Most File Sharers Would Pay For Legal Downloads

An anonymous reader writes "Two separate studies from Australia and Holland give the lie to corporate entertainment industry claims that file sharers are unprincipled thieves out to rob the honest but harshly treated movie and music studios. Over in Oz, news.com.au reports, 'Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent.' And from the EU, 'Turnover in the recorded music industry is in decline, but only part of this decline can be attributed to file sharing,' says Legal, Economic and Cultural Aspects of File Sharing, an academic study, which also states, 'Conversely, only a small fraction of the content exchanged through file sharing networks comes at the expense of industry turnover. This renders the overall welfare effects of file sharing robustly positive.'"

Comments

Re:How Cheap?

[dangitman]

I would be happy to pay $1 per episode to watch without commercials and to avoid any hassle downloading or getting Hulu onto my TV screen instead of a computer monitor.

But when Hulu does charge $1 for an ad-free episode, you won't pay it. This is the difference between saying you'd be "happy" to pay for it on an internet forum, versus actually paying for it.