A World Of Copies

A report by Joe Karaganis, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, finds that piracy is on the rise:

[W]e have seen little evidenceand indeed few claimsthat enforcement efforts to date have had any impact whatsoever on the overall supply of pirated goods. Our work suggests, rather, that piracy has grown dramatically by most measures in the past decade, driven by the exogenous factors ... high media prices, low local incomes, technological diffusion, and fast-changing consumer and cultural practices. 

Felix Salmon calls this the "best report ever on media piracy":

The big forces driving media piracy in developing countries are real and powerful and will not be changed, no matter how many western politicians get on their moral high horses and insist that countries like India and China build a “culture of intellectual property.” But the irony is that if governments and corporations really wanted to build such a culture, then they would encourage companies to set their prices low enough that the populations of those countries could actually afford to buy music, movies, and software at the full legal retail price.

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