Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails to all firms include a link to the licensing page of the infringed image; for treated firms, we add links to a significantly cheaper licensing site. Making infringers aware of the cheaper option leads to a fourteen-fold increase in the ex-post licensing rate. Two additional experimental interventions are designed to reduce search costs for (i) price and (ii) product information. Both interventions-immediate price comparison and recommendation of images similar to those infringed-have large positive effects. Our results highlight the importance of mitigating user costs in small-value transactions.

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

NBER

January 2019

I didn't find this helpful.This was helpful. Please let us know if you found this article helpful.
Loading...
By |2019-06-13T11:05:11-07:00January 1st, 2018|Copyright, Intellectual Property, Political Economy, Reference|