A study commissioned by European Commission has found out that piracy has no real impact on sales, but the study never saw the light of the day.
It is usually believed that piracy hurts the sale of copyrighted materials, which is not really the case. Over the years, there have been quite a large number of studies which has reached the same conclusion, and that was piracy has no heavy effect on sales. It sounds strange, but that is the truth.
Companies have chosen to ignore this information, and it is easy to understand why. This sounds like the logical thing to imagine, but it’s not backed by science. Nevertheless, the European Commission wanted to know the effect on copyrighted material and has ordered a study. The results were never made public.
Keeping in line with all of the studies conducted before, the investigation performed by the Dutch company Ecorys has revealed the same thing, with a single exception. Recently released blockbusters could be affected somewhat. The study was conducted in 2015, and has remained buried until now. It is however not clear why that happened.
According to the information released by Julia Reda, who is a member of the European Parliament, the sole reason she was seeing this study now was that she had requested it. Otherwise, this would have remained buried for god knows how long.
“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. An exception is the displacement of recent top 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,” is the conclusion of the study.
The study is a dry read, and you can check it out yourself. Furthermore, the study also has the most insignificant name possible, which is, “Estimated displacement rates of copyrighter content in the EU.” If you even saw this document on a table somewhere, you wouldn’t have the urge to turn even one page.
