Follow the money: Online piracy and self-regulation in the advertising industry

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effects of a self-regulatory effort, orchestrated by the European Commission, that aims to reduce advertising revenues for publishers of copyright infringing content. Historical data lets us follow how the third-party advertising and tracking services associated with a large number of piracy websites and a corresponding set of legitimate "placebo" websites change after the agreement to self-regulate went in place. We find that larger EU-based advertisers comply with the initiative and reduce their connections with piracy websites. We do not find reductions for other non-advertising services that track consumers, which has potentially important implications for the efficiency of targeted advertising.

European Privacy Law and Global Markets for Data

“…We follow the data collection approach in Batikas et al (2019) to access historical information about the HTTP requests that websites make to third parties. We use data from HTTPArchive, a project that periodically crawls the homepages of about half a million hosts.…”

“…Since the GDPR came into effect, domain registration data has not been publicly available anymore. 15 As a proxy to the web technology provider's location, we use its country-specific TLD (Batikas et al, 2019). For example, we define third-party domains to be more likely located in the EU when they use an EU-specific TLD like de or fr.…”

“…A second placebo exercise, in column ( 4), looks at a specific set of websites. We observe 57 "piracy" websites that offer unlicensed content (music, movies, live sports streams) as identified by blacklists and reports of the IT security and entertainment industries (Batikas et al, 2019). For these websites, which primarily exist because it is difficult to enforce copyright law, we would expect that it is equally difficult to enforce the GDPR.…”

Does piracy lead to product abandonment or stimulate new product development?: Evidence from mobile platform‐based developer firms

“…Many studies have looked explicitly at different forms in which piracy was regulated and the impact of these policies on the consumption of pirated goods (Aguiar, Claussen, & Peukert, 2018; Batikas, Claussen, & Peukert, 2019; Luo & Mortimer, 2017; Reimers, 2016). These studies document that while there may be opportunities to regulate piracy through either technological or policy interventions, their impacts on consumption are mixed, suggesting that piracy may continue to affect digital innovators even following these interventions.…”

Catch Me If You Can: Effectiveness and Consequences of Online Copyright Enforcement

“…Initiatives towards a self-regulation of the online advertising industry have been implemented in 2013 the UK and are on the agenda of the European Commission since 2015. 53 Although economically appealing, except for a recent working paper by Batikas et al (2017), we are not aware of an academic literature that provides evidence on the overall effectiveness of such efforts.…”