Private or Public Law Enforcement? The Case of Digital Anti-Piracy Policies with Illegal Non-Monitored Behaviors

Darmon Eric and Le Texier Thomas ()
Additional contact information
Darmon Eric: University of Rennes 1, CREM (UMR CNRS 6211) and University of Augsburg, 7 Place Hoche, 35065 Rennes Cedex, France
Le Texier Thomas: University of Rennes 1 and CREM (UMR CNRS 6211), 7 Place Hoche, 35065 Rennes Cedex, France

Review of Network Economics, 2016, vol. 15, issue 4, 169-210

Abstract: Should rights be publicly or privately enforced in the case of digital piracy? The emergence of large-scale anti-piracy laws and the existence of illegal non-monitored channels raise important issues for the design of anti-piracy policies. We study the impact of these demand-side policies in two enforcement settings (namely, public and private enforcement settings) with an outside adoption option for users of an illegal non-monitored channel. Our results show that public enforcement generates higher monitoring and lower price levels, and also higher legal welfare than private enforcement. However, we identify potential conflicts of interest between the legal seller and the social planner when the efficiency of the illegal non-monitored channel is low. Introducing supply-side policies, i.e. policies targeted to suppliers of illegal content, we find that they may have unexpected impacts and can damage legal welfare. We also identify situations in which the two policies are substitutes or complements.

Keywords: copyright infringement; demand-side policy; digital piracy; law enforcement; monitoring; regulation; supply-side policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D78 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/rne-2016-0027 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:rneart:v:15:y:2016:i:4:p:169-210:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rne/html

DOI: 10.1515/rne-2016-0027

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Network Economics is currently edited by Lukasz Grzybowski

More articles in Review of Network Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().