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Purpose – Despite an abundance of literature on the effects of copyright infringement on music consumption, empirical evidence remains ambiguous. The aim of this chapter is to quantify the effect of copyright infringement on recorded music purchases and live music attendance for Spanish frequent music consumers, and to measure its effect on participation for all music consumers.

Design/methodology approach – We rely on survey data for the Spanish population as our main information source and use propensity score matching to estimate the average effect of copyright infringement on music consumption. In order to do so, the methodology aims at estimating the difference between actual outcomes (record purchases or attendance to live concerts) for copyright infringers and the (counterfactual) outcome would they had not been infringers.

Findings – Two findings stand out. First, and with regards to recorded music consumption, we find a net positive effect of copyright infringement on full album purchases although a nonsignificant one for tracks. Second, there is a positive and significant effect on live attendance, which is consistent with an indirect appropriation effect across products. These results are robust when participation is considered, but some interesting differences arise between recorded music purchasers and live concerts attenders.

Originality/value – First, the use of a counterfactual control group provides an additional approach to the assessment of copyright infringement. Second, within the same framework we investigate the effects of copyright infringement on recorded and live music, an approach that sheds some light on the degree of complementarity between both markets.

This study aims to investigate the impact of digital technologies for intangible assets management. The authors analyse how technological innovations and regulations of intellectual property affect business models of companies or intellectual property rights (IPR) intensive industries to determine the impact of digital transformation on intangible assets management, highlighting emerging issues and future effects of the digital technology revolution.

The authors use a case study method to answer our research questions. The authors use Soundreef SpA as our case study, a collecting company that develops technology for monitoring, collecting and maximising the earnings of songwriters and music publishers. The authors also elaborate and adopt the framework of the enhanced intellectual capital as the theoretical lens for presenting and analysing our case study, determining how the digital transformation caused business model innovation and more transparent and timely performance measurement in copyright-based companies.

The analysis of Soundreef SpA’s business model allows us to demonstrate how using new technologies drives the performance measurement of copyright holders and improve the collecting societies’ performance, introducing a new key performance indicator. This turning point is made possible by digital transformation and regulatory change. In the IPR industry, copyright holders’ performance has never been calculated, so the distribution of copyright revenues was based on the criteria approved by governance bodies/management.

In the study, the authors demonstrate that digital transformation is able to enhance the intellectual capital of IPR-intensive companies introducing new ways to manage intangible assets and to measure performance.

One of the binding commitments under the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is the extension of the copyright term to 70 years after the death of the author. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a research on the potential impact of the extension of copyright term on the music industry in Malaysia. As Malaysia is a user and net importer of intellectual property, it is feared that extending the copyright term will likely impede incentives for the creation of new contents, increase the cost of licensing/royalties, diminish the choice and creativity of film and music industry and increase royalty payments abroad. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the commercial lifespan of copyright works is long enough.

Using a qualitative research method, in-depth interviews were carried out with key industry players between June and September 2015 to collect relevant information from the industry. The information obtained was analysed to gauge the market standing of the local music industry and how the proposed extension would bolster their financial and market power. The paper does not intend to explore the legal implications from the retrospective extension of copyright term and data on illegal use and piracy. The findings of the research will be purely drawn from the non-structured interviews and information gathered from respondents.

The paper concludes that there is not enough evidence to support the notion that the copyright extension will be economically advantageous to the local music industry.

The feedback from the interviews, although cannot be generalised to be considered as representing the whole music industry in Malaysia, can nevertheless be taken as preliminary conclusions and an eye-opener to the quest for concrete support in the debate for the extension of the copyright term in Malaysia. The paper also does no explore the legal implications from the retrospective extension of copyright and data on illegal use and piracy.

In conclusion, more studies need to be conducted to understand the dynamics and needs of the music market in Malaysia for the extension of the copyright term to be really beneficial to them. As this study is only conducted using a qualitative research method, using open-ended and in-depth interview techniques on a small group of respondents, there may be a need to embark on empirical research with proper execution of survey instruments to a larger group of respondents.

The music industry is chosen as the case study because it may develop into a potential export interest. The music industry as a small component of the larger “creative industry” has been identified as one of the new economic drivers under the Tenth Malaysia Plan.

