Economists’ Topsy-Turvy View of Piracy

Stan Liebowitz

Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Although it was once considered inevitable that unauthorized copying would harm copyright owners, it is now understood that this is not necessarily the case. The concept of indirect appropriability played an important role in shaping this newer understanding. In recent years, however, many economists seem to have taken the message from this new understanding too far, seeing gains to the copyright owners from unauthorized copying in every nook and cranny of the economy, when in reality the instances of such gains are likely to be rather limited. The current literature on this subject, which consists mainly of theoretical models, seems to be badly out of kilter. In this paper I attempt to explain some of the problems and try to provide the outlines of what I believe to be a more balanced and nuanced view of copying. It emphasizes the importance of examining various institutional and behavioral details of individual markets, which are often overlooked by researchers.

Keywords: copyright; indirect appropriability; copying; mp3; downloads (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2005-05-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-hpe and nep-law
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 24. Part of Symposium on Indirect Appropriability
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/le/papers/0505/0505002.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwple:0505002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).