9 ms·

EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings

280 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

skrebbel 9y ago
This title is wrong and makes the problem worse. If we want people to believe the European Commission is acting corrupt by selectively hiding reports, we have to start by not twisting the conclusions of said reports, eg in headlines or on social media. The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie. Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.
- 4bpp 9y ago
  The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful: > 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.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
    - 4bpp 9y ago
      Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".
      - KekDemaga 9y ago
        How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for" means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical handwaving in my experience.
        pas 9y ago
        These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And usually take more things into account that what people think about in the first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study. That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless. Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games. There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.
- marenkay 9y ago
  Getting the feeling almost every news site does not accurately report on this for the sake of click bait. I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.
  - skrebbel 9y ago
    Yes and and IMO that's OK when it's about iPhone X's cost but not OK when breaking news about policy maker corruption.
    - marenkay 9y ago
      I would agree but at this point also warn to not indicate policy maker corruption since - just as for digital goods piracy - there was no conclusive evidence presented for corruption in EU at this point. ;-)
- waqf 9y ago
  There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy. Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.
yomly 9y ago
The entrenched interests complaining about piracy need to realise it is a symptom that their pricing or product isn't good enough. For instance, I would be lying if I said I've never pirated music in my life. My total lifetime spending on music in physical form is probably only around £100. My spending on live music in the past 2 years probably exceeds £1000 though. What's changed? I have a Spotify subscription. Spotify has made music discovery far easier (than even tracking down torrents) and is something I gladly pay for without a second doubt. A secondary effect is I now see far more live music as I have discovered artists I actually care about supporting. To quote Jeff Bezos: your margin is my opportunity.
sklivvz1971 9y ago
The problem is that when you talk about "piracy" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased. People compose music. Should they be compensated every time the music is played? There's no clear "yes" answer here--the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today. People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software? Should the number be kept secret so they can be paid by people that want to know it? Of course not, and this is ridiculous. When there were actual (plastic) records, there was an industry whose job was to produce this special plastic. Their business was plastic. They got a license to print special plastic and then sell it. Of course the "designer" of the special plastic wanted a bit of the sale. But now, this industry is only in the business of keeping numbers secret. And this is not a viable business, and we should not support them. There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars. They were viable propositions when printing records was expensive (high marginal cost business). Now the cost of music distribution is effectively zero (zero marginal cost business). Why should they insist they are allowed to maintain their business model? If making pizza becomes essentially free, why would we pass laws that prevent people from getting free pizzas? It's absurd.
- namlem 9y ago
  Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    There's two points -- Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable. Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks). There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)
redleggedfrog 9y ago
If you commissioned a study for 420K, got it, ignored it cause you didn't like the results, and then refused to honor freedom of information requests by ignoring them, too, I'd be trying to find a way to put you in prison. It's really no different than just stealing the 420K directly, unless you had cohorts at the company doing the study and it was just plain corruption, which is no better.
mnm1 9y ago
Piracy is part of the classic "there are no problems so let's create some" response that has fueled such wonderful human endeavors like US wars since WWII, the drug war, and now information copying. The racket goes something like this: some people are happy and content so we must create some chaos and problems for them which will allow us to go in and 'solve' these fake problems in exchange for taking their money or other valuables. Who cares if people die, get tortured, or thrown in jail as a side effect? Fuck those people, fake problem X is so much more important we can tolerate those lives being ended or ruined. Substitute whatever you want that people are scared of for problem X and you got a modern day economy. By reinvesting some of that money into problem X, one can keep a racket like this going for decades, maybe centuries.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  That's, unfortunately, sales&marketing 101. Whether you go by the old school ("people buy by needs and wants") or new school ("people buy by fears and passions") - we've mostly run out of easy and genuine needs/fears to solve and wants/passions to satisfy. So what's the strategy with the best ROI? Solve hard problems? Provide for sophisticated passions? No. It's to manufacture fake needs and brainwash people into wanting useless stuff. That's why I hate sales&marketing as an industry. It's a thin layer of actual social good covered by meters of dishonesty and malice.
  - Fjolsvith 9y ago
    So sell a real product that people honestly need and want, that can't get outsourced to another country, and cannot be copied cheaply. I sell large portable wooden sheds. Very profitable.
dathinab 9y ago
Honestly I often feel the whole piracy problem is less a problem then more a symptom for a discrepancy between how "classical" content providers want us to consume the content and how everyone else want to consume the content. Without questions there are some areas where piracy is a real problem like: - "free" (ad income) content of small content creators pirated on youtube and reuploaded on facebook (or one of the many other variations of this problem) - maybe very good blockbuster movies most people would actually have buyed even if slightly expensive - movies released _before_ there official release (through this is more a cybersecurity problem then a piracy one) But at last for all people in my environment the coming of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Spotify, and well regular Steam Sales and Humble Bundle cured them from any intend of illegal downloading content.
hiisukun 9y ago
In Australia, we have a 'Productivity Commission' that investigates and produces reports on things impacting the country. One of these was recently produced on Intellectual Property arrangements [1]. While the findings didn't state that piracy wasn't harmful, they certainly did find that current the intellectual property situation (including local laws and international laws and trade) was harmful in some ways. I'm yet to hear or see any movement resulting from the report, but part of the findings were how hard it is to make informed changes to the current system, because of so many international and complicated legal requirements. [1] https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-property/report https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-prope...
- ruytlm 9y ago
  That report also highlighted that piracy is in many cases a service problem - the legal means are slow, awkward, or unreasonably expensive, so people pirate because it's just easier. "Timely and cost effective access to copyright content is the best way to reduce infringement."
newsmania 9y ago
Gee if you want music and don’t want to pay for it, learn how to play the guitar. But if you think someone else is better than you and you want to listen to their music, what do you have against them being compensated? Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.
- KitDuncan 9y ago
  I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. The problem is that most of my money goes to an (for me) unneccessary distribution channel (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,...), when there are superior ones for free (torrent).
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    All I got from that comment is that you prefer not to pay for an artist's work. > I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. You can. Buy the album. Don't stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play, which are very different distribution channels that are closer to renting than buying.
jokoon 9y ago
In the end artists might just stop making records, and will just keep performing until they are sure their listeners will buy their albums.
deleted 9y ago

