On Wednesday, June 12, the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics hosted the first of two workshops on digital piracy co-organized with the Université de Rennes (France). Professors, industry experts, and students from business and economics departments across the world participated in the workshop. Professor Michael A. Arnold, who teaches Managerial Economics to MBA students at Lerner, began the day’s discussion with a comment on the international contingent. Digital piracy proved to be a rich, far-reaching research topic for Lerner’s faculty and workshop guests alike.
Professor Arnold presented a paper he co-authored with Université de Rennes’s economics professor, Thierry Penard. The paper, entitled “How Does a Graduated Response Policy Influence the Behavior of Digital Pirates? Some Evidence from the French Three-Strike (Hadopi) Law,” analyzes the behavior of digital pirates rather than the negative effect they have upon the sale of pirated products. Arnold told workshop attendees that two-thirds of digital media exchanges moved from owner to owner without purchase. Arnold’s research underscores the danger that digital piracy poses to the economic health of digital media and a salient topic for MBA students focusing on areas such as business ethics and media & entertainment.
A follow-up conference workshop on Digital Piracy will take place October 24 at the Université de Rennes. The international scope of the conference highlights that Lerner, while firmly ensconced in the business culture of the greater Philadelphia metro, maintains a global reach that directly benefits the educational offerings of the MBA program.