EU suppressed results of a study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537

by ABS • 9 years ago

174 38 9 years ago

andy_ppp3• 9 years ago

I’ve been thinking for a while what would happen and how much money Hollywood could make if they charged $1 for a 1080p film and $2 for 4k, no DRM, just a file download.

I think I’d probably spend a hundred dollars or more straight away if all films were there I loved. I think a lot of people would pay a small amount for each film too. Blurays at $20 is too much and I’ve no interest in physical copies.

frik• 9 years ago

It's the MP3 model (digital music file with no DRM), sure it would work for movies too.

I buy physical DVD & Blueray discs, as then I own the disc and can play it when I want.

BUT I avoid 4K Bluerays with their online-dongle.

I personally prefer buying over subscription based models (got burned several times).

mal808• 9 years ago

Some smaller record labels I follow sell their artists albums for around €10 to €15 with immediate download of high quality, DRM free mp3's, then a physical CD with stickers, etc, follow in the post. I like that model.

aidenn0• 9 years ago

You need a beefy machine to capture, but there are 4k capture cards that do work now. I use x264 in lossless mode at superfast and it can keep up on a ryzen 1700. You now own your movie again. You'll need an HDCP 2.2 stripper, but those aren't too hard to find (I got mine for $40 on amazon).

adekok• 9 years ago

I’ve been thinking for a while what would happen and how much money Hollywood could make if they charged $1 for a 1080p film and $2 for 4k, no DRM, just a file download.

Pretty much that model works well for Netflix.

I pay $10 or so a month. I don't watch 10 movies a month.

panic• 9 years ago

You don't own the movies you watch on Netflix, though—that's the critical difference.

BjoernKW2• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, Hollywood studios aren't run by entrepreneurs and businessmen but by lawyers.

They care more about upholding copyright laws and byzantine licensing systems than about generating revenue and turning a profit.

betterunix2• 9 years ago

The effort to maintain copyright is strategic. Hollywood is less concerned about the latest technological fads (streaming, apps, etc.) than about the longer-term impact the Internet will have on their entire business model. They have no idea how to make money in a world where exact duplicates of movies can be made using tools everyone has in their pockets.

Basically, like the rest of the copyright industries, the entire business model depends on copying requiring specialized industrial equipment. The Internet is an existential threat to that model because it is "flat" -- nothing in the technical standards of the Internet divides IP addresses into producers and consumers (for comparison, look at the standards for the cable system). Combined with the fact that a PC can run the same software as an "industrial grade" server, Hollywood et al. are facing a situation they cannot apply their business model to: one in which there are no centralized distributors they can be forced to pay for the right to distribute something.

Giving up a bit of short-term profit for the sake of protecting the long-term prospects of the industry is not so surprising. What I am more concerned with is the fact that politicians have sided with these particular industries, even though they have happily watched other obsolete business models die in the face of new technologies. The copyright industries have managed to convince everyone that their business model is in some way sacred and have co-opted governments in their strategic efforts.

rayiner2• 9 years ago

Less? The idea that an entire industry with several large competitors in it is just too stupid to realize that giving away their products for next to nothing with no DRM would make them more money is the height of wishful thinking.

Or maybe they should just adopt the web business model, where you don’t trade money for products like civilized humans but trade your sanity and privacy for “free” services.

andy_ppp3• 9 years ago

Well all of DVD and Blu-ray sales makes about $15bn per year and the App Store makes about $30bn, heavily weighted towards $2 or less content. I think the premise that there are industries that don't maximise profit should be of no surprise to people around HN.

criddell• 9 years ago

I'd rather see something like Spotify or Google Music for movies. I subscribe to Google Music and I have no idea if the music has DRM applied. I assume it does, but since it's never gotten in the way for me, I really don't care. I want that experience with movies.

I'm not interested in being a digital librarian. I just want access to the collections in a way that is inexpensive and close to universal.

At one time I thought Netflix was the answer, but they've carved out a much more interesting place to be - making excellent serialized television. They could drop all the movies from their collection and I would stay subscribed.

rhino3693• 9 years ago

Do you really think there are 15X as many people who would buy a move for a dollar than would pay 15 bucks?

user5994461• 9 years ago

Of course there are.

andy_ppp3• 9 years ago

Yes. See the App Store which has less compelling content (IMO) and makes twice as much as all DVD, Blu-ray and streaming.

_justpassingby_• 9 years ago

Yes. I would assume- based on the exponential nature of wealth distribution- that you would get exponentially more people willing to spend as the amount lowers.

tambienben• 9 years ago

Imagine if they took advantage of & adopted software platforms like popcorntime.

lttlrck• 9 years ago

I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and cost of storing hundreds of $1 downloads.

I’d watch a lot more movies on iTunes if renting was $1 a pop.

dTal• 9 years ago

They would make a bunch of money for a short while, which would then trail off rather badly as copies of the mainstream stuff became ubiquitous, which would also cannibalise all the other licensing deals they might have.

However they'd probably continue to turn a nice, steady, small income from long-tail stuff. Providing this stuff would become their core business, and they would turn from a mass-supply business to a low-margin archive.

