Two Sides to the Evasion: The Pirate Bay and the Interdependencies of Evasive Entrepreneurship

Purpose – Evasive entrepreneurs innovate by circumventing or disrupting existing formal institutional frameworks. Since such evasions rarely go unnoticed, they usually lead to responses from lawmakers and regulators. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors introduce a conceptual model to illustrate and map the interdependencey between evasive entrepreneurship and the regulatory response it provokes. The authors apply this framework to the case of the file sharing platform The Pirate Bay, a venture with a number of clearly innovative and evasive features.

Findings – The platform was a radical, widely applied innovation that transformed the internet landscape, yet its founders became convicted criminals because of it.

Originality/value – Applying the evasive entrepreneurship framework to this case improves the understanding of the relationship between policymaking and entrepreneurship in the digital age, and is a first step toward exploring best responses for regulators facing evasive entrepreneurship.