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EU Paid For Report That Said Piracy Isn't Harmful -- And Tried To Hide Findings (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the brushed-under-the-rug dept.

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..."

6 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. bury it! by markdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:bury it! by war4peace · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I stopped pirating games a decade ago, when they became legally available in my country at normal prices.
      Sadly, the same is not valid for music I listen to, and movies were always locked down for home viewing. I'd gladly pay for a virtual cinema ticket to be able to watch recently-released blockbusters from home. I'm sensitive to high volume sound and cinema "3D" with those plastic glasses give me severe headaches - so no cinema for me. I gave it another shot recently, went to watch "valerian and the city of a thousand planets" and came back with tinnitus and a 2-day headache.

      Lack of options force me to access torrent sites, where I can find blu-ray quality movies with surround sound and subtitles. If I could pay-per-view for the same quality, I would. But I can't. oh and there's also the "the movie isn't available in your country" bullshit, because some shady distributor signed exclusivity, even though they don't offer streaming service whatsoever.

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  2. "Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" by mi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the report concluded that piracy isn't harmful.

    vs.

    seems to suggest that there's no evidence that supports the idea that piracy has a negative effect on sales

    As we all know, absence of proof is not a proof of the opposite. Indeed, the quoted report explicitly says:

    That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect

    I would not blame anyone for not publishing a study that's so inconclusive...

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you spent half a million dollars of public money to get get a report, you should publish it even if it was inconclusive. The question of whether piracy is harmful may not yet have a conclusion, but the question of "what was the result of the $428 million euros spent investigating the harm of piracy?" certainly has a conclusion.

    2. Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Huh? Why?.. What would the publishing of an inconclusive study have achieved?

      I don't know if you are aware, but it is customary to publish inconclusive scientific studies. There is useful information in the final report, even if there is no conclusion. That's why the report exists in the first place. It probably shows things like their methodology, what data they collected, etc, and might be useful in future studies if even to avoid making some of the same mistakes. Sometimes people even go back to old "inconclusive" studies and find useful data in them after the initial flawed analysis.

      Was the analysis flawed? Was the data truly inconclusive? No one would ever find out if it's not published.

      And, BTW, TFA alleges attempts to "bury" the study, but offers no evidence to support the allegations...

      The author released the correspondence with the European Commission trying to gain access to the document and being given the run around. Is that "burying" the report? I guess it depends on your personal definition of "burying". But it seemed pretty clear to me that they were not enthusiastic about making this report public. I don't know that I would assume the motivation is deception (e.g. maybe they are unenthusiastic about everything), but I don't think the author's allegation is ridiculous, given the evidence she has presented.

  3. Search for and Not Found by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.