Quite interesting looking at the comments here furiously looking for flaws in the study.

If the results had found the opposite, I doubt the study's legitimacy would have been so vigorously questioned.

The presence of amazing startups finally punching through the incredible awkwardness and extreme hassle that is consuming content legally is certainly the driving force behind increased sales.

I've never understood why people think piracy is some form of theft. It makes more sense to think about it as a form of advertising/marketing. You see, media companies NEVER have sales. The closest you'll get is watching 20 minutes of ads per hour on cable TV while footing a pretty intense bill in addition.

For over 100 years, it's been sound business sense to give things away to increase market penetration and drive increased sales. Sales bring buyers who also tend to make other purchases, which leads them to advertising to their friends. Giving things away to people who broadcast the products to a large audience is advertising 101. Loss-leading is a modern strategy that is working very well for expensive electronics. It works by essentially giving people technology so that they can consume more easily, expecting them to compensate you for the difference over time.

This is all identical to how I have actually seen piracy affect the media industry. It's literally just marketing. People who pirate stuff typically aren't people who would buy it anyway. I really do not see a negative impact whatsoever. There's so much evidence to the contrary that I find someone making a claim that "piracy made more difficult, content sales up" is anything other than a context-free juxtaposition of facts absolutely inane. Piracy is easier today than it ever has been. For < $200 in hardware you can have your own personal Netflix but with all the latest movies and TV shows. Yet sales continue to rise, and the failed and hassle-filled pre-internet business models are falling away, leading to a minimal-cost sampled environment where the need for something like piracy is growing smaller all the time.

Then there are some industries that are devolving and paying for it severely. Remember demo disks when we were all kids? I could, every week, get a demo disk with all the latest games on it. Maybe I got to play 10% of the game, but I didn't have to go pay $60 to see if I liked it. Now that digital purchases are non-resellable, fewer and fewer companies offer demos of their games to people so they can try before they buy. Piracy is useful here, and still tends to be an advertisement rather than a hindrance. And these companies want us to buy into always-on, in-your-face, and anti-consumer DRM? They're making it harder to consume legitimately! That's the exactly wrong thing to do! I haven't pirated a game in a long, long while. But I haven't bought any either (except a few indie games and the humble bundles) because the industry seems to be incapable of making any good business decisions.

So yes. It really is so far-fetched that closing down a "major" (what, <5% of all piracy?) piracy site would increase legitimate downloads by even 1 sale.

Well, that sounds okay.

But I'd like a statistician to look at the numbers. (especially their model and their scatter plots.)

How much did it affect the promotion of movies though if people weren't talking and looking for it more? I actually think it ends up benefitting in the end or close to even. Exhibit A: The success of Windows Exhibit B: The success of Photoshop. Both gained a foothold via piracy initially. Piracy gets them hooked then later they buy or they buy it with budgets at work.

Is it worth recovering 1-2% for losing 98% of a user base? Does that eventually lead to more sales? It is a tough problem.