Category Empirical Research

Presenting ‘Copy Culture in the US and Germany’

Copy Culture in the US and Germany is a comparative study of digital culture, focusing on media consumption, media acquisition, and attitudes toward copyright enforcement. The study is based on a large-scale phone survey of Americans and Germans in late…

Research Finds Censoring Pirate Sites Doesn’t Work

[Originally posted by Ernesto on TorrentFreak, CC-BY-NC] A new study released by researchers from Boston’s Northeastern University shows that censoring “pirate” sites by blocking or seizing their domains is ineffective. The researchers looked at the availability of various pirated media…

America Says: Go Gently on Porn Pirate

So another case has come along to illustrate the excesses of the US system of statutory penalties for copyright infringement–here, a $1.5 million judgement against a guy for sharing 10 porn films on BitTorrent.   Previous infringement cases suggest that there…

Copy Culture by Race and Ethnicity

We’ve looked at the difference age makes to copying and downloading (a lot), and gender (not much), and politics (not much).  How about race/ethnicity? Well, it makes some. Here is our sequence of questions about attitudes toward sharing music….

Boldrin and Levine: “The Case Against Patents”

The following is an excerpt from the full paper by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, published as a working paper for the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  The full paper is available here. The case against patents can be summarized…

Study Shows Positive Impact of Fair Use Singapore

A new paper by Roya Ghafele and Benjamin Gibert provides empirical evidence that Singapore’s adoption of fair use into its copyright law had a positive effect on it economy.   The authors examine data from the private copying industries – defined…

Where do Music Collections Come From?

In our last installment, we noted that there’s a sharp generational divide (in the US and Germany) in attitudes toward copying and file sharing, with those under 30 showing more acceptance of these practices in general and much more acceptance…

Unauthorized File Sharing: Is It Wrong?

We’re kicking off our Copy Culture in the US and Germany pre-release festivities with a fresh(ish) look at an old question: is unauthorized file sharing wrong?  Or more properly: do Americans think it’s wrong?