Piracy and box office movie revenues: Evidence from Megaupload |
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| Institution: | 1. University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, Zürich 8006, Switzerland;2. LMU Munich, Professor-Huber-Platz 2, München 80539, Germany;3. CEPR London, 2nd Floor, 33 Great Sutton St, London EC1V 0DX, United Kingdom;4. Copenhagen Business School, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark;1. Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Central Connecticut State University;2. Department of Public Justice, State University of New York at Oswego;3. Department of Criminal Justice, The Citadel;1. Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University, South Korea;2. School of Industrial Management Engineering, Korea University, South Korea;3. Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, South Korea |
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| Abstract: | In this paper we evaluate the heterogeneous effects of online copyright enforcement. We ask whether the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload had a differential effect on box office revenues of wide-release vs. niche movies. Identification comes from a comparison of movies that were available on Megaupload to those that were not. We show that only movies that premiere in a relatively large number of theaters benefitted from the shutdown of Megaupload. The average effect, however, is negative. We provide suggestive evidence that this result is driven by information externalities. The idea is that online piracy acts as a mechanism to spread information about product characteristics across consumers with different valuations for the product. Our results question the effectiveness of blanket public anti-piracy policy, not only from a consumer perspective, but also from a producer perspective. |
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