The EU Suppressed a 300-Page Study That Found Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales - Sensationalist Headlines

[quote=gizmodo]The European Commission paid €360,000 (about $428,000) for a study on how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games, and movies. But the EU never shared the report—possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem. The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a [URL="https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf"]304[/URL][URL="https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf"]-page report[/URL] 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.” [/quote] [url]https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537[/url]

if you're going to pirate something, chances are you're doing it having to intention of buying it anyways tbh, or you don't have access to services better than piracy, or you don't have access to a product [editline]22nd September 2017[/editline] Lets not forget, that you can't count 100% of all downloads as a lost sale. That's not the reality, but businesses like the film and music industry want people to believe this because it sensationalizes it as something grander than something that simply exists.

what's funny is that the study cost more in tangible, physical euro bills than piracy ever did

Gizmodo sucks, didn't even read the shit they wrote. Fuck gawker. [Quote]In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. [B]That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect[/B] but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect[/quote] I mean I wouldn't be surprised if piracy had no effect but the study clearly doesn't have that conclusion according to the authors

One of the few things I've always disliked about the EU is the hard-on they get from going after piracy and other internet related things in general. They just can't give it a rest, even after countless studies showing that, hey, whatever it is you're trying to do, it has no effect.

To add, as bad as anyone can argue piracy is, the suppression of the internet required to truly stop it is a billion times worse, and even then it wouldn't stop it. The worst thing that could come out of piracy is the actions that would be required to stop it in the first place. Isn't that ironic?

The collateral damage anti-piracy methods does, is nowhere worth the uneffective results given. Especially a topic were the positive outweighs the negative that all countless research support. Piracy will always remain no matter the actions against it, because you simply can not fight information that wants to be free, in a society that constantly digitalizes each day. The industry must adapt, not the consumer, and take advantage of new marketing platforms like any other industry; and stop acting like special snowflake victims.

I don't understand suppressing studies like this, like, you're not making it any less true, and if the conclusion of the study is essentially "piracy doesn't damage sales", why would you suppress that, you could be saving money by not implementing DRM and other intrusive measures not only is this greed, but it's fucking idiotic greed

[QUOTE=Cloak Raider;52706753]I don't understand suppressing studies like this, like, you're not making it any less true, and if the conclusion of the study is essentially "piracy doesn't damage sales", why would you suppress that, you could be saving money by not implementing DRM and other intrusive measures not only is this greed, but it's fucking idiotic greed[/QUOTE] Because someone would lose contracts for millions of dollars, some slimy fucks like Denuvo for example. They all in cahoots.

How about a report regarding how much the legit consumer gets fucked over by anti-piracy measures, bet that won't surface either. One fucking word: Spore.

[QUOTE=Cloak Raider;52706753]I don't understand suppressing studies like this, like, you're not making it any less true, and if the conclusion of the study is essentially "piracy doesn't damage sales", why would you suppress that, you could be saving money by not implementing DRM and other intrusive measures not only is this greed, but it's fucking idiotic greed[/QUOTE] Because the conclusion isn't 'piracy doesn't damage sales', it's 'we didn't find anything statistically significant'. It's right there in the OP: [quote][B]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.[/B][/quote] The actual study basically just says 'all we know is that it doesn't seem to have an immediately obvious effect'. This is some shitty reporting but I'd expect no less from Gizmodo.

[QUOTE=catbarf;52707257]Because the conclusion isn't 'piracy doesn't damage sales', it's 'we didn't find anything statistically significant'.[/QUOTE] That's science-speak for 'piracy doesn't damage sales', mate. You're almost never gonna see a 100% definite answer in any sort of scientific report, because that's taking a major risk if your findings are ever disproved, even just slightly.

[QUOTE=Riller;52707433]That's science-speak for 'piracy doesn't damage sales', mate. You're almost never gonna see a 100% definite answer in any sort of scientific report, because that's taking a major risk if your findings are ever disproved, even just slightly.[/QUOTE] To further extend this, in a scientific report your conclusion is going to be something along the lines of "our hypothesis was supported" or "our hypothesis was not supported" Nothing is ever concrete in them outside of laws, and even then if we find new evidence to counter an existing law, then the law isn't concrete.

