Infringing Nations: Predicting Software Piracy Rates, BitTorrent Tracker Hosting, and P2P File Sharing Client Downloads Between Countries

This study sought to investigate the predictors of digital piracy at the national level. The bulk of previous research on this subject has relied almost exclusively on measures of piracy taken from reports created by copyright industry representatives, which may not be objective sources. For this research, two new measures of piracy related activity in addition to the usual software piracy rate and software piracy cost measures were used. The number of BitTorrent tracking servers and the number of peer-to-peer file sharing client downloads per country were measured. It was determined that these new measures tended to have predictors that were different than the standard software piracy rates. Additionally, it appeared that measuring piracy as a rate relative to legal purchases had the opposite effect than when measuring piracy in absolute terms (such as the absolute number of BitTorrent trackers and absolute dollar amount lost due to piracy). Smaller, poorer, and less technologically developed countries had higher piracy rates, but lower absolute piracy activity. An absolute measure of piracy may be more appropriate, as it likely reflects larger costs to copyright stakeholders, and therefore policy ought to focus on wealthier nations, not poorer ones, when it comes to targeting pirating behavior.