Definition
Digital piracy is the act of reproducing, using, or distributing information products, in digital formats and/or using digital technologies, without the authorization of their legal owners.
Introduction
The objective of this entry is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of digital piracy (this entry summarizes and updates Belleflamme and Peitz (2012)). Although we put the emphasis on the economic analysis, we also briefly present the legal context and its recent evolution. As digital piracy consists in infringing intellectual property laws, it is important to start by understanding the rationale of such laws. That allows us to define more precisely what is meant by digital piracy. We can then move to the economic analysis of piracy. We start with the basic analysis, which explains why piracy is likely to decrease the profits of the producers of digital products; we also examine how the producers have reacted to digital piracy when it started to grow. We review...
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Belleflamme, P., Peitz, M. (2019). Digital Piracy. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_13
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