280 points by denzil_correa 9y ago

This title is wrong and makes the problem worse. If we want people to believe the European Commission is acting corrupt by selectively hiding reports, we have to start by not twisting the conclusions of said reports, eg in headlines or on social media. The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie. Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.

4bpp 9y ago
The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful: > 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.
- thisisit 9y ago
  Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
  - 4bpp 9y ago
    Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      How would you control for that in a real sense? Often "we controlled for" means we made some pretty big logical leaps that we justified with statistical handwaving in my experience.
      - pas 9y ago
        These considerations are usually elaborated at length in the studies. And usually take more things into account that what people think about in the first 5-50 minutes after hearing about the study. That said a lot of studies are crap, maybe the conceptual framework is sound, but they botched the mathematical parts (the stats handwaving), or the sample size is too small, so even if the math is beautiful, the study is meaningless. Now, for these data from the real world studies the controls are the differences between individual games/movies/albums. Because there are games that take more time to upload (because they take more time to crack, or the game publisher aggressively started to shut down torrent trackers). For movies and albums I don't know what kind of controls they came up with, but they can look at IP addresses of big torrent swarms and asking film studios for marketing spending data and then later cinemas for seats sold data, and try to look at the signals. (Did downloads with a lot of IP addresses from a state had an affect on cinema tickets sold in that state? Is there a per movie difference? Is there a common cause variable - they can try to control with DVD/Blueray/video-on-demand sales.)
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games. There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.
marenkay 9y ago
Getting the feeling almost every news site does not accurately report on this for the sake of click bait. I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  Yes and and IMO that's OK when it's about iPhone X's cost but not OK when breaking news about policy maker corruption.
  - marenkay 9y ago
    I would agree but at this point also warn to not indicate policy maker corruption since - just as for digital goods piracy - there was no conclusive evidence presented for corruption in EU at this point. ;-)
waqf 9y ago
There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy. Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.

yomly 9y ago

The entrenched interests complaining about piracy need to realise it is a symptom that their pricing or product isn't good enough. For instance, I would be lying if I said I've never pirated music in my life. My total lifetime spending on music in physical form is probably only around £100. My spending on live music in the past 2 years probably exceeds £1000 though. What's changed? I have a Spotify subscription. Spotify has made music discovery far easier (than even tracking down torrents) and is something I gladly pay for without a second doubt. A secondary effect is I now see far more live music as I have discovered artists I actually care about supporting. To quote Jeff Bezos: your margin is my opportunity.

sklivvz1971 9y ago

The problem is that when you talk about "piracy" it's already a totally forgone conclusion that you are biased. People compose music. Should they be compensated every time the music is played? There's no clear "yes" answer here--the counterpoint being that otherwise no one would compose music is disproven by hundreds of years of wonderful music still performed today. People record music and codify this in a big number (a wav file). Should they be paid every time such a number is put in a particular software? Should the number be kept secret so they can be paid by people that want to know it? Of course not, and this is ridiculous. When there were actual (plastic) records, there was an industry whose job was to produce this special plastic. Their business was plastic. They got a license to print special plastic and then sell it. Of course the "designer" of the special plastic wanted a bit of the sale. But now, this industry is only in the business of keeping numbers secret. And this is not a viable business, and we should not support them. There's an obviously failing business with little to no added value: that of big record companies and rock stars. They were viable propositions when printing records was expensive (high marginal cost business). Now the cost of music distribution is effectively zero (zero marginal cost business). Why should they insist they are allowed to maintain their business model? If making pizza becomes essentially free, why would we pass laws that prevent people from getting free pizzas? It's absurd.

