Files
Abstract
With the rapid growth of the Internet and peer-to-peer technology, digital piracy has become a serious problem. Many studies have focused on negative or neutral effects that piracy has had on the music industry, but the role that piracy plays in the film industry is still relatively unclear. Companies have spent millions of dollars in lawsuits that have yielded very little in return. By making their content more convenient to access, these companies might be able to lure pirates away from file sharing and into a more socially acceptable form of enjoying these digital goods. Using a basic difference-in-difference model and data collected from two of the largest illegal file sharing websites, I find that introducing a blockbuster movie onto Netflix, the leader in digital video streaming with over 27 million subscribers, decreases the rate at which it is pirated.