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Encyclopedia of Law and Economics pp 1–8Cite as

Digital Piracy

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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CORE and LSM, Université catholique de Louvain, 1, Place de l’Université, B-1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Paul Belleflamme

  2. Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Martin Peitz

Authors
  1. Paul Belleflamme
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  2. Martin Peitz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Belleflamme .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lehrst. Finanzwissenschaft/ Finanzsoziologie, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Thüringen, Germany

    Jürgen Backhaus

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Belleflamme, P., Peitz, M. (2014). Digital Piracy. In: Backhaus, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_13-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_13-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Digital Piracy
    Published:
    19 August 2021

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_13-2

  2. Original

    Digital Piracy
    Published:
    13 June 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_13-1

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