Abstract
The economic analysis of the piracy of copyright products has used a variety of modeling assumptions, the majority of which use typical industrial organization settings. The results of such models are manyfold, but in general they are ambiguous as to the optimal protection strategy, and the effects of protection on the welfare of copyright holders, and on the existence of piracy. Concretely, little has been said about which types of protection mechanisms are most adequate for controlling piracy. In the present paper, we propose a new theoretical framework by drawing an analogy between copyright piracy and prey–predator behavior. This analogy gives us a new perspective to approach copyright issues and it provides the economic theory of copyright piracy with a new set of mathematical models. We consider a very simple model that can be used to show that publicly instigated and financed policies designed to deter piracy can have the effect of increasing the amount of piracy, while privately financed strategies (e.g. DRM) will always decrease piracy.
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Vázquez, F.J., Watt, R. Copyright piracy as prey–predator behavior. J Bioecon 13, 31–43 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-010-9098-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-010-9098-1