Hacker News Reader

A suppressed European Commission study found piracy to have negligible effect: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...

The study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales. While this result is not unique, but consistent with previous studies, it begs the question:

Why did the Commission, after having spent a significant amount of money on it, choose not to publish this study for almost two years?

That study has to do with blockbuster movies and not purely digital goods. I am guess that things like ebooks and video games behave very differently. I heard of stories of AAA devs saying they can tell when a crack was released because their sales took a nose dive.

> That study has to do with blockbuster movies

It is not limited to them: "the study’s conclusion: With the exception of recently released blockbusters.."

There is a very obvious lack of respect for all other possible effects in the reddit post. A good reason for sales to drop 40% would be book sellers not featuring it anymore as "this years new and hot" a year after release. Another one might be the saturation of the market that is the authors larger social circle. Not mentioning such effects at all and just going "sales drop - must be pirates" sounds unreasonable and more like scapegoating. Honestly the whole post seems to me more like a desperate attempt at advertisement instead of any reasonable foundation for discussion.

Honestly, the drop in sales he describes sounds like every indie release ever. I don’t think it was caused by piracy, that’s just how sales work in niche markets.

> Wouldn't sales naturally decay over time anyway? The author doesn't even know the month the book was pirated, so I'm pretty skeptical that they've measured the impact of piracy reliably.

What...? The author gave a pretty darn clear timeline:

- I released Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition in 2011

- Overcoming Gravity 1st Edition was pirated around August or September of 2012.

- "Book sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months."

I disagree that that's clear. What month was it released in? What month pirated? What was the trend of sales up to that point? Even the phrase "sales immediately dropped 40% over 3 months" is unclear because things that are immediate usually don't take 3 months.

A graph showing sales with an annotation on when the piracy happened would be clear. Even better if it could be compared to similar books and sales figures.

Can you clarify what exactly you're insinuating here? Do you think it's likely that sales in fact have been dropping 40% every 3 months but the author is too clueless to notice it for any other 3-month period except that one? Or are you alleging the author is lying? What scenario seems more plausible to you here than the one that involves piracy actually having caused the drop?

I don't think I'm insinuating anything. I'm forthrightly saying I don't think the evidence is clear enough to support the conclusions in the OP. I then pointed to specific problems - we don't know the publication date for the first book, the piracy date, the trend of sales before piracy, or what trends are typical of similar books. I also think the author's jump to accuse an Amazon employee of piracy is evidence of a tendency to jump to unsupported conclusions.

I personally doubt the author is lying. I assume the author is stating what they think and giving the evidence they have. That's good, but I don't think their conclusion follows from their evidence.

It's like if I told you I lost my 1-year-old credit card and suddenly 3 months later I saw notifications of $10k in extra charges and therefore think someone is abusing it, and now you're objecting "but you don't even tell me what month this happened in??", "but how do you know those notifications were legit?!", "how many notifications did you get normally?!", etc...

At that point, you're throwing common sense out the window and insinuating the other person is either just stupid or deliberately lying to you, whether you explicitly say this or not.

Sales dropping over time is more common [1] than unexpected $10k charges to a credit card. It also has many more explanations. The scenarios are so different, the analogy is frankly dishonest.

[1] It is, in fact, the rule. And can be much faster and bigger than 40% in 3 months: https://www.addthis.com/blog/2014/04/21/can-social-buzz-pred...

A drop of sales is so common, and espeically a more sharper after the core customer base has bought the book.

So yes, the OP is probably a novice to the whole book selling buisness.

We may agree that piracy is theft, but 'ALittleLight has a point.

From Novembrer 2011 — when it was published — to September 2012 — when the author believes it's been "pirated" — there is a window of just 10 months. Not 21 months. 10 months.

Now, did sales beging to drop only after September? Were them already going down? How long before? How do sales typically go over time for books? For Amazon books? Other possible causes?

Moreover, I think your analogy is completely off. Here is a better one.

You can't find your credit card anymore. You are notified of suspect online payments by your bank. Thinking about it, you're quite sure you left it at the supermarket; and you somehow conclude that that sneaky cashier must have stolen it.

But it turns out, your son got a trojan while trying to pirate a PlayStation game on your family PC with the magnificent Windows XP, and your card number was saved in Google Chrome.

> Non-real number example: OG1 was selling 100 books/month by 2012. After piracy this dropped to 60 books/month. For instance, August 2012 had sales of 100 books, and by November 2012 it had dropped to 60 books/month. Over time, this slowly tapered from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30 to 25 books/month by 2015-2016. That's how drastic things were.

If post author had correctly identified the time that the book started getting pirated, the drop in revenue in that 3-month period is much more drastic that before and after, and is the most likely cause (another cause would need to have very compelling evidence).

> If I had to pirate an ebook with zero insider connections I would just use a script, maybe something like autoit, to page through the ebook

Some of the more abusive text book publishers would only allow you to read their books via a very poorly done web application. In college I wrote scripts to do this and build pdfs from the screenshots because it was way too painful to read that way.

I've also never really pirated books, because there's very nice, legit and convenient sources to get them - namely physical, DRM free ones also available in public libraries... (only exception: George R.R. Martin when I didn't have 200€ to spend, because the library was reserved for years to come).

This changes for movies, where I try to buy Blu-Rays nowadays but I won't let copyrightholders kill my physical drive for it, so if they think they don't want me to give a suitable, high-def media I can effectively do whatever I want with: piracy it is.

To add to what you’ve suggested - at least the cleanups can be outsourced via fiverr and such. (Edit: typos)