Can filesharers be triggered by economic incentives? Results of an experiment

Illegal filesharing on the internet leads to considerable financial losses for artists and copyright owners as well as producers and sellers of music. Thus far, measures to contain this phenomenon have been rather restrictive. However, there are still a considerable number of illegal systems, and users are able to decide quite freely between legal and illegal downloads because the latter are still difficult to sanction. Recent economic approaches account for the improved bargaining position of users. They are based on the idea of revenue-splitting between professional sellers and peers. In order to test such an innovative business model, the study reported in this article carried out an experiment with 100 undergraduate students, forming five small peer-to-peer networks.The networks were confronted with different economic conditions.The results indicate that even experienced filesharers hold favourable attitudes towards revenue-splitting.They seem to be willing to adjust their behaviour to different economic conditions

Towards a new Digital Rights Management ecosystem: The importance of its systems for the copyright holders, the consumers and the innovation. The example of the HTML 5

The evolutionary character of technology creates new conditions for the DRM in the online copyright world. The legal rules have to be in accordance with the new applications and platforms in order to be effective. Cloud computing and HTML 5 are some examples of the challenges that DRM faces in the new era.The aim of this work is to examine the effectiveness of the EU and US legislation regarding this era

The Problem of Freedom Override by Digital Rights Management Technologies: The Market Mechanisms and Possible Legal Options

One of the major problems of copyright regulations in the digital and network era is that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are overriding the freedom incorporated within the copyright regulations in the analog world. The override problem partly comes from the strict implementation of the DRM systems by the market, and partly from the anti-circumvention regulations that almost blindly protect such implementation. This research reviews the scope of anti-circumvention regulations by introducing Japanese regulations, which are rather modest, and by comparing with the U.S. regulations. It also extensively analyzes the market mechanisms that cause rather strict implementation of DRM systems based on interviews of key persons in the market. At the end, it suggests several legal options to improve the problem of freedom override by DRM technologies, either by direct legal means or through market mechanisms, to keep a better balance of interests between right-holders and users of copyrighted information