Movie industry buries report proving pirates are great consumers
Jul. 20, 2011 (9:00 am) By: Matthew Humphries

Movie industry buries report proving pirates are great consumers | Geek.com

The movie and music industry seem hell bent on portraying pirates as criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies are commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment.

The problem with this approach is that it has been found to be biased towards portraying pirates as the movie industry wants them to be seen, rather than presenting the facts. A great example of this has been discovered by the German-language politics and media website Telepolis.

GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be.

The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend.

The conclusion of the study is that movie pirates are generally more interested in film and therefore spend more money and invest more time in it. In other words, they make up some of the movie industries best customers.

Unfortunately, we will never get to read the official version of the study as the unnamed client who paid for it to be created has decided it should not see a release. The reason given for shelving it was that the contents proved “unpleasant.”

The revelation that this study exists has come following a big raid on European video streaming site Kino.to last month. 250 police raided data centers and homes across Germany, Spain, France, and the Netherlands managing to arrest 12 people in the process. Those 12, plus the 4 million visitors a day to the site could now be thought of as core consumers the movie industry needs, but I assume the pararsite criminal tag will be used instead.

This is by no means the only evidence that piracy isn’t as detrimental as those lobbying against it portray it to be. Independent research reported early this year found anime piracy and streaming in Japan increased DVD sales.

Read more at TorrentFreak and Telepolis (translated)

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The same was ever true of music and... comics.

I am old enough to remember a time where bookstores didn't like you reading, especially comics (which can be read reasonably fast) without buying it first.

They stopped when they realised that, actually, people reading comics in bookstores are the heaviest of heaviest consumers - I got something like 500 or 600 comics in my library and although it expands less fast now that I am in the UK, cut off from supply, it still grows...

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