EU Paid For Report That Said Piracy Isn't Harmful -- And Tried To Hide Findings (thenextweb.com) 128
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..."
bury it! (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?
Re:bury it! (Score:5, 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.
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>"I'm sensitive to high volume sound [...]. 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."
Yep. Theaters think that LOUDER = more impressive or higher quality or more "experience." It is nothing of the sort. I take musician earplugs with me everywhere and I must use them almost always in theaters to protect my hearing and get the volume tolerable. I sprung for expensive silicone ones now which are quite co
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Irrelevant (Score:1, Troll)
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.
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Wrong; when it is published for public consumption and on sale it has been made public (with the intention of individual profit). Their individual profit no longer encompasses the scope of the collective experience. The library of congress is just that, a library. Fair Use is currently being restricted unethically with DRM, so piracy gives the immediate "and legal" recourse against technological blockades which have overstepped their license from the government. We CAN figure out how to legally access your
Re:It isn't their labor. (Score:1)
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Only very slightly - new heights are inevitably reached by standing on the shoulders of giants.
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...he shouted, demanding the imaginary walls around Happy Birthday and I Have A Dream torn down.
Christ, they have you good. You don't even know what you're defending.
The wall around Happy Birthday was torn down because it was already in the public domain and the copyright claims were false. The Author of "I have a Dream" would probably be appalled about how his heirs have used it.
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Yep. It is now yours — because the creator sold it to you. It is now yours — and you are entitled to control, who sits in it.
A composer can (or ought to be able to) sell rights to a song just as well — and/or will it to his children, etc.
His right...
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Access to information that the creator is willing to share. You have no right to receive any information from me.
True, you always have the right to keep your information secret.
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Re:Irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
The courts decided that there is no natural right to intellectual property in the common law back in the mid 18th century when the first copyrights ran out and fell into the public domain.
Copyright is an invention of the legislatures (or writers of the Constitution in the USA) for one purpose, to advance learning (arts and sciences in the US Constitution) by granting a monopoly for a limited time.
It is not real property and all current works are heavily based on others works.
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His right...
Not true: for example in Africa, patents have been cast aside in the early 2000's not because live saving drugs weren't available, but because they were too expensive. As a result, drugs are now a lot cheaper in Africa and other poor areas through several programs.
Let's not forget that intellectual property (patents and copyright both) is a fiction. A fiction that we allow to exist for one single purpose: our society.
As soon as we feel that intellectual property harms society, it will be cast aside. And of
Copyrights (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org]. Also, having infringement (which should fundamentally be a civi
Promoting the hitman industry (Score:2)
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.
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"If the creator does not want you to use his creation for whatever reason â" or even without reason â" you should not use it."
If the creator does not want you to use his creation for whatever reason -or even without reason, all he has to do is not making it... ahem... PUBLIC.
Once it's public, it's public.
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And how does this fit in with discrimination laws? Isn't refusing to sell in one country but not another a form of racial discrimination?
If you sell something, you should sell it under the same terms and at the same cost to anyone who wants it.
If you discriminate against me (by refusing to sell, or by imposing ridiculous terms not imposed on others) then i refuse to pay for your content. If you think i'm unworthy to have your content then i will obtain it by other means simply to spite you.
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>"Isn't refusing to sell in one country but not another a form of racial discrimination?"
No it is not. It might not be nice, it is irritating, and often seems unfair, but it is not racial discrimination.
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Ah, this is so cute.
Copyright is an artificial, government backed monopoly on the publication and distribution of a "protected" work .
You are not assured of any money whatsoever. Ever. The LGP edition of Ballistics from Grin, SE proved that out to me. Even if there wasn't the 5-10k units of pirated versions on The Pirate Bay out there, the thing probably wouldn't have been much more sold for Linux.
Not because of the Linux market's "small". I know better. You appear to not.
Not because of the piracy, th
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> Do you have IP, which is to say, creative works protected by Copyright?
We all do. Almost everything original you write down is automatically protected by Copyright. Every single picture you take, with very minor exceptions, is protected by Copyright. Every answer on stackoverflow. Every nontrivial comment on any social site. Pretty much all of the Tweets that are full-length. Etc.
The widely spread myth is that Copyright is something special, only applicable to works made with a "purpose". It's not, and
Tainting the public with access to a work (Score:2)
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.
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When the study doesn't fit the narrative, just bury it! If that isn't bias, what is?
