| Abstract: |
Peer-to-peer technology has made massive music piracy possible, which, in
turn, has arguably had a significant economic impact on the recording
industry. Record labels have responded to online piracy with litigation and
are also considering self-help measures. It is currently not obvious whether
or not these counter-piracy strategies will ultimately stifle online file
sharing in the long term. With this paper we attempt to add to our
understanding of the conflict within the institution that is the commercial
music industry. We conduct an institutional analysis of the industry in
transition and extend the traditional pattern modeling methodology with a
formal resource-based model of a representative online music network. The
model accounts for complex causal interactions between resources, private
provision of common goods, free riding and membership dynamics. The numerical
implementation of the model is the basis of a decision support system, which
is used in a series of computer experiments that emulate anti-piracy
scenarios. We show that a peer-to-peer system may be quite resilient to
outside disturbances. The experiments also demonstrate that policies rank
differently in their effectiveness based on a selected yardstick. |