This is interesting. From the Register, an article called, “Software piracy pushes companies to be more competitive, study claims • The Register“, sub-titled, irreverently as ever, “So, do copy that floppy?”
The article is written by, Wendy Bradley, assistant professor of strategy, entrepreneurship, and business economics at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, and Julian Kolev, an economist at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The article describes their methodology, and links to their paper. They define the launching of Bittorent as a shock and examine the intellectual property development of vulnerable companies to that shock.
“When comparing the IP strategies of software firms at risk of piracy (the treatment group) against those of not-at-risk firms (the control group), we find that our treatment group significantly increases its innovative activity after the piracy shock in terms of R&D expenditures and granted copyright, trademark, and patent applications,”
Bradley & Kolev – Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation (August 2021)
Interestingly it seems, that Entertainment software companies behave differently. although the academic work done, as quoted in the article does not suggest that piracy reduces the supply of content.
Basically the big software firms use their superior cost structures, achieved by size and source code ownership to increase the rate of innovation to keep their customers coming to them. The entertainment companies don’t. I don’t think they look at the size and cost of investment into regulatory barriers to entry, both buying the laws they want, and pursuing newly created malefactors.
Bradley, Wendy and Kolev, Julian, Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation (August 2021). USPTO Economic Working Paper No. 2021-3, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3912074 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3912074 …
