The European Commission shelled out some serious cash for a massive study on the impact of piracy on media sales. This wasn’t’ just a video games deal; the study examined movies, music, and books in addition to games. Essentially, it went over any widely consumed media governed by copyright law. It turns out the European Commission never really made much of the study’s results, opting to just sit on them, and it may be because the organization didn’t get the results it wanted. The study actually seems to suggest, with the possible exception of movies during their initial box office runs, piracy doesn’t really hurt sales.
The report was submitted in May 2015 by a Dutch firm known as Ecory after many months of research. The report ended up being a substantial 304 pages and concluded that the data available does not reliably suggest that online copyright infringement causes lower sales. It did not entirely conclude that piracy doesn’t have an effect on sales, but that there is no sufficient evidence that it does.
The weird part is how we’re just now hearing about this. Despite being submitted in 2015, we only just know about this thanks to the EU’s Freedom of Information legislation. Julia Reda, a representative of the German Pirate Party in the European Parliament, had to use the EU’s Freedom of Information to get a hold of the study, subsequently posting it on her personal blog after she got it.
Source: Gizmodo