The EU Suppressed a 300-Web page Examine That Discovered Piracy Doesn’t Hurt Gross sales
The European Fee paid €360,000 (about $428,000) for a research on how piracy impacts the gross sales of copyrighted music, books, video video games, and films. However the EU by no means shared the report—probably as a result of it decided that there isn’t a proof that piracy is a serious downside.
The Dutch agency Ecory was commissioned to analysis the influence of piracy for a number of months, finally submitting a 304-page report to the EU in Could 2015. The report concluded that: “Normally, the outcomes don’t present strong statistical proof of displacement of gross sales by on-line copyright infringements. That doesn’t essentially imply that piracy has no impact however solely that the statistical evaluation doesn’t show with adequate reliability that there’s an impact.”
The report discovered that unlawful downloads and streams can truly increase authorized gross sales of video games, in response to the report. The one unfavourable hyperlink the report discovered was with main blockbuster movies:“The outcomes present a displacement fee of 40 p.c which signifies that for each ten current prime movies watched illegally, 4 fewer movies are consumed legally.”
The research has solely come to mild now as a result of Julia Reda, a Member of the European Parliament representing the German Pirate Social gathering, posted the report on her personal blog after she bought ahold of a replica via an EU Freedom of Info access to document request.
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The European Digital Rights organization suggested in a weblog publish that the total contents of this report was deliberately suppressed, pointing to a 2016 academic paper by two Fee officers. The paper, “Film Piracy and Displaced Gross sales in Europe,” solely talked about the a part of the Ecory report that highlights the connection between piracy and blockbuster movie misplaced gross sales, and excluded the opposite findings of the report. Moreover, the paper didn’t even disclose that the cited info got here from Ecory’s research.