Catch Me if You Can: Effectiveness and Consequences of Online Copyright Enforcement

Christian Peukert (), Luis Aguiar and Jörg Claussen

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

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.

JEL-codes: K42 L11 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cul, nep-ipr, nep-law and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Catch Me If You Can: Effectiveness and Consequences of Online Copyright Enforcement (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145490

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