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Last week, Minister of the European Parliament, Julia Reda, unearthed a well-hidden 2014 study financed by the European Commission entitled Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU [warning: PDF] that studied the effects of copyright infringement on sales. The study cost 360,000 EUR to carry out and although it was ready in 2015, it was only made public last week when Reda was able to get ahold of a copy.
The study's conclusion was that with the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales. This conclusion is consistent with previous studies, and raises the following question: "Why did the Commission, after having spent a significant amount of money on it, choose not to publish this study for almost two years?"
- The blog post by MEP Julia Reda, Pirate Party, Germany: What the Commission found out about copyright infringement but 'forgot' to tell us.
- TorrentFreak: EU Piracy Report Suppression Raises Questions Over Transparency
- RT: Piracy doesn't impact sales: Pirate Party MEP unearths €360k European Commission report
- Newsweek: Inside the Piracy Study the European Union Hid: Illegal Downloads Don't Harm Overall Sales
- TheNextWeb: iEU paid for a report that concluded piracy isn't harmful — and tried to hide the findings
- The Inquirer: The EC accused of burying a report that found that piracy isn't that costly
- HotHardware: EU Study Hidden For Two Years Concluded That Digital Piracy Doesn't Affect Sales
- ... and many others ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @07:31PM (1 child)
They are. Except you are forgetting that they inhabit an alternate reality world where they believe that if it were made impossible to pirate content, that all those pirates would immediately begin paying the content distributors their fees they are due for consuming the content. And in that alternate reality, creating a system that makes it impossible to consume content without paying a 'protection fee' produces a huge boost to the bottom line.
This report, however, shows that what we have been saying for years is actually true. Those who obtain your (as in 'big distributor co.') content on the pirate market will never become paying customers, instead they will simply do without the content if they can not acquire it via the pirate market.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Monday September 25 2017, @09:50PM
Well it depends on the media involved.
Their survey coughed up a 30% probability that illegal consumption (pirate) kills off a legal consumption (sale).
This study's estimate wasn't all that far from the industry experts ("panel") who estimated 40% sales kill.
Measuring the negative side of the question is a lot harder, and the logic in the study is much more tortured. They never actually measured true walk-away rates. (If not free - will walk away).
The closest they could come is measuring how much more than zero would the pirate pay for convenience and speed of a paid source.
On page 164 they point out that for some media (books/games/music) a substantial portion of pirates (51 to 66 percent) might be willing to pay MORE than the market price to have it convenient and NOW.
For movies and TV-series, 80 percent of pirates would not be willing to pay the market rate for convenience. (Which still leaves 20% that would be willing).
However since every movie/tv show ends up on free TV within a year or three, (which is not the same as music or books or games - which may never be free - or even available), this reluctance of 80% of pirates to pay the going rate may reflect simply the willingness to wait for the inevitable free availability - which they view as a certainty.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.