Digital piracy is a worldwide concern. Both very high and very low rates of intellectual property infringement threaten innovation, thus implying that some level of effective copyright regulation is required to incentivize the creation of original works. However, although the article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights encompasses the advocation of social access to culture as well as the protection of copyright, in many countries we do not yet have an economic and legal balance between authors and consumers.

This thesis aims to answer which copyright law measures are more related to low/high digital piracy rates. To deal with that question, I took a picture of how is the world of copyright today. My empirical law and economics methodology thus consists of a content analysis of significantly selected copyright law measures that have been more or less broadly implemented, or that have been dismissed, by 108 countries in their current national copyright statutes (data from WIPO Lex). After processing the resultant database (or coding scheme) with econometric and descriptive statistical tools, my findings suggest that (1) the legal measures that are more correlated to high digital piracy rates are the sweat of the brow doctrine and secondary liability rules for ISPs, (2) the ones that are more correlated to low piracy rates are private copying and fair use provisions, (3) statutes that favor copyright holders are associated with greater rates of digital piracy, and (4) richer countries show lower levels of copyright infringement, which validates the development economics theory. Since there is no extant literature on the field, these results constitute the first step toward a comprehensive cross-national quantitative study on comparative copyright law and digital piracy, both in descriptive and explanatory terms.

Besides the interest among law and economics and intellectual property scholars that this project might excite, it also targets international policymakers given that the aforementioned outcomes represent the core in providing policy guidelines on copyright to legislatures and governments around the world. Such interdisciplinary recommendations, which go in the line of designing a new and economically viable regulatory copyright model, attempt to reduce piracy rates and to solve the global tension between authors and consumers in the digital era.