed consumption, coupled with the rapid emergence of new platforms, led the streaming piracy market to quickly recover from the intervention and to limited substitution into licensed consumption. Our results therefore present evidence of a high elasticity of supply in the online movie piracy market, together with relatively low switching costs for users of copyright infringing platforms. The fact that the post-shutdown market structure was much more fragmented - and therefore more resistant to future interventions - further questions the effectiveness of the intervention.

Suggested Citation

  • Luis Aguiar & Jorg Claussen & Christian Peukert, 2015. "Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure," JRC Working Papers on Digital Economy 2015-01, Joint Research Centre.
    • Handle: RePEc:ipt:decwpa:2015-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/reports-and-technical-documentation/online-copyright-enforcement-consumer-behavior-and-market-structure_en
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Miguel Godinho de Matos & Pedro Ferreira & Michael D. Smith, 2018. "The Effect of Subscription Video-on-Demand on Piracy: Evidence from a Household-Level Randomized Experiment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(12), pages 5610-5630, December.
    2. Imke Reimers, 2016. "Can Private Copyright Protection Be Effective? Evidence from Book Publishing," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(2), pages 411-440.
    3. Debabrata Dey & Antino Kim & Atanu Lahiri, 2019. "Online Piracy and the “Longer Arm” of Enforcement," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 1173-1190, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Anti-Piracy Intervention; Copyright; Movie Industry; Natural Experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • O34 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital
    • O38 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ipt:decwpa:2015-01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Publication Officer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ipjrces.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.