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EU Paid For Report That Said Piracy Isn't Harmful -- And Tried To Hide Findings (thenextweb.com)
According to Julia Reda's blog, the only Pirate in the EU Parliament, the European Commission in 2014 paid the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys 360,000 euros (about $428,000) to research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content. The final report was finished in May 2015, but was never published because the report concluded that piracy isn't harmful. The Next Web reports: The 300-page report seems to suggest that there's no evidence that supports the idea that piracy has a negative effect on sales of copyrighted content (with some exceptions for recently released blockbusters). The report states: "In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally."
On her blog, Julia Reda says that a report like this is fundamental to discussions about copyright policies -- where the general assumption is usually that piracy has a negative effect on rightsholders' revenues. She also criticizes the Commissions reluctance to publish the report and says it probably wouldn't have released it for several more years if it wasn't for the access to documents request she filed in July. As for why the Commission hadn't published the report earlier, Reda says: "all available evidence suggests that the Commission actively chose to ignore the study except for the part that suited their agenda: In an academic article published in 2016, two European Commission officials reported a link between lost sales for blockbusters and illegal downloads of those films. They failed to disclose, however, that the study this was based on also looked at music, ebooks and games, where it found no such connection. On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales. That demonstrates that the study wasn't forgotten by the Commission altogether..."
On her blog, Julia Reda says that a report like this is fundamental to discussions about copyright policies -- where the general assumption is usually that piracy has a negative effect on rightsholders' revenues. She also criticizes the Commissions reluctance to publish the report and says it probably wouldn't have released it for several more years if it wasn't for the access to documents request she filed in July. As for why the Commission hadn't published the report earlier, Reda says: "all available evidence suggests that the Commission actively chose to ignore the study except for the part that suited their agenda: In an academic article published in 2016, two European Commission officials reported a link between lost sales for blockbusters and illegal downloads of those films. They failed to disclose, however, that the study this was based on also looked at music, ebooks and games, where it found no such connection. On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales. That demonstrates that the study wasn't forgotten by the Commission altogether..."
When the study doesn't fit the narrative, just bury it! If that isn't bias, what is?
Piracy does and can hurt legal revenue, but nowhere near as much as many seem to think. A more interesting study might be: "What hurts legal revenue more- piracy, or DRM + region locking + overly high prices + time-locking + scarcity + poor legal choices to obtain content?" Care to wager which it is?
vs.
As we all know, absence of proof is not a proof of the opposite. Indeed, the quoted report explicitly says:
I would not blame anyone for not publishing a study that's so inconclusive...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As a software developer, I've seen first hand the loss of sales when a cracked version of our software is released. A revenue drop of 75% is common.
This is not even relevant. If the creator does not want you to use his creation for whatever reason — or even without reason — you should not use it. Same goes for whatever strings he chooses to attach to it. If you find his position wrong/ridiculous/racist/profiteering/whatever, your only morally-acceptable recourse is to not use it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I I I TOLD YOU SO, i, i, told you so (back in 1998)
* cool story bro.
* blog it.
* defeasible reasoning
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Piracy, drugs, it's all the same. Research is ignored to uphold the basis for negotiated international agreements.
Could someone explain how the Witcher 3 that came without DRM protection was a big commercial success... Maybe the industry is missing something else...
Everybody knows that when you are paid to produce a report it should say what those that paid you want it to say. There are a dozen ways to say that piracy is evil without actually lying.
When I was young I pirated Civilization and Wing Commander I from a friend. Then I bought every new release afterward of both series because I loved them. I even bought Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret because of how much I loved Wing Commander. Origin System was just kicking ass in 1990s. I'm still waiting for Crusader 3: No Escape :(
How many people learned Photoshop because it was easy to pirate?
But I don't think the same applies to movies. I doubt there are a lot of people that pirated a movie and then bought the Blu-ray of that movie.
