20 August 2009

OECD on digital piracy

The OECD has released a new 134pp report (browsable here) on Piracy of Digital Content as a follow-up to the 2008 Seoul Declaration on the Future of the Internet Economy [PDF]. 

It centres on sports rights and overall is a statement of received wisdom. A dash of wasabi might have helped. 

The report is described as studying ...
digital piracy - the infringement of copyrighted content (such as music, films, software, broadcasting, books, etc.) - where the end product does not involve the use of hard media, such as CDs and DVDs. It presents the unique economic properties of markets for pirated digital products, where the existence of a large number of suppliers willing to provide pirated content at virtually no cost poses new and difficult challenges to copyright owners and policy makers in combating that piracy. These economic features, together with rapid technological developments, create special and unique problems to policy makers and the large number of actors involved in different jurisdictions.