Well, I tend to agree, but I also think that before we get up in arms, we should try to understand this in a wider context. This is in fact something that has been in the news several times recent years - not about piracy, but about politicians not following the advice of their own experts. Most notoriously, the furore about David Nutt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt), who was dismissed as a government advisor for criticising the UK drugs policy. He was IMO 100% right in his criticism, but I think
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When the study doesn't fit the narrative, just bury it! If that isn't bias, what is?
When a study produces no statistically significant result, publishing it will likely make the media spin it in the wrong direction.
I can see both cases here. The media and public have enough problems with understanding statistically significant studies, let alone those which aren't. That said, the study was paid for by pubic funds, so it should have been published on those grounds alone.
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rubbish blockbusters? Formulaic re-boots/re-hashes? Copycat me too genre films...
"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" (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.
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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...
Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" (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.
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There is a difference between "inconclusive" and "no conclusion". The first is that you have looked and there is no difference and the second is that you not have looked (or not enough data was available)
So in this case if the MAFIAA says that there is a difference, you can say "Bo, there is not". In the latter you would have to say "Yo
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As a European, I'd rather like to think that if half a million euros of our money is spent on anything that I'd at least see the outcome of it. Hell, if they spend half a million euros taking a shit, I'd expect some cut-price compost to be available somewhere.
Re:"Not" vs. "no evidence of yes" (Score:4, Informative)
the $428 million euros spent investigating the harm of piracy?" certainly has a conclusion.
The conclusion being that you're off by 3 orders of magnitude. We're talking about Euros, not lire.
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Distinction without difference.
In the context, they are synonyms. The very title says "report that said piracy isn't harmful" — yet another way to state exactly the same thing.
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"In a Slashdot post that said mi ( 197448 ) had no clue how to pleasure his girlfriend."
There, it was SAID, but not PROVEN.
Search for and Not Found (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Bingo! Not sharing that you found nothing means you're trying to hide things...
It is a requirement, though not often followed in any endeavor these days, to show your "homework" for a given conclusion or set thereof.
Doesn't matter if you're talking a Law, or a bit of Physics research.
Hiding things or discounting them because they don't provide you conclusive answers is not science, law, or the like- it's merely religion in other clothing.
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That's true, there's quite a bit of evidence that piracy increases sales.
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What's so inconclusive about it?
The thesis is "Piracy has a displacement effect on legitimate sales."
The results could not find evidence that the thesis was true, with the limited exception of "recent top films".
They couldn't verify the thesis, so doesn't that mean the thesis is false? And even if the thesis is false, doesn't that at least strongly imply that its antithesis is true?
I think there's other ways of criticizing the study, like their measurement methodologies -- how do you measure the displaceme
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It is very difficult to prove that things don't exist. Like a correlation between piracy and sales. For example, there can be a correlation in a different way that was not looked for. Perhaps there is a time delay. Perhaps more people play a game, but are not in a hurry to get the game.
Bullshit (Score:1)
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.
Pick any of these valid responses (Score:2)
* cool story bro.
* blog it.
* defeasible reasoning
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Hey, maybe we could slashdot his store and make him sell out :)
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If your game is available on Steam, you might see the difference.
I didn't buy a single game in a shop in the past 10 years. Despite buying 2-3 games a month. For none of them I have any kind of medium. The reason why I buy them? It's done with a mouse click.
Not unlike downloading a copy, ya know...
It's not the 10 bucks. I wipe my ass with 10 bucks. It's driving to the goddamn store, looking for a parking spot for half an hour, standing in line to pay the game for another half hour and then drive back home.
T
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I don't pirate games (i very rarely play games)... But i do pirate movies and tv shows, and simplicity is the reason there too.
I travel a lot, i can obtain pirate movies and shows wherever i go whereas all the streaming services i've seen will discriminate against me for travelling to a different country.
I can download them to my laptop instead of streaming, which means i can let it download over night on a slow connection and watch the following day.
Because i can download, i can put the file on my laptop,
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Simplicity IS the reason. Along with usability.
The last time I came really close to actually copying a game again was when the "always online" bullshit hit us. Remember? When you bought a game and couldn't play it because the makers' servers were overloaded while the people who cracked the game could play it?
Instead I said "fuck this" and played SimCity 3000 instead. In hindsight, it's better than the crap EA pushed out as the most recent incarnation anyway.
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Perhaps LAN parties attract a particular kind of a pirate and you suffer from selection bias.
My anecdote: last time I was at a LAN party was in high school quarter of a century ago. Games back then were priced well out of the range of what a high schooler could afford in Eastern Europe. These days I don't pirate for the simple reason that it makes 0 sense: it costs me more in my time to pirate than to get a legal download. If need be, I'll make an "illegal" copy through a HDCP stripper and watch it in the f
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And where are you living?
