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..."

Comments

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hardly an outlier.

While it's certainly true that piracy doesn't always affect sales, many pirates are bald face liars. So trusting them to tell you why, what, and when they pirate is a fools' game. Basically, a lot of them are just highly unethical and will do literally anything they can get away with. All logic and reasoning that comes from their mouths is all just excuses and meant to muddy the waters.

And I say that as someone who despises DRM/copy protection. Unfortunately, as long as we have such highly unethical people in our society these things will be necessary.

As a flawless example, I used to do LAN parties on a regular basis. I knew a ton of pirates from that time in my life and they always claimed they were dead flat broke and whether copy protection existed or not would not affect whether they would pay for a game or not. Note that many of the computers there were like $4,000 and many of them drove sports cars worth about $50,000 to $100,000. Meanwhile at the time, a number of the games we played were about $10 to $20. Not all but a lot. Which makes their word very suspicious. However, the nail in the coffin was the day when the pirates that attended discovered they didn't have a crack for a particular game we were planning on playing. All of them immediately left the LAN party to BUY THE FUCKING GAME! There wasn't even a moment's hesitation.

But ya... We're supposed to take these notorious liars word that you know... They'd give us if the money if they weren't totally broke. And piracy doesn't affect sales. Sure sure.

Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes"

[mi]

you should publish it even if it was inconclusive.

Huh? Why?.. What would the publishing of an inconclusive study have achieved? It was not paid for from some secret account, it was possible to obtain it — indeed, TFA explicitly says, it was obtained by perfectly legal means...

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