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Fighting Software Piracy in Africa: How Do Legal Origins and IPRs Protection Channels Matter?

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Abstract

In the current efforts toward harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes in the African continent, this paper provides answers to four key questions relevant in the policy decision-making processes. After empirically examining the questions, the following findings are established. (1) In comparison to common law countries, civil law countries inherently have a significant autonomous rate of software piracy; consistent with the “law and property rights” theory. (2) But for IPRs laws, the other intellectual property (IP) protection channels (World Intellectual Property Organization treaties, main IP law, and multilateral treaties) reduce the incidence of software piracy. (3) In both short-run and long-term, IPRs protection channels in civil law countries appear to mitigate software piracy more than in common law countries. (4) Formal institutions are instrumental in the fight against software piracy through IPRs protection channels.

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Notes

  1. This school of thought has gained prominence in the debate over if “permission” should be granted to permit “copying” of life-saving pharmaceuticals, especially those used in the management of HIV/AIDS in developing countries most affected and least likely to afford such treatments.

  2. World Intellectual Property Organization

  3. “The Board remains ready and willing to support software copyright owners by intensifying enforcement efforts to reduce software piracy in our country and ensure that legitimate businesses reap the fruits of their labor as per the Kenya Copyright Board mandate” (Fripp 2011).

  4. The model assumes the likelihood of determining a unique set of appropriate institutional arrangements in advance and then expects convergence towards those arrangements to be inherently desirable (El-Bialy 2010). Countries applying the same formal rules will have very different performance characteristics, since it is obvious that they have different informal norms and enforcement characteristics (North 1995). Hence, it is very uneasy to determine a unique set of appropriate formal and external institutional arrangements that could be implemented in all countries without taking the already existing informal or internal institutional setup of each country into consideration. According to North (1996), this fact can explain the failure of some formal rules (from successful Western economies) when applied to developing countries.

  5. For instance, some considerable achievements were noticed as piracy trends started to decline in North Africa.

  6. The link between strong property rights and innovation and the idea of proper incentives are the subject of vigorous academic debate (see section “The politics of piracy and intellectual property rights protection”).

  7. Note should be taken of the fact that many scholars have expressed doubts about the validity of the legal origin theory. A more balance discussion has been presented to address the debates on comparative property law in caveats of the paper (see section “Caveats”).

  8. For instance, by providing the owners of ideas with more protection, stronger IPRs may stifle incentives to innovate and introduce novel technologies (Helpman 1993; Bessen and Maskin 2000; Maskus 2000; Shadlen et al. 2005). As sustained by Shadlen et al. (2005), with too much protection, the “tragedy of the commons” may be replaced by the tragedy of the “anticommons” (Heller and Eisenberg 1998), since diminished access to upstream ideas can significantly deter downstream innovation. Hence, the challenge for the management of IPRs and policy orientation is to create incentives for provision that do not unnecessarily inhibit the distribution.

  9. Additional support for the possibility that the changing strength of IPR regimes is based on a nation’s level of development or current technological ability is found in the rapid growth witnessed by Southeast Asia. Some evidence suggests that the “East Asian Miracle” could have been caused by weaker IPRs regimes at the early stages of these nations’ development in addition to their accumulation of capital. These nations’ capacity to absorb, replicate, and duplicate foreign innovations may have contributed to their relatively high growth rates. It has been further noted that, as these countries became significant producers of new technologies and innovations, their IPR regimes tightened.

  10. Data from the BSA primarily provide measurement for the piracy of commercial software. More discussion on the reliability of piracy data could be obtained from Traphagan and Griffith (1998) and Png (2008).

  11. This data have been widely used in the literature on piracy (Marron and Steel 2000; Banerjee et al. 2005; Andrés 2006; Goel and Nelson 2009).

  12. An over-identifying restrictions (OIR) test is employable only in the presence of over-identification. That is, the instruments should be higher than the endogenous explaining variables by at least one degree of freedom. In cases of exact-identification (instruments equal to endogenous explaining variables) and under-identifications (instruments less than endogenous explaining variables), an OIR test is by definition not possible.

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Acknowledgment

The author is highly indebted to the editor and referees for their very useful comments.

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  1. African Governance and Development Institute, P.O. Box 18 SOA/ 1365, Yaoundé, Cameroon

    Simplice A. Asongu

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 2 Summary statistics and presentation of countries
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Table 3 Correlation matrix
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Table 4 Variable definitions
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Asongu, S.A. Fighting Software Piracy in Africa: How Do Legal Origins and IPRs Protection Channels Matter?. J Knowl Econ 6, 682–703 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-012-0137-0

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