【主題】The Incidence of Software Piracy: Evidence from Windows
【主講人】Scott Stern, 麻省理工學院斯隆管理學院教授
【時間】2013-5-29（周三）下午14:00-15:30
Professor Stern is School of Management Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management Group at the Sloan School at MIT. He works widely with both companies and governments in understanding the drivers and consequences of innovation and entrepreneurship, and has worked extensively in understanding the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in competitiveness and regional economic performance. Stern received his PhD from Stanford University, and started his career at MIT from 1995-2001. Stern has also previously held positions as a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, before returning to MIT in 2009. Stern is the director of the Innovation Policy Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2005, Stern was awarded the Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship.
This paper evaluates the nature, relative incidence and drivers of software piracy. In contrast to prior studies, our study is based on direct observation of piracy, focusing on a specific product – Windows 7 – which was unambiguously associated with a significant level of private sector investment. Using data passively created by users (i.e., data that is transmitted to Microsoft as part of using the product), we are able to characterize the ways in which piracy occurs, the relative incidence of piracy across different economic and institutional environments, and the impact of enforcement efforts on choices to install pirated versus paid software. Our preliminary findings highlight a number of striking findings: (a) the “sources” of piracy are quite concentrated insofar as the vast majority of “retail piracy” can be attributed to a small number of widely distributed “hacks” that are available through the Internet, (b) the incidence of piracy varies significantly with the microeconomic and institutional environment (e.g., piracy is declining in GDP per capita but increasing in countries with stronger legal infrastructure), and (c) piracy has a complicated relationship with elements of the supply chain and IT environment. Finally, taking advantage of country-specific enforcement efforts against suppliers of pirated software such as the Pirate Bay, we are able to demonstrate the impact of enforcement efforts against software piracy on the choice by users between pirated versus paid software.
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