A Brittish kayaker was killed by pirates this week, so it is very clear that they do the most serious of harm.
To compare pirates to people who infringe copyright is a travesty which dishonors the real victims of piracy. It is the equivalent of Colbert calling Mitt Romney a murderer. Only Colbert isn't serious when he makes the accusation.
BeauHD's continued insistence on using the word pirate in lieu of copyright infringement in article after article reinforces the framing language desired by the MPAA and RIAA. It is used to demand harsh punishments for minor crimes. It is also indicative of the biases which tarnish the reputation of objective news reporting as a whole.
While what you said is correct that does not mean that the report has no value. They searched for evidence of harm and did not find any. This means that if there is any harm it is not visible in the places where they looked and so the report is useful in that the next search for harm clearly needs to look somewhere else. In addition, if piracy really does not cause any harm, then all such studies will show no evidence of harm and we need to see that in order to be able to conclude that in fact there might not be any harm being caused.
We use the same approach in physics when searching for evidence of new models. If we find nothing then we publish this result along with the areas where we looked and saw nothing. The next experiment then knows not to look there and to try a different approach that looks in a different area of the parameter space. If, after lots of searches, massive areas of parameter space are ruled out then at some point people start to think that the new model is probably not the way the universe works and theorists start to develop other ideas which is what is happening with something called Supersymmetry now which was once regarded as the most promising model to explain Dark Matter. None of this would happen if nobody published their unsuccessful searches.
Please remember that a computer is not to be used for telling jokes. When a child is born in a hospital it doesn't see the hospital as entertainment. Just as when a child first encounters a computer it does so with innocence believing the computer to be truthful.
Each copy is done by someone else, usually a lot of someone else's. Whether it's an illicit copy or not.
I bought 3 Lord Of The Rings extended versions disks sets at a pawn show for $5 each. Pissed me off as another pawn shop had them for $3. The movie studios lots huge on my sale today.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What if you recreate the research?
Musicians' earplugs aren't perfect but they are far better than the simple foam or gel earplug alternatives. I take them to every cinema I visit.
So, rule is "Blockbuster film? Use ear plugs". "Art house film? You might be able to keep your hearing without them."
Uhh, isn't that a very very large percentage of the movies people want to see?
They apparently didn't pay enough to get a real "study".
Do you have ESP?
Arrrrrr
Requiem for the American Dream
we are screwed i tell you!
Normally I'd say it's to make money, but if piracy isn't significant, then anti-piracy efforts are a waste of money and the resources should be spent on something profitable.
Thanks Juncker, Oettinger and you other filthy crooks, for killing Europe, one distrust at a time.
There should be a special jail for this lobby and mafia cesspool.
sorry, but she's very blunt at telling the story as she sees it.
Piracy does in fact hurt sales very much, but some people have the notion that, 'otherwise I would not have bought it anyway' is counting as not a missing sale. But it IS a missing sale, as you have consumed the content without paying for it. If you only downloaded it and didn't do anything with it, then that case can be considered not a lost sale, but if you download it and consume the content, then it IS a lost sale.
Piracy may not hurt larger companies as such, but for smaller companies it can mean death as all costs can't be recouped because only a small group of people actually bought it and the rest just pirated it. I've seen many companies go down by piracy.
Haven't they read the terrorist religious government warning that piracy is not a victemless crime?
If I discover a cure for cancer, don't market it, you separately discover the cure and do market it, than you have the market rights to the discovery.
Uh, dunno, most of them aren't worth the time watching even if someone payed you.
The "Academic Paper" was dishonest.
Cherry-picking some data and the drawing conclusions is simply dishonest.
It's like using only data from physically handicapped people and then conclude that humans cannot jump higher than 10cm...
If you separately "discover" the same cure they will sue you until your ears bleed because of the infringement on "their" chemical.
With the £350 million a week from the EU we will be able to commission and bury our own report.
Personally, I don't think rights ought to exist past the death of the creator, since they exist to keep him alive and once he dies, welp, that's all he wrote.
