Piracy, Music and Movies: A Natural Experiment

Adrian Adermon and Che-Yuan Liang

No 854, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of illegal file sharing (piracy) on music and movie sales. The Swedish implementation of the European Union directive IPRED on April 1, 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and prosecuted for file sharing. We investigate the subsequent drop in piracy as approximated by the drop in Swedish Internet traffic and the effects on music and movie sales in Sweden. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 18 percent during the subsequent six months. It also increased sales of physical music by 27 percent and digital music by 48 percent. Furthermore, it had no significant effects on the sales of theater tickets or DVD movies. The results indicate that pirated music is a strong substitute for legal music whereas the substitutability is less for movies.

Keywords: Copyright protection; Piracy; File sharing; Music; Movies; IPRED; Natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D40 K11 K42 M48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2010-10-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-ict, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Piracy, Music, and Movies: A Natural Experiment (2010)
Working Paper: PIRACY, MUSIC, AND MOVIES: A NATURAL EXPERIMENT (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0854

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