[QUOTE=catbarf;52707257]Because the conclusion isn't 'piracy doesn't damage sales', it's 'we didn't find anything statistically significant'. It's right there in the OP: The actual study basically just says 'all we know is that it doesn't seem to have an immediately obvious effect'. This is some shitty reporting but I'd expect no less from Gizmodo.[/QUOTE] As others have said, you're really focusing too much on the wording itself rather than on what it actually means. Of course they're going to say "We didn't find anything to support piracy harming sales" rather than "We've proved without a doubt that piracy will never and has never affected sales", because dealing in absolutes is not a good idea and there needs to be some room for change in case new evidence suggests otherwise later on. You aren't quite getting it if you think saying "nothing suggests piracy harms sales" means "we don't really know if piracy harms sales".

[QUOTE=zeromancer;52707218]How about a report regarding how much the legit consumer gets fucked over by anti-piracy measures, bet that won't surface either. One fucking word: Spore.[/QUOTE] Spore was made even better by the fact that staying logged into the EA online horseshit they forced on you wasn't even necessary. Because of the weird but awesome way Spore stores you and others' creations on your PC, getting a new creature in your game is literally as easy as saving a .png from the complete online library of creations on the Spore website. The only downside to pirating is that it adds some extra steps to populating your world, while removing all the drawbacks to buying the fucking thing normally.

Study finds out the sky is blue. Piracy as a means to avoid buying something even though you could buy those things just fine is one of the rarest reasons of why people pirate. Piracy is in many ways still a simple service problem. Draconic DRMs, poor digital availability, region limits and much more often just force people into getting the content they like over other means. Lack of demos when it comes to games as well. Gabe said it 6 years ago, it still holds up. [QUOTE]"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."[/QUOTE] A decent service like Steam (even with its basic DRM) probably helped more to combat piracy in the past years then any DRM every created. The music and movie industry sadly doesn't get it yet. Netflix and Co. changed a bit but even there you have to use VPNs or rely on piracy because content is still region locked and comes out months or years late in other places. They just continue to push for more draconic DRM, (4K BluRay on PC *cough*) and they wonder why people pirate those. In the example of 4K BluRay on PC I would basically need a new PC because of the Intel KabyLake only DRM or I could download a .mkv file that is 4K and it runs with a single click. Go figure.

