Rahul Telang

Rahul Telang is an Information Systems and Management professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He is known for his book Streaming, Sharing, Stealing, which he co-authored with Michael D. Smith.

His scholarly work has been published in Management Science, Marketing Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and the Journal of Marketing Research, and he serves on the editorial boards of these journals.

His research focuses on the economic and policy implications of digital technologies, particularly in the media, entertainment, cybersecurity, and privacy sectors.

Education and career Telang earned his Ph.D. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

He has been a faculty member at the Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon University since 2002, primarily teaching in the School of Information Systems and Management. He also holds a courtesy appointment at the Tepper School of Business.

Before pursuing his PhD, he completed his Bachelor of Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS, Pilani), India.

Research Rahul has made contributions to the media industry, with a focus on music and film. In the early 2000s, when he started his career, Napster and then BitTorrent-based protocols made music and movie infringement commonplace. He conducted a series of research on the role of piracy in demand, supply, innovation, and the role of copyrights and policymaking. He and his colleague, Michael Smith, established a research center, Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA). The center examines various economic and policy issues surrounding the entertainment industry. In 2016, he wrote a book, “Streaming Sharing Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment,” with his colleague, Michael Smith.

His other area of research is the economics of Information Security. In the early 2000s, the lack of software security became a significant concern as numerous data breaches became common due to buggy products. He wrote a series of papers on what makes software unique, which enables firms to sell such products successfully in the market. He has won awards and is the recipient of grants, including the NSF Career Award,

In 2025, Telang co-authored a study examining the role of generative AI systems in reproducing copyrighted material, which found that outputs frequently included content resembling copyrighted characters and other protected works even without explicit prompting for them.

He was the chair of the PhD program from 2014 until 2019, when he suffered a serious injury (TBI) when he fell 20 feet from his attic.

Selected publications