The paper was first presented at the ATRIP Congress 2015 at Cape Town on 27th September 2015. The paper has not been published. No studies have been done on the possible implications of copyright extension term on the music industry in Malaysia before.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the HADOPI Law adopted in France in 2009. It aims to focus on two aspects of the law: the graduated response and the certification of a “legal” offer. It also aims to describe both, analyze their rationale and discuss their likely impact.

The paper combines legal and economic approaches. The legal debates have been analyzed and transcribed in a casual discourse. Economic analysis is used to understand the rationale of the law. Both approaches are used to point out the limitations of the law.

The paper shows that the graduated response and the certification of a “legal” offer both target consumers. The former aims at deterring file sharing, the latter aims at guiding consumers towards “legal” services. However, the graduated response's efficiency is dubious; the certification raises the issue of defining what is legal. Both mechanisms destabilize the French copyright law by putting more pressure on ISPs and online services. Targeting consumers in the name of copyright may cause a rejection of copyright as a whole.

The HADOPI Law is considered a pioneer in the field of copyright enforcement, especially as a first application of the graduated response. The topic is therefore of premier importance for copyright at global level.

The paper is the first to combine economic and legal approaches to analyze the graduated response. It deals with the certification of “legal” services, which has only rarely been studied. The link between both mechanisms has never been considered before.

The main purpose of this chapter is to interrogate the regulatory environment in Africa by exploring trends and developments within key intellectual property rights agencies and highlighting some of the challenges revolving around contracts enforcement and royalty payments. In many developing countries, the performance and competitiveness of the creative industries have suffered from weak institutional capacity and a spate of copyrights infringement. This chapter highlights a few case illustrations drawing upon the World Intellectual Property Organisation surveys covering a selection of African countries between 2011 and 2020.

A great artist creates a mural which, bearing his name, eventually reaches the hands of a purchaser who objects to the nude figures that the creator had seen fit to incorporate into his tableau. The purchaser, therefore, employs another artist to drape the figures. In a now famous decree the German Supreme Court, in 1912, held that the transferee of the mural in a case involving these facts, could not have changed it to suit his individual preferences.

The blockchain technology provides a way to record transactions that is designed to be highly secure, transparent, trustable, traceable, auditable and tamper-proof. And, the internet of things (IoT) technology provides the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction, which is able to link computing devices and digitized machines, things, objects, animals and people that are provided with digital unique identifiers (UIDs). This paper aims to explore the combined application of blockchain and IoT-based technologies, especially on the intellectual property protection area.

In this paper, the authors propose a high-level architecture design of blockchain and IoT-based intellectual property protection system, which can help to process three types of intellectual property: (1) patents, copyrights, trademarks etc.; (2) industrial design, trade dress, craft works, trade secrets etc.; and (3) plant variety rights, geographical indications, etc.

Using blockchain peer-to-peer network and IoT devices, the proposed method can help people to establish a trusted, self-organized, open and ecological intellectual property protection system.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that applied blockchain and IoT technologies on traditional intellectual property protection and trade ecosystem.

According to the Italian regulation firms must qualify to bid in auctions for public work contracts worth more than 150,000 euros. In this paper, we investigate the link between the efficiency of infrastructure provision, and the Italian regulation concerning the firm's entry and qualification system, employing a large dataset on Italian public works contracts for roads and highways. First, firm's efficiency in public contracts' execution is estimated using a smoothed data envelopment analysis (DEA) bootstrap procedure. Then, the effects of the qualification system on firm's efficiency is evaluated using a semi-parametric technique that produces a robust inference for an unknown serial correlation between efficiency scores. Our analysis shows that fully qualified firms perform better than partially qualified firms.

This paper investigates the impact of peer-to-peer networks that promote the unauthorized downloading of MP3 files exert on the recording industry. Although Napster was the most famous of these systems, its progeny have continued to allow millions of music listeners to download music (and other) files without remuneration to the copyright owners. Economic theory does not allow us to determine what the impact of such downloading will be. Using data on the historical sales of prerecorded music I examine in detail the recent decline in record sales and attempt to gauge the importance of various factors that have been put forward to explain this decline. My conclusion is that the evidence is most consistent with a claim that MP3 downloads decrease sales. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether the damage to the industry will be fatal.