Publisher's Synopsis
Responding to concerns in governments and the business community, the OECD launched a project in 2005 to assess the magnitude and impact of counterfeiting and piracy. The objective of the project was to improve factual understanding and awareness of how large the problem is and the effects that infringements of intellectual property rights have on governments, business and consumers around the world. This book reports on Phase II of this project and studies digital piracy, i.e. the infringement of copyrighted content (such as music, films, software, broadcasting, books, etc.) where the end product does not involve the use of hard media, such as CDs and DVDs. It presents the unique economic properties of markets for pirated digital products, where the existence of a large number of suppliers willing to provide pirated content at virtually no cost poses new and difficult challenges to copyright owners and policy makers in combating that piracy. These economic features, together with rapid technological developments, create special and unique problems for policy makers and the large number of actors involved in different jurisdictions. This book also provides an illustrative, in-depth case study of the sports rights owners sector, highlighting how it is affected by digital piracy. For more information about OECD work on counterfeiting and piracy, see www.oecd.org/sti/counterfeiting
