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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

Of course there are.

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

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.

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.

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...

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/