In many countries $10 is a lot of money, a significant portion of their monthly income.
People don't have $4000 computers, they have a computer that might have been worth $4000 10 years ago.
Because of the older hardware, they will be playing older games, usually cracked ones.
Balassa-Samuelson theory (Score:2)
In many countries $10 is a lot of money, a significant portion of their monthly income.
Balassa-Samuelson theory [wikipedia.org] 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.
Drug Policy (Score:1)
Piracy, drugs, it's all the same. Research is ignored to uphold the basis for negotiated international agreements.
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Cool story, bro.
Huh? No, I'm not trolling, that's the answer to why it was a success. That and the fact that you could easily buy it online. Give people what they want, demand a reasonable price and make it easy to buy.
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Exactly. Witcher was a freaking awesome value for the money, and it was done by real craftsmen and artists, not some corporate slaves who're just about ready to jump off a bridge. You can really tell whether the team working on a game enjoys themselves or not. Most of them seemingly don't.
The consultants will never work again (Score:2)
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.
Depends on the type of piracy (Score:3)
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.
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Honestly, when you see a move that sucks, the $0.00 fee of entry makes it much more palatable.
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Someone gave me a shitty video CD copy of Lord of the Rings, wife loved it and bought it and all the sequels and dragged me to the theatre a couple of time to watch it.Probably at least a couple of hundred bucks the studio, distributors etc made from that one pirated copy.
We almost always buy used (a dollar a DVD at the local thrift store) and those are the only 2 times I've gone to a movie in a long time.
I'm also pretty sure I've seen studies that show pirating is a net benefit for sales, though these stud
Tell that to the Kayaker... (Score:1)
A Brittish kayaker was killed by pirates this week [nypost.com], 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 [youtube.com]. 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
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Nobody think media pirates and pirates are remotely similar. It's about as sensible a correlation as horses and seahorses.
But even if they did, pirates in the public perception are romantic figures - The Dread Pirate Roberts; Jack Sparrow; even the villains like Captain Hook have charisma.
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Yep. Piracy is usually a criminal offense. Copyright infringement is usually a civil matter.
I removed money from corporate pockets today (Score:3)
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.
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Would you have bought them at full price? No? Then they didn't lose anything on the sale.
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Not to hear them whinge about it. Each used sale takes money away from them in their own whines and words. Because if they could keep you from buying the used copy, they could sell you the new one (If I'm disinterested in spending the money, no, you wouldn't- but they don't see things that way...)...
Here's an example of the thinking there...and a study that shows how dangerous the thinking actually might be... [wired.com]
with some exceptions for recently released blockbu (Score:2)
Uhh, isn't that a very very large percentage of the movies people want to see?
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Uh, dunno, most of them aren't worth the time watching even if someone payed you.
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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.)
LOL (Score:2)
They apparently didn't pay enough to get a real "study".
Arrrrrr (Score:1)
Arrrrrr [youtube.com]
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What is their agenda? (Score:1)
not so much.. (Score:2)
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
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You're completely and utterly wrong. Your argument literally makes no sense.
Whether something is viewed or not makes no difference to whether it was a lost sale. I could watch or not watch a pirated film that I was never going to buy and I would still never have bought it.
The premise of your argument is that if someone was to watch something then they would ALWAYS have bought it, but that's just obviously not true.
It's only a lost sale if the act of pirating content led to someone not making the purchase wh
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And that's exactly what wrong with YOUR view. If you consumed the content you should have payed for it, it's just like a shopowner who got stuff lifted, he has to write off the stolen good as the shoplifter has 'consumed the content'.
So you watch which means you didn't pay even though you should have (if you didnt' enjoy it or not doesn't make any difference).
It's about you having consumed the content, if you didn't consume the content it's not a lost sale, if you did consume it is, as you should have paid
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"And that's exactly what wrong with YOUR view. If you consumed the content you should have payed for it, it's just like a shopowner who got stuff lifted, he has to write off the stolen good as the shoplifter has 'consumed the content'."
But that's a different thing "Should have paid for it" is NOT the same as "Would have paid for it". It's a simple concept, and morality is subjective.
Some might reasonably argue that not paying money to organisations that have been willing to pay millions to lobby governments
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Find me a shop selling these (Score:2)
Why "consume" and not "view"? Why "content" and not "work"? [gnu.org]
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.
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Who cares (Score:2)