Sound recording market: The ambiguous case of copyright and piracy

This paper attempts to analyse the organization and the economics of information industries starting from the case of the phonographic market. The focus here is on the relationships between copyright, the pivotal element of the market, and unauthorised sound reproduction, its main lamented infringement. The trade-off between the push to diffusion and the push to exclusion, at the root of the market functioning, is here discussed to show that unauthorised reproduction should be considered as an endogenous constituent because of the institutional setting and which has positive effects for the industry itself.