Piracy, Copyright Enforcement & Damages Expert Witness

The central empirical claim in most copyright damages disputes is a displacement rate: the share of unlicensed consumption that would have been licensed consumption instead. That number is frequently assumed rather than estimated, and the assumption usually drives the damages figure more than any other input.

What the published evidence actually shows

• Blocking a single infringing site generally does little — traffic disperses to substitutes faster than they can be addressed, an effect documented across drug marketplaces, commercial sex advertising, and media piracy.
• Blocking multiple sites simultaneously does measurably reduce piracy and increase legal consumption; scale is what distinguishes effective enforcement from symbolic enforcement.
• Even a single-site shutdown can raise legal streaming uptake in some markets, but conversion concentrates among higher-income users while price-constrained users migrate to other unlicensed sources.
• Notice-and-takedown has measurable effects where it reaches — targeted copyright protection produced a 14% sales increase in one quasi-experimental study — but has little purchase on foreign services.

Each of those findings is from peer-reviewed work, three of them my own. In litigation this matters in both directions: it supports well-grounded damages claims and it undercuts inflated ones. A displacement assumption that contradicts the published record is not difficult to expose under cross-examination.

Who I work with

Rightsholders, platforms, and defendants. I take the same methodological position regardless of the retaining party, which is the only position that survives adversarial scrutiny.