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Study: Piracy Doesn't Harm Digital Media Sales
r5r5 writes "European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies has published a study which concludes that the impact of piracy on the legal sale of music is virtually nonexistent or even slightly positive. The study's results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute for legal digital music and that a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchase websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting a complementary relationship between these two modes of music consumption. According to the results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites leads to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchase websites."
It's worth noting that this study only measured the effect of piracy on online purchases, not on revenue from physical formats.
the recording industries will simply stick their fingers in their ears whilst singing "nanananananana"
. .
Yes, but they also want to make sure you can't sell it later, and keep you from getting refunded by retaining the power to remove your license at any time.
EA wasn't out to stop pirates, they were out to manipulate and screw over the customers.
Don't spread the MAFIAA's FUD for them. File sharing is already legal. "File sharing" and "copyright infringement" are not the same thing.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
I'm not defending MAFIAA in any way, but just want to point out, that the study was conducted under circumstances when file sharing is illegal.
If it becomes legal, it may very well impact the sales in a negative way. Bottom line: interesting study, no practical applications.
This doesn't necessarily mean that sharing music should become legal, it just means that it shouldn't be life-ruiningly-illegal. Speeding is illegal, but if you get caught you just get a small fine and life goes on. They don't fine you more than 10x your yearly income and stick you with legal fees that could bankrupt CEOs.
Piracy's real effect on music sales is difficult to accurately assess. In classical economics prices are determined by the combination of the forces of supply and demand, but the participators in the digital market do not always follow the usual motives and behaviors of the supply and demand system. First, the cost of digital distribution has decreased significantly from the costs of distribution by former methods. Furthermore, the majority of the filesharing community will distribute copies of music for a zero price in monetary terms, and there are some consumers who are willing to pay a certain price for legitimate copies even when they could just as easily obtain pirated copies, such as with pay what you want vendors.
Another issue is that because some people, like many in China, illegally download music because they cannot afford to purchase legitimate copies, not every illegal download necessarily equates to a lost sale. This has some effect on music sales, but as Lawrence Lessig points out, there is wide asymmetry between the estimated volume of illegal downloading and the projected loss of sales:
“In 2002, the RIAA reported that CD sales had fallen by 8.9 percent, from 882 million to 803 million units; revenues fell 6.7 percent. This confirms a trend over the past few years. The RIAA blames Internet piracy for the trend, though there are many other causes that could account for this drop. SoundScan, for example, reports a more than 20 percent drop in the number of CDs released since 1999. That no doubt accounts for some of the decrease in sales... But let’s assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here’s the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent... So there is a huge difference between downloading a song and stealing a CD."
Don't spread the MAFIAA's FUD for them. File sharing is already legal. "File sharing" and "copyright infringement" are not the same thing.
Indeed. And there is a lot of music available which is either in the Public Domain, or under one of the Creative Commons licenses. For instance, excellent recent recordings of classical music were released as 320kbps MP3 and as lossless tracks, and these are explicitly in the Public Domain. Lots more (typically electronic & rock & metal & house, etc.) can be found at the Netlabels collections. MusOpen typically has classical music, and also has some PD or CC sheet music.
Share away, with these files. Upload, download, give away, stream, sell, whatever. And quite legally. Just about the only thing you can't do with Public Domain stuff is claim that you own the copyright, or that you act on behalf of the copyright owner. Either copyright has expired, or it was never copyrighted to begin with.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
... as I recall.
A few years ago I found a magazine article about music "piracy" from 1981. Back in those days most of the technology we use today didn't exist. Almost no one had a computer, there was no Internet (as we know it today), etc.
The villain back then, according to the RIAA was cassette tape recorders -- people were making tapes of their friends albums rather than buying them. So the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to Congress to convince them that they needed new laws to combat this terrible problem. But the report was shelved and never widely publicized because it showed that people who owned high end cassette decks, on average, bought 75% more albums than people who didn't.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.