Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers

An anonymous reader writes "The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies have been commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment. GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be. The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend."

Comments

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

They also lie on surveys about pirating and purchasing.

Re:And...

[icebraining]

Lying is irrelevant if the study is decent and asks for proof of purchase, like this did.

No big deal

[Sponge Bath]

When you can't deny the information any longer, you switch to discrediting it. Fighting truth is just a cost of business for the entertainment industry.

Re:No big deal

[next_ghost]

Because if they can't keep their tight grip on our culture, they're done for. This group of middlemen stopped being useful over a decade ago. It's not piracy they're fighting, it's the market which is trying to get rid of unnecessary transaction costs. Piracy is just a ruse.

Let me be a customer

[ccguy]

I often download the first season of TV shows, and then buy the blu-ray of the rest - which I have to ship from a different continent because they won't sell them in my country. Well, they often don't air the TV shows here (in any channel), and of course web access is country restricted.

So I go out of my way to pay. If you still think I'm a pirate, fuck off.

Re:First to say

[kj_kabaje]

I believe that's called a lie of omission... still perjury in a court of law.

This is nothing new

[rudy_wayne]

A while back I came across a copy of Modern Recording magazine (this was a trade magazine aimed at people who worked in recording studios) from 1981 and there was an article about "piracy" of music. In those days there were no personal computers or internet. The villain, according to the record companies, was the cassette tape recorder. People were borrowing albums from their friends and making a copy on cassette tape. So the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to the government and get some sort of law passed to halt this terrible crime (much like the MPAA tried to stop the VCR).

According ot the article, the RIAA study was shelved and never widely distributed because it revealed -- surprise -- that people who owned cassette tape decks bought an average of 75% more albums that people who didn't own any recording equipment.

Re:half agree

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Can't blame them really. They're experts at their job, and I'm sure their shareholders would agree, they're doing quite well at their job.

They hell I can't! If they were robotic automatons that were preprogrammed with the single goal of generating a metric fuckton of profit for their shareholders and that were lacking the free will to reevaluate their values, then you would be correct, I couldn't blame them.

However, the record companies are not run by robotic automatons. They are run by humans and, quite frankly, as human beings, they should have the cognitive capacity to understand complex mental abstractions such as morality, healthy social balance, empathy, and temperance. Trying to earn a profit is not a morally corrupt quest. Trying to earn a profit at the expense and livlihood of your fellow human beings, and at the disruption of the society that you, yourself, are part of is downright stupid, if not flagrantly evil.

So you bet your ass I can and will blame these lying, piss-poor pieces of shit that were raised with such a moral apathy that they hardly even resemble a shell of what a thinking, intelligent, contributing member of this species is.

You may think it is okay to be an apologist for sociopaths, but I, personally, hold my fellow human beings to higher standards than that if they are going to continue calling themselves human.