Just when the argument against piracy continues in high places with the implementation of services such as Denuvo, a big piece of news came out of a study by the European Union.
The European Union Commission was found to have received a 304-page report from Dutch research firm Ecory, who was commissioned to research the impact of piracy on game sales for several months. What the firm found was that the results of the study did not provide robust statistical evidence that there is any real displacement by online copyright infringements.” In layman’s terms: We’re not saying piracy doesn’t affect game sales, we just can’t reliably say it does.
Unfortunately for the general public, this report, received in May 2015, wasn’t released outside of the commission, until European Parliament member, Julia Reda of the German Pirate Party, posted the report on her personal blog after receiving it through an EU Freedom of Information request.
What the @EU_Commission found out about #copyright infringement but ‘forgot’ to tell us https://t.co/Sxshdxy3KZ pic.twitter.com/Vk4Q74k1Hv
— Felix Reda (@Senficon) September 20, 2017
On top of this, the European Digital Rights organization suggested in a blog post on their site that the full contents of this report were “intentionally suppressed,” pointing to an academic paper by two Commission officials in 2016, titled “Movie Piracy and Displaced Sales in Europe.” This paper fails to mention the cited information comes from Ecory’s study, and only mentioned part of that report in relevance to piracy and blockbuster film sales while excluding the other findings.
Source: Gizmodo
