The impact of online piracy on companies’ revenues and consumer behavior has been a well-known problem for industry, policy-makers and academics. When it comes to piracy, consumers arguably benefit due to cheaper access to a wider range of content. However, piracy may also inflict significant direct costs, as many piracy sites may be unsafe due to malware, Trojans and other security issues.
In this original study, Rahul Telang analyses whether frequent visits to copyright infringing sites lead to poor computer health and a higher possibility of downloading malware files. The author monitored users behavior for a year to answer that question. His results showed that more visits to infringing sites lead to a 20% increase in malware files being downloaded to peoples’ computers.
This study shows that there is still work to do to increase awareness when it comes to the danger of piracy websites. If you are interested in infringing websites and user behavior this article provides a good source of information as the data from this study was captured from observation of the users in the real world.
Cite: T. R. (2018). Does Online Piracy Make Computers Insecure? Evidence from Panel Data (March 12, 2018).
Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3139240
