IP Outreach Research > IP Crime
Reference
| Title: | Piracy on the Silver Screen |
| Author: | Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel [University of Pennsylvania] |
| Source: | The Journal of Industrial Economics 55, no. 3: 379-395 |
| Year: | 2007 |
Details
| Subject/Type: | Piracy |
| Focus: | Film |
| Country/Territory: | United States of America |
| Objective: | To investigate whether (and how much) unpaid consumption of movies displaces paid consumption. |
| Sample: | 470 undergraduate students |
| Methodology: | Survey |
Main Findings
Only a small fraction of movie consumption is unpaid consumption (5.2%, of which roughly 60% is burned and 40% downloaded), but when piracy occurs, it usually occurs on first viewing of the movie (i.e. respondents pirating a movie usually have not viewed it beforehand through another medium, such as movie theatres or television). While the rate of displacement is large (question: how many movies are not purchased for each movie that is pirated?: 1.0 for movies pirated on the first episode of consumption and 0.20 for those pirated on the second episode of consumption), the amount of displacement is small (question: how much paid consumption is displaced by unpaid consumption?). Overall, unpaid consumption reduced paid consumption by 3.5%.
According to the authors, movies (with a high rate of displacement and a low unpaid consumption volume) and music downloading (with a low rate of displacement and a high unpaid consumption volume) differ for two reasons: first, the cost of obtaining unpaid music is smaller in terms of downloading time; secondly, as opposed to music, movie watching requires the viewer's undivided attention, and individual time to watch movies is finite - so the number of movies watched is not likely to rise dramatically even if the cost of obtaining them may get smaller with technological progress.
[Date Added: Aug 12, 2008 ]