Comment by supernumerary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernumerary | Hacker News Reader

EU had to suppress the report. Because from their absolute point of view piracy harms sales. While the report argues that in fact it is now incorporated with a vanilla sales funnel - people who 'don't pirate' talk to people who 'pirate', and this 'boosts sales' ...

Ultimately, it seems pirated materials are 'free as in beer' ... and as the report concludes - in many cases, pirated films boost sales. To say nothing of the various personalities and corporate interests behind films for example that prosper from bare exposure, product placement, propaganda etc...

Incidentally, the same applies to software. I imagine by this time Adobe has a shadowy but no-less locked down funnel that teens enter when they first torrent and crack Photoshop...

Furthermore, it seems that the concept of piracy is fraught with mixed metaphors and improper comparisons, epitomized by the 'You wouldn't download a bear.' meme. These seem to be spawned by authority trying to leverage some moral sentiment without understanding the inter-relatedness of the cultural scene and the internet generally. Nevertheless this has created a general class of 'law-abiders' or 'normies' who might account for the people who ultimately purchase a product after being referred to it by a pirate.

Appreciate a well-expressed comment, but I don't see what "the EU" as such has to gain by suppressing the report. The EU Commission is accused (in [1]) of withholding information in TFA, and I think the evidence is pretty thin here. As the linked post says itself

> But the EU never shared the report possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem

Now there might very well be lobbying for changing EU "copyright law"; I don't know, and TFA doesn't tell either.

(Actually, there's no such concept as "copyright" in France/Germany and other European jurisdictions with Code Civil heritage. Is "copyright" a Common Law or US-only concept? I guess with Brexit the only Common Law jurisdiction left in the EU would be Ireland but IANAL).

[1]: https://edri.org/did-the-eu-commission-hide-a-study/ Did the EU Commission hide a study that did not suit their agenda?

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...

I guess I still fail to see the political agenda thing of the EU Commission in this matter. The results were published in the context of movie downloads because that's the only area calling to action according to the study. It's also not clear to me why the EU Commission should suppress discussing a study they themselves ordered, or what their stance in this matter is alleged to be, when there is no material conflict of interest here that I can see. That just doesn't make sense.

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/

Apple's offerings (Final Cut, Logic, etc) have no DRM, if someone has it they can just send the application over AirDrop or something and it will Just Work™

That doesn't stop people from buying it anyway after a while.

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