We develop models in the field of the economical analysis of law.
As an example, we have performed a recent study for the french agency Hadopi: illegal sharing of cultural goods on the Internet has become a massive reality in today’s connected society. Numerous studies have been performed to try and evaluate the impact of these practices on the industry of cultural goods, and how much harm, if any, they have entailed. The effect of legal and technical responses to limit pirating has also been investigated, showing in general inconclusive effect. Instead of penalizing illegal actors – providers and/or consumers -, a totally different approach has been proposed recently by the Hadopi. The idea is to offer the possibility to sites that illegally share cultural goods to become legal in exchange of a retribution proportional to their activity. Our model studies the economic feasibility of such a scheme under various assumptions on the behaviour of the different actors involved. Our main finding is that, supposing that more popular goods are more prone to pirating, a retribution of the order of the increase in benefit per user gained by legalized sites does indeed lead to a win-win situation for both producers/sellers of cultural goods and willing-to-be-legalized sites.
Selected associated references:
Jacques Lévy Véhel, Pierre-Emmanuel Lévy Véhel, Victor Lévy Véhel. A model investigating incentives for illegal cultural goods sharing sites to become legal. 2015.