[QUOTE=Riller;52707433]That's science-speak for 'piracy doesn't damage sales', mate. You're almost never gonna see a 100% definite answer in any sort of scientific report, because that's taking a major risk if your findings are ever disproved, even just slightly.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=FlakTheMighty;52707444]To further extend this, in a scientific report your conclusion is going to be something along the lines of "our hypothesis was supported" or "our hypothesis was not supported" Nothing is ever concrete in them outside of laws, and even then if we find new evidence to counter an existing law, then the law isn't concrete.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=nightlord;52707502]As others have said, you're really focusing too much on the wording itself rather than on what it actually means. Of course they're going to say "We didn't find anything to support piracy harming sales" rather than "We've proved without a doubt that piracy will never and has never affected sales", because dealing in absolutes is not a good idea and there needs to be some room for change in case new evidence suggests otherwise later on. You aren't quite getting it if you think saying "nothing suggests piracy harms sales" means "we don't really know if piracy harms sales".[/QUOTE] Come on guys, why don't you try actually reading the paper instead of just assuming it's confirming your preconceptions? Here, I'll make it easy and quote the conclusion: [quote]With regard to total effects of online copyright infringements on legal transactions, there are no robustly significant findings. The strongest finding applies to films/TV-series, where a displacement rate of 27 with an error margin of roughly 36 per cent (two times the standard error) only indicates that online copyright infringements are much more likely to have negative than positive effects. The insignificant estimates are mainly caused by people who illegally download or stream in large numbers. If the sample is limited to persons with at most 10 or 20 illegal transactions per year (illegal downloads or illegal streams), then the estimates are generally more negative and less insignificant, however not representative for the total population and therefore not presented. For audio-visual, the 27 per cent displacement is a net effect of displacement of cinema visits, legal downloads and physical purchases adding up to 50 per cent for illegal downloads and to 51 per cent for illegal streams on the one hand, and positive effects on legal streams and rentals adding up to 31 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. For each of these channels, none of the estimated effects is significant at the 1 per cent level, and hence the large error margin for the total effect is no surprise. Even though the 27 per cent displacement of this study is insignificant, the magnitude is similar to significantly estimated displacement rates of previous studies: 32 per cent reported by Leenheer and Poort (2014) and 27 per cent implied by the study of Hennig-Thurau (2007) if it is assumed that file sharing intentions will always result in file sharing behaviour. Rob and Waldfogel (2007b) even found a displacement rate of 74 per cent for students of 2004 and 2005 but this is perhaps neither representative for the rest of the population, nor for all films and for later years. Rob and Waldfogel further commented that when file sharing of films becomes easier, it is more likely that the average displacement rates decrease though the total displacement may be larger due to the increased volume of file sharing. The reason for decreasing displacement rates is that when file sharing is difficult, only people who expect many illegal downloads will invest time in file sharing. Whereas if file sharing is easier, many people will do so on occasion if that happens to be more convenient for that particular music track. Rob and Waldfogel also predicted that when file sharing of films becomes faster, more people will use this. As a result, Rob and Waldfogel predicted that increasing volumes of file sharing of films with smaller average displacement rates would become a serious threat for the film industry. For books, the number of people reporting illegal streams is negligible and hence only effects of illegal book downloads can be reported. Sales of printed books (offline or via a web shop) are displaced at an estimated rate of 73 per cent by illegal book downloads with an error margin of 79 per cent (two times the standard deviation). On the other hand, 100 illegal book downloads are estimate to induce 50 extra legal book streams. The net effect is uncertain, since the estimated displacement rate of 38 per cent has an error margin of 150 per cent (two times the standard error). Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU 149 For music, the overall displacement rate estimated in this study is zero. In particular, the displacement of physical sales (though with a large error margin) is compensated by a significant positive effect of illegal streams on live concerts. Rob and Waldfogel (2007b) and Barker and Maloney (2012) found significant displacement rates at 8 per cent overall, and 18 per cent with rapidly diminishing displacement rates for large numbers of illegal downloads respectively, both with 2004-2005 data. Since both studies exploited the panel structure of their data, their estimates are arguably less biased and more accurate. For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive because only free games are more likely displaced by online copyright infringements than not. The overall estimate is 24 extra legal transactions (including free games) for every 100 online copyright infringements, with an error margin of 45 per cent (two times the standard error). The positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by players getting hooked and then paying to play the game with extra bonuses or at extra levels. For assessing impacts of piracy, both the volumes and the displacement effects of piracy must be taken into account. For music the proportion of people using illegal channels is average compared to recent previous literature (see Chapter 6), and for the other type of creative content the proportions of illegal users is larger than in recent previous literature. For music, recent literature found generally small positive or negative effects of illegal online transactions, and the estimates of this study are in line with this. For films, recent studies generally found robust negative effects, while the negative effects in the analysis of this chapter have large error margins. Partly this is a shortcoming of having no data from different points of time, an issue that is addressed in the next chapter. But also, displacement rates tend to decrease for larger numbers of illegal transactions. For the subsample of respondents with large volumes of pirated content (over 20 CDs, films, books or games) displacement rates are estimated to be zero, and for the subsample of respondents with smaller numbers the displacement rates are generally larger and less insignificant. Since self-reported piracy volumes according to this study are higher than in previous studies, part of the explanation of the insignificant displacement rates in this study may be that piracy volumes have increased and displacement rates may truly have decreased. For books, downloading and streaming are still quite rare and illegal online transactions have high displacement rates compared to other content. If books follow the path of music and films, illegal downloads and streams will become more frequent, and the displacement rates will decline. Displacement rates for games have been little analysed in previous literature, but it is interesting that a study of Bastard et al. (2012) also indicate significant positive effects, suggesting that games have succeeded in turning illegal online transactions to their advantage by hooking up gamers and offering more levels / bonuses that are available only after paying. [/quote] tl;dr Movies seem harmed by piracy, music seems unaffected, games might be positively affected, books are irrelevant (for now), and all of this has such enormously high error margins that it's impossible to say anything conclusive. If you want to read into the methodology they acknowledge the sources of potential error in their estimates and explain why it's so hard to draw anything concrete on the subject. It's obviously not saying 'there's no evidence piracy affects sales' when they then have a follow-on section providing evidence that piracy affects film and TV. They're just responsible enough to qualify their conclusions as based on data with enough margin of error that they can't claim statistical significance.

