Economics of Law

1.Introduction:

Piracy has been seen by the music, movie and software industry as the main cause in the decline of sales and profits. Copyright law makes piracy a criminal offence and statues are passed to deal with such criminal offences. Therefore lawmakers and copyrights owners are more concerned with the deterrence of piracy than the lay “free rider” using copyrighted material for personal use. Technological advancement such as high-speed Internet and media encoding make it even easier to obtain and copy copyright material. As a result it is harder to monitor and police such wide scale piracy. Anyone with an access to a computer and Internet connection is a potential ‘pirate’ as the cost and time for downloading, copying and distributing is extremely low.

The recent introduction of Bill c-61 (copyright amendment act) has caused ripples all across the media. The bill seeks to impose harsh penalties on piracy and breaking of digital locks. This paper aims to analyze copyright infringements using microeconomic theory of criminal law (Becker’s model).

Firstly, the paper would briefly outline the proposed changes that would affect the outcome of the analysis i.e. the penalties. The next section describes the model used to analyze the remedies in c-61 for copyright infringement. Section 3 and 4 details the discussion and analysis of this bill and section 5 concludes.

2.Bill C-61:

Bill C-61 clearly states consumers' rights on how they are allowed to copy intellectual property and also clarifies doubts regarding certain issues. Current laws don’t actually allow consumers to make copies of books, newspapers, photographs, DVDs and music. The new bill would actually allow consumers to make one copy of each item per device owned i.e. a computer or MP3 player. The bill would also allow consumers to record television programs for later viewing but not for archiving purposes. The bill would also exempt ISPs from copyright liability, as they are intermediaries. They...