[depressedpanda]

> But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy [sic] has a notable impact on creator's earnings.

Do you have any data that doesn't make the ridiculous and false assertion that 1 download = 1 lost sale, with which to back that claim?

Because from what I've read, piracy has the opposite effect.

[jcranmer]

If you look at a graph of music industry revenue, it peaks in 2000, collapses until 2015 (at ½-⅓ its peak value), and has been on a strong uptick since then. Peak apoplexy about the impact of piracy was around 2005, and there was a strong desire to tie the collapse in revenue directly to piracy.

From what I can tell, most of the studies establishing a clear economic cost to piracy tend to rely on numbers originating from the music industry without clear attribution to data, or by naïve analyses estimating that 1 download = X lost sales, without considering effects like budgetary limits (I'll spend at most $X on entertainment this year) or conversions to profitable sales.

Additionally, there's a lot fewer studies on piracy post-revenue nadir. It seems as if the rise of streaming has caused the industry to stop panicking so much about piracy, and there's some evidence that streaming has converted consumers to paying customers.

All-in-all, I would say that it's not so much that piracy hurt the industry as piracy filled the existence of a market segment that the industry refused to fill. Piracy only hurt the industry in the same way digital cameras hurt Kodak: the existing business model was unsustainable, but they refused to pivot to take advantage of the clear coming shift in the business model.

[gamblor956]

I'm not claiming that 1 download = 1 lost sale.

But it's well-documented that piracy negatively affects music, film, and game studio income. See, e.g., https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound...

Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.

[kick]

(This user was lying, and their link is, as 'dredmorbius notes, a thinktank funded by Exxon and the Koch brothers.)

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

[nitrogen]

Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.

High school events where I grew up were basically an iMac with the student body officers' MP3 collections and a PA system. All the pirated MP3s people were playing at those various official and unofficial gatherings of my youth led to me buying CDs once I had money of my own.

Has a non-industry-affiliated research group produced causal data (not just declining sales figures) showing that noncommercial entertainment piracy is a net harm?

[jcranmer]

If you read the fine print in that study, it is concluding the cost of the piracy purely in terms of 1 download = 0.2 lost sale. There's not even a discussion of the potential word-of-mouth effects or later sale generation potentials for pirated music.

[benologist]

What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...

[dredmorbius]

The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) is a think tank based in Irving, Texas and founded in 1987 by Congressman Dick Armey to "research, develop and promote innovative and non-partisan solutions to today's public policy problems."[1]

IPI is an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing "think tanks" and other non profits spanning 49 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.[2]

The conservative Capital Research Center ranked IPI as amongst the most conservative groups in the US, scoring it as an "eight" on a scale of one to eight.[3] IPI has received funding from corporations like Exxon Mobil and organizations like the Kochs' Claude R. Lambe Foundation, Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation and others....

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Po...