EU suppresed study that found piracy dosen't harm sales
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NEWS ANALYSIS
The EU Suppressed a Study That Found
Piracy Doesn' t Harm Sales
new macro as 18
The European Commission paid , aoo (about , 000) for a study on
how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games,
and movies. But the EU never shared the because it
determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem.
The Dutch firm Emory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy
for several months, eventually submitting a 305 page report to the EU in
May 2015. The report concluded that: "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."
The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost
legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the
report found was with major blockbuster films:" The results show a
displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top
films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally."
The study has only come to light now because Mia Rem, a Member of the
European Parliament representing the German Pirate Party, posted the
report on her personal biog after she got ahold of a copy through an EU
Freedom of Information access to document re aest.
Estimating displacement rates
of copyrighted content in the
Report
Julia Reda tts
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What the @EU_% xmission found out about #
Infringement but Forgor to tell us / 201 T/ 09/ secret
2 38 PM _ Sep 20, 2017
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The European Digital Rights organization suggested in a biog post that the
full contents of this report was intentionally suppressed, pointing to a
2016 academic paper by two Commission officials. The paper, "Movie
Piracy and Displaced Sales in Europe," only mentioned the part of the
Emory report that highlights the relationship between piracy and
blockbuster film lost sales, and excluded the other findings of the report.
Additionally, the paper didn' t even disclose that the cited information
came from Emory’ s study.
European Digital Rights, Techdirt]
new THE AUTHOR
Jennings Brown
Senior editor and reporter at Gizmodo
Email .riveter {Posts
Mimi l leanings ?‘ 1. M
W 37
Is the thought the people who pirate media would be unlikely to pay for the content
anyway even if that was the only alternative?
a -iepu
Bingo!
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