Piracy 'Warnings' Fail To Boost Box Office Revenues, Research Says (torrentfreak.com)

A new academic study shows that graduated response policies against file-sharers fail to boost box office revenues. From a TorrentFreak report: The empirical research, which looked at the effects in various countries including the United States, suggests that these anti-piracy measures are not as effective as the movie studios had hoped. [...] Thus far there has been very little research on the topic but a new study, published by Dr. Jordi McKenzie of Sydney's Macquarie University, suggests that these "strikes" policies don't boost box office revenues. For his paper, published in the most recent issue of the journal 'Information Economics and Policy,' McKenzie looked at opening week and total box office revenues for 6,083 unique films released between 2005 and 2013. Using a variety of statistical analyses, he then measured the impact of the graduated response systems and related policies in six countries. In addition, another ten countries were included as a control measure. The overall conclusion based on thousands of data points is that these anti-piracy policies have no significant impact on box-office income.

Comments

News Flash

[bfpierce]

Preventing people from getting your movies for free does not in fact make them better able to afford your movies, or make it seem more worth it to those who can.

people are tired of recycled movie plots

[FudRucker]

99% of movies has the same schema portrayed in various backdrops & settings, you have a protagonist battling an antagonist over either a princess or a treasure, and that is what movies are, it is the same old shit over & over & over again, it never changes and people are not wanting to spend money to see the same old schema with just different costumes

Wow shocked

[DarkOx]

The not so subtle suggestion you think a large portion of your patrons are no good criminals or ignorant boobs that need to be lectured at over and over again does not make them want to cooperate or cause them to embrace your way of thinking?

Wow I am totally shocked! Maybe if they were a little less in your face about it, did not threaten you jail they'd get more buy in. That and they need to stop pushing the obviously false equivalence with physical theft. Only the most radical intellectual property proponents consider that remotely equivalent. They'd find a lot more allies among the general public if they stopped clutching the pearls quite so hard. Many people myself included agree we need some copyright and intellectual property protections. Where we don't and won't agree is that it has to be FOREVER or that we need armed FBI shock troops kicking in doors and shooting peoples dogs because they copied a DVD once. Which I realize does not happen in minor cases like that but you'd sure imagine that it does after watching some of those piracy warnings and propaganda shorts they put in front of movies now.

I don't know about others but the response those things engender in me is, "These guys are nasty bullies, I don't like bullies so I don't care what happens to them, best of luck to pirates." Which is a simplistic, non intellectual response that when I sit down and think about the issues careful I realize isn't really right, but they are making an emotional appeal and so they trigger an emotional reaction; just not the one they want.