TILEC Seminar: Joost Poort (UvA)

The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement

The ways in which consumers acquire music, films, series, books, and games have changed radically over the last twenty years. Until the turn of the twenty-first century, copyright-protected content was bought primarily in the form of physical carriers such as CDs, DVDS and printed books. Nowadays, an increasing amount of purely digital content is acquired and experienced online. In recent years, it has become possible to discern a second shift in consumption of content: from ownership to access.

This presentation deals with the “acquisition and consumption of music, films, series, books, and games through the various legal and illegal channels that exist today, in a set of thirteen countries across the globe.” It aims to provide factual information about the state of authorized and unauthorized acquisition and consumption of these types of content. The second aim is to assess the underlying mechanisms and the link with enforcement measures and legal supply. The final aim is to assess the effect of online piracy on consumption from legal sources.

Articles to read:

• The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement -  Joao Quintais and Joost Poort, and 
• Polderpiraten voor anker - Joost Poort, Martin van der Ende en Anastasia Yagafarova

Joost Poort is associate professor and co-director of the Institute for Information Law. He works as an economist on various economic and multidisciplinary research projects in the field of copyright, telecommunications and media. Examples include studies on online piracy and enforcement measures against it, the financing of European films and the extension or renewal of licences for telecommunications and commercial radio. He graduated cum laude as a physicist at Utrecht University in 1996. A year later, he graduated in the Philosophy of Science. During his studies Joost spent a year in Ireland at University College Cork. After his studies, Joost started in 1998 as an economic researcher at Nyenrode Forum for Economic Research (NYFER). From 2003 he worked at SEO Economic Research as senior researcher and since 2008 as head of the Competition and Regulation cluster. Over the years, his research has increasingly focused on the economic aspects of copyright, telecommunications and media. Since mid-2015, Joost has been an Honorary Economics Fellow at CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy, at the University of Glasgow.

For more information and a list of publications, see:  www.ivir.nl/employee/poort/, and: www.researchgate.net/profile/Joost_Poort