Which would encourage people to commit increasingly undetectable murders against authors in order to terminate their copyrights. To me, only reckoning the term from the date of publication is fair, as with patents.
This is not even relevant. If the creator does not want you to use his creation for whatever reason — or even without reason — you should not use it.
How can I do so when shops selling the necessities of life force me to use it? By entering a grocery, I am exposed to the music that the shop has licensed to play using revenue from my grocery bill. And from that moment of "access" until my death, I am barred from writing a song that's substantially similar to what was playing at the time.
In many countries $10 is a lot of money, a significant portion of their monthly income.
Balassa-Samuelson theory holds that a country's exchange rate is primarily determined by the productivity of its tradable goods sector, as opposed to local goods such as restaurant food or local services such as haircuts. Thus a country whose currency is that undervalued can make its currency more valuable by becoming more efficient at producing products for export.
Just think about all the poor hard-working sailors who were fed to the sharks by bloody pirates. Piracy still exists in the 21st century and it is hardly harmless.
So Mr. Libertarian, perhaps you can tell me why you're choosing to defend a government-granted monopoly here. Because from the outside it seems like you're too busy worshiping Mammon to pay attention to the many ways that our copyright law conflicts with your principles. Even if we accept the fiction that you retain some property interest in a copy which I make with my own labor and materials, the concept of criminal copyright is still dubious. Also, having infringement (which should fundamentally be a civil offense) be policed and investigated by the federal government is in essence Big Government regulating what you can and cannot say. Aren't we against that?
Your fundamental problem is this:
Jefferson also points out that stable ownership exists solely by collective agreement: the natural order of things is that something is not your possession without it is within your physical control. However, while it's clear that government-granted monopolies are not consistent with your philosophy, we acknowledge that when your principles run afoul of the real world that you are willing to compromise them and call it pragmatism, so let's examine the actual problem that copyrights purport to solve. The fundamental issue is one of pricing and information: creators cannot know in advance how popular their work might be, and so cannot price it accurately when selling their works to a publisher. If you happened to write a bestseller, the value of that popularity would be captured by the publisher, not the author. Thus, to encourage the creation of new works, we have a system in which the original creator is granted a property interest in subsequent copies. This system is not in any sense necessary, and the negative consequences of this monopoly power can be argued to outweigh the benefits.
Fortunately, there are also other models for this. Patronage and commissioned works have enabled artists to create masterworks for centuries. Both have flourished on the Internet. Both pay-what-you-want models and the study referenced in TFA suggest that profits are possible even if many people choose not to pay for content. Also, in lowering the difficulty of self-publishing content to a negligible consideration, the Internet has removed much of the need for copyright in the first place (in addition to making it effectively obsolete).
There is no strict need to choose one model over the other: if one artist wishes to work for a salary and another chooses PWYW, it should be their own concern. I don't see any particular reason for the government to be involved in content creation in any way beyond contract enforcement, but I would certainly listen to an argument for a government-granted monopoly of an extremely limited duration. I would be somewhat dumbfounded hearing such from a libertarian, however.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Why "consume" and not "view"? Why "content" and not "work"?
Anyway, find me a shop serving the U.S. market where I can purchase a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South or the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, and I'll consider your point of view more valid.
Its very simple
You steal something, you DIE
DIE DIE DIE
That's funny, because I signed up for moviepass largely so I could see the big blockbusters for only a couple bucks apiece in the theater. (assuming 3-4 movies/month, which I think is the minimum I'll use it.)
Medicines are patented, you twat. It's an entirely different set of rules.
If I want to see something, I pay close to $20 CAD to watch it in comfortable seats with a beer in my hand.
I don't even bother pirating. If it's not worth paying for, I don't watch it.
So for many people like me, I'd say this study is even a bit too harsh on piracy. The reality for many of us is that we are simply not interested in your "save the cat" garbage plots.