[QUOTE=catbarf;52707766]Come on guys, why don't you try actually reading the paper instead of just assuming it's confirming your preconceptions? Here, I'll make it easy and quote the conclusion: tl;dr Movies seem harmed by piracy, music seems unaffected, games might be positively affected, books are irrelevant (for now), and all of this has such enormously high error margins that it's impossible to say anything conclusive. If you want to read into the methodology they acknowledge the sources of potential error in their estimates and explain why it's so hard to draw anything concrete on the subject. It's obviously not saying 'there's no evidence piracy affects sales' when they then have a follow-on section providing evidence that piracy affects film and TV. They're just responsible enough to qualify their conclusions as based on data with enough margin of error that they can't claim statistical significance.[/QUOTE] i get what you're saying from my perspective though, if it's inconclusive that piracy does damage, the correct approach would be to commission a deeper look/more studies into the impact, while releasing the study so that it can inform decision making if the study was legit, even if the conclusion was "this is really hard to judge", it should be released holding it back just furthers belief that these decisions regarding DRM are made with zero knowledge of the facts and statistics surrounding piracy, but with "common sense" i confess though that i didn't read the conclusion/abstract, so most likely took a stronger position than i otherwise would have done

[QUOTE=Cloak Raider;52708047]i get what you're saying from my perspective though, if it's inconclusive that piracy does damage, the correct approach would be to commission a deeper look/more studies into the impact, while releasing the study so that it can inform decision making if the study was legit, even if the conclusion was "this is really hard to judge", it should be released holding it back just furthers belief that these decisions regarding DRM are made with zero knowledge of the facts and statistics surrounding piracy, but with "common sense"[/QUOTE] That's fair, and I agree that that's in principle the right approach- even if the apparent conclusion is vague it's better to release it. I only take issue with the simplistic narrative that the study said piracy isn't harmful and the EU buried it because it opposed their agenda. Plenty of government-funded research ultimately goes nowhere for various reasons, one of the biggest being that there's not much incentive to widely publish and distribute government-funded research if it doesn't have any actionable purpose. And if there were a partisan anti-piracy interest involved, it seems odd that they would bury a paper that straight up says 'it looks like piracy harms the film industry significantly, and will only get worse if the popularity of piracy increases' (see third paragraph). I'm more inclined to believe it was apathy than deliberate suppression, but I could be wrong.

Sounds like you didn't even read my response, I didn't say anything was right or wrong :v:

I admittedly used to pirate quite a bunch, because convincing my parents to lend me their card to buy games was difficult, steam cards weren't a thing yet in the local game store, and purchasing new games on my own was limited to getting my hands on physical copies once in a blue moon. When I got my own credit card and started to make my own money I pretty much stopped pirating altogether because I found that not spending money on a game means I don't really commit to that game. I don't think I've [I]completed[/I] a game I've pirated in a decade, not without buying it at some point at the very least. The option of piracy isn't what makes me play less games. It's the increasing amount of pressure put on paying customers that does. How am I going to commit to a game by paying for it if the game is specifically tailored to bleed me of more money than it's worth, hiding extra content in redundant bundles and obscure DLC, forcing me to deal with intrusive DRM and always-online nonsense ?

If companies 1.) [B]made their shit available to buy[/B], 2.) stopped with the anti-consumer "you don't own your [x], we do" and "microtransactions in a $60 game with a $40 season pass with extra bits of $5 DLC you don't get from the season pass" bullshit, and 3.) (which is kind of an extension of 2) stopped pissing off their consumers with always-online, anti-tamper, anti-modification stuff that might result in media being broken in a decade, along with DRM for video files, I'd bet the current piracy rates would drop a bit. At a point, the experience is just outright better with a pirated copy. For example: FO4 is going to have its script extender broken every single time Bethesda adds more microtransactions to the main menu. With a pirated copy, updates breaking everything wouldn't be a concern. Another example: I was watching the first Avengers movie through Google Play with my girlfriend. No less than [I]three times[/I] I had to go refresh the page because it told me I wasn't authenticated or some bullshit. If I was just playing an .avi, it would've been perfectly smooth the whole way through. When I buy a game, I want to play it, and I want to do so however I want. When I buy a movie, I expect it to play all the way through the hour and a half I have allotted for it. [editline]a[/editline] And that's assuming I'm able to buy it at all. Like "Oh hey Jim, I just had a great idea to increase our revenue. Let's just not make it available! You want to watch Season 5 of Masterchef? Well, buddy, you're either waiting two days to get it from Amazon or you're torrenting the [I]fuck[/I] out of it." "Wow Ted, that's a great idea! Let's make sure the only season we have available on Hulu is the current one, and be absolutely sure to remove the previous season just as the new one starts so that if you're just getting into the series, you're pretty much screwed." :huh: [editline]a[/editline] And that example of not being able to buy something doesn't even take into account region locking.

I think it really depends on the medium as well. Movies and TV shows are usually a one-time experience and most people don't really rewatch the same movie more than once. So piracy negatively affects it, since it's "I've already seen it once why bother" Compared to games and music, where people do like to play/listen to it more than once, so there's more reason to later down the line eventually buy it.