namlem 9y ago
Making music isn't virtually free though. It's just the copying of music that has already been made that's basically free. Plenty of labor still goes into the production process. Copyright has plenty of flaws, but is there a better alternative to incentivize the creation of music and art?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  There's two points -- Just because we want some copyright, doesn't mean we want the current system. There's lots of room to have mixed strategies, eg personal use copying of music is free but public performance requires a license. (Basically, the de facto state now.) And there's lots of reason to believe we should adjust the current system (and business models built around it) somehow, because it's clear that what we have legislated isn't optimal... or in some ways even workable. Secondly, why not Kickstarter it? (or Patreon? or sell merchandise? etc.) There's no reason not to collect a pool of money, escrow it (with some payments to live on during), and hand it over when they release an album. They get paid for certain and the public can listen to the album as much as they want. This seriously hurts the machine that is pop music, but is that really a bad thing? I think we can do better as a culture than what we presently have (in the form of big, centrally controlled companies/networks). There are lots of ways to fund music and musicians without the current paradigm. People like art and want to support art they enjoy. (And for that matter, music managed to get funded for all of human history without the present system... So I suspect the concern is overstated.)

redleggedfrog 9y ago

If you commissioned a study for 420K, got it, ignored it cause you didn't like the results, and then refused to honor freedom of information requests by ignoring them, too, I'd be trying to find a way to put you in prison. It's really no different than just stealing the 420K directly, unless you had cohorts at the company doing the study and it was just plain corruption, which is no better.

mnm1 9y ago

Piracy is part of the classic "there are no problems so let's create some" response that has fueled such wonderful human endeavors like US wars since WWII, the drug war, and now information copying. The racket goes something like this: some people are happy and content so we must create some chaos and problems for them which will allow us to go in and 'solve' these fake problems in exchange for taking their money or other valuables. Who cares if people die, get tortured, or thrown in jail as a side effect? Fuck those people, fake problem X is so much more important we can tolerate those lives being ended or ruined. Substitute whatever you want that people are scared of for problem X and you got a modern day economy. By reinvesting some of that money into problem X, one can keep a racket like this going for decades, maybe centuries.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
That's, unfortunately, sales&marketing 101. Whether you go by the old school ("people buy by needs and wants") or new school ("people buy by fears and passions") - we've mostly run out of easy and genuine needs/fears to solve and wants/passions to satisfy. So what's the strategy with the best ROI? Solve hard problems? Provide for sophisticated passions? No. It's to manufacture fake needs and brainwash people into wanting useless stuff. That's why I hate sales&marketing as an industry. It's a thin layer of actual social good covered by meters of dishonesty and malice.
- Fjolsvith 9y ago
  So sell a real product that people honestly need and want, that can't get outsourced to another country, and cannot be copied cheaply. I sell large portable wooden sheds. Very profitable.

dathinab 9y ago

Honestly I often feel the whole piracy problem is less a problem then more a symptom for a discrepancy between how "classical" content providers want us to consume the content and how everyone else want to consume the content. Without questions there are some areas where piracy is a real problem like: - "free" (ad income) content of small content creators pirated on youtube and reuploaded on facebook (or one of the many other variations of this problem) - maybe very good blockbuster movies most people would actually have buyed even if slightly expensive - movies released _before_ there official release (through this is more a cybersecurity problem then a piracy one) But at last for all people in my environment the coming of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Spotify, and well regular Steam Sales and Humble Bundle cured them from any intend of illegal downloading content.

hiisukun 9y ago

In Australia, we have a 'Productivity Commission' that investigates and produces reports on things impacting the country. One of these was recently produced on Intellectual Property arrangements [1]. While the findings didn't state that piracy wasn't harmful, they certainly did find that current the intellectual property situation (including local laws and international laws and trade) was harmful in some ways. I'm yet to hear or see any movement resulting from the report, but part of the findings were how hard it is to make informed changes to the current system, because of so many international and complicated legal requirements. [1] https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-property/report https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/intellectual-prope...

ruytlm 9y ago
That report also highlighted that piracy is in many cases a service problem - the legal means are slow, awkward, or unreasonably expensive, so people pirate because it's just easier. "Timely and cost effective access to copyright content is the best way to reduce infringement."

newsmania 9y ago

Gee if you want music and don’t want to pay for it, learn how to play the guitar. But if you think someone else is better than you and you want to listen to their music, what do you have against them being compensated? Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.

KitDuncan 9y ago
I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. The problem is that most of my money goes to an (for me) unneccessary distribution channel (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music,...), when there are superior ones for free (torrent).
- thirdsun 9y ago
  All I got from that comment is that you prefer not to pay for an artist's work. > I wouldn't have a problem, compensating an artist a reasonable amount for his songs. You can. Buy the album. Don't stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play, which are very different distribution channels that are closer to renting than buying.

jokoon 9y ago

In the end artists might just stop making records, and will just keep performing until they are sure their listeners will buy their albums.

deleted 9y ago