Hoenstly, the whole thing is like watching the scifi short story "BUSINESS AS USUAL, DURING ALTERATIONS" in slo-mo.

supernumerary• 9 years ago

EU had to suppress the report. Because from their absolute point of view piracy harms sales. While the report argues that in fact it is now incorporated with a vanilla sales funnel - people who 'don't pirate' talk to people who 'pirate', and this 'boosts sales' ...

Ultimately, it seems pirated materials are 'free as in beer' ... and as the report concludes - in many cases, pirated films boost sales. To say nothing of the various personalities and corporate interests behind films for example that prosper from bare exposure, product placement, propaganda etc...

Incidentally, the same applies to software. I imagine by this time Adobe has a shadowy but no-less locked down funnel that teens enter when they first torrent and crack Photoshop...

Furthermore, it seems that the concept of piracy is fraught with mixed metaphors and improper comparisons, epitomized by the 'You wouldn't download a bear.' meme. These seem to be spawned by authority trying to leverage some moral sentiment without understanding the inter-relatedness of the cultural scene and the internet generally. Nevertheless this has created a general class of 'law-abiders' or 'normies' who might account for the people who ultimately purchase a product after being referred to it by a pirate.

ReverseCold• 9 years ago

Apple's offerings (Final Cut, Logic, etc) have no DRM, if someone has it they can just send the application over AirDrop or something and it will Just Work™

That doesn't stop people from buying it anyway after a while.

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

Appreciate a well-expressed comment, but I don't see what "the EU" as such has to gain by suppressing the report. The EU Commission is accused (in [1]) of withholding information in TFA, and I think the evidence is pretty thin here. As the linked post says itself

But the EU never shared the report possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem

Now there might very well be lobbying for changing EU "copyright law"; I don't know, and TFA doesn't tell either.

(Actually, there's no such concept as "copyright" in France/Germany and other European jurisdictions with Code Civil heritage. Is "copyright" a Common Law or US-only concept? I guess with Brexit the only Common Law jurisdiction left in the EU would be Ireland but IANAL).

[1] https://edri.org/did-the-eu-commission-hide-a-study/ Did the EU Commission hide a study that did not suit their agenda?

jcranmer• 9 years ago

I'm glad I'm not the only person that thought that the evidence of malicious suppression was lacking. The basic facts are that the EU Commission commissioned a study on the displacement of sales by piracy and did not report the results, and that this study found that piracy did not appear to have a significant impact (one way or the other) on sales. From these facts, the conclusion is reached that the EUC intended to show that piracy was killing sales, found otherwise, and buried it to save face, which sounds a lot more like projection of the reporter's viewpoints than logical reasoning to me.

It's not clear from the original tender (which I wouldn't call an "announcement") if the study was ever intended for general publication. It's also not exactly news that piracy isn't the cause of declining sales--there are studies a decade ago that you could have pointed to that would have debunked the "piracy is killing music/books/movies" trope.

Actually, there's no such concept as "copyright" in France/Germany and other European jurisdictions with Code Civil heritage.

Uhhh... Berne Convention disagrees with you. The only original common law signatory to the convention was the UK, and the main instigator of the convention was France. For all practical purposes, copyright in the Anglo-American sense is the same as the droits d'auteur in the French sense.

That-one-thing• 9 years ago

I will quote here from Julia Reda who got the report.

"At first I was willing to give the Commission the benefit of the doubt that the study had simply fallen through the cracks, since the responsible department underwent significant restructuring in 2014, after the study was commissioned.

However, now 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.

They also failed twice to meet the deadline for responding to my freedom of information request.

One cannot avoid the suspicion that the Commission intentionally suppressed the publication of publicly-funded research because the facts discovered were inconvenient to their political agenda."

Tl:dr Hidden on purpose to further their agenda.

EDIT: Sorry source. http://www.journalismonline.gr/eu-paid-for-a-report-that-con...

c3o• 9 years ago

Of course there is EU law on copyright, and it's currently undergoing highly contentious reform. The Commission is pushing for an extra "copyright" for news sites, designed to get Google and Facebook to pay EU publishers for reproducing tiny snippets of their articles when they link to them, as well as an obligation for internet platforms to scan all uploads for infringement.

EU Commission info page: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/copyright

MEP Reda's overview over the reform process: https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/

devmunchies• 9 years ago

See other recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

Divver• 9 years ago

I’m wondering if the study differentiated between analyzing the effect of piracy on large companies with big profit margins versus small companies with thin profit margins.

My conjecture is that piracy would have a stronger negative impact on the latter.

My guess is Piracy doesn’t hurt big blockbuster entertainment and software corporations much because of their corporate deals and large profit margins.

But if you limit the study to smaller mom-and-pop musicians/entertainers/actors/performers, small video game development studios, and other small software companies which have thin profit margins,

I think we’d see a noticeable negative impact caused by piracy.

Toboe• 9 years ago

Quality headline...

European Comission tries to hide study that piracy doesn't harm sales, is foiled by member of European Parliament.

* And technically it seems the study found it harms for Blockbuster movies, helps for games, does negligible harm for books and has no effect on music.

(Going by a German report on it[1])

[1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Auswirkungen-von-Rau...

shihab_shahriar• 9 years ago

I am from a 3rd world country, have been using all things pirated since my birth without ever blinking an eye. But still, I do realize this is morally wrong, and should be discouraged even if it doesn't directly harm sales.

EU suppressed results of a study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales

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