It found that most things weren’t affected.
Look, Piracy is one of those things everyone does to some degree or another. I’m pretty sure everybody has at least one “illegal” mp3. Probably Metallica because Lars Ulrich got pretty pissy about it and you did it out of principal just to stick it to him. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, hey, I know what it’s like to plan out a week’s worth of meals in dollar store ramen.
So it’s interesting that in 2013 the EU paid for Dutch organization Ecosys to perform a study of the effects of piracy on sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. Shelled out €360,000 (roughly $430,000) to do it, too. And then they never published the results. Well, that’s not entirely true; they published the finding that blockbuster movies shown in theaters suffer from it. Specifically, that every ten downloads equates to around 4 fewer theater views.
The information might well have rotted away were it not for EU parliamentarian Julia Reda. She submitted a freedom of information request this July, and after being stalled twice, finally got hold of the study’s findings. The verdict? As she states on her blog:
With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales.
This isn’t terribly surprising; while other media is usually fair in its pricing, going out to catch a flick has gotten prohibitively expensive in recent years. And aside from that, most people that pirate media either do it to determine whether they should support the product, or because they don’t have the money to do so in the first place. Naturally, in such cases, piracy doesn’t affect sales either way because in the former the sale is hypothetical in the style of Schrödinger’s cat, and in the latter it didn’t exist to begin with.
You can probably come to your own conclusions about why the EU didn’t actually publish the study. The interesting part is, around the time Ms. Reda’s request went through, they decided to release the study anyway:
We understand that the Commission says that it is a complete coincidence that its decision to publish the study, a year and a half after it was finished, happens to coincide with Ms. Reda’s freedom of information request,
So, while you really shouldn’t engage in piracy as a general rule, it’s not exactly destabilizing the industry (in the EU). And if you’re Chinese you probably leave that Jolly Roger hoisted 100% of the time. So, I don’t know… maybe just keep it to a minimum, I guess?
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