Swiss Government Study: Online Piracy Benefits Artists

By JacobSloan on December 15, 2011 in News 5

Encouraging results regarding unauthorized downloading, via TorrentFreak:

The Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.

The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.

The entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.

The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money.

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

Suddenly Spam!

Expect this to be swept under the rug next time Hollywood starts with the old cut and BAWWW routine.
DeepCough

Without piracy, you would not have innovation and no new technology.

And Hollywood has absolutely no excuse to bitch about pirating. Case in point: Snakes on a Plane. When the internet got hold of that shit, Hollywood, rather than bitch about copyright, decided to exploit the piracy. and it completely changed the movie, and it made it even more successful.
DeepCough

Without piracy, you would not have innovation and no new technology.

And Hollywood has absolutely no excuse to bitch about pirating. Case in point: Snakes on a Plane. When the internet got hold of that shit, Hollywood, rather than bitch about copyright, decided to exploit the piracy. and it completely changed the movie, and it made it even more successful.
Anonymous

My opinion is that piracy is good, mainly for the music industry, more people can find and listen to music they might not have other wise found and if an artist has pride in their work then they will get more out of people listening and enjoying their music rather than make a cut on every album sold.
http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

That jibes with what I’ve said all along…Hollywood and the Music Biz’s cries of “we’re losing countless millions to piracy!!!” are flat out bullshit.

The number of dollars people will spend on entertainment is a comparatively fixed amount depending on general economic well being. The people most likely to pirate a few things or jack a few songs are generally NOT consumers with disposable income that would be spent on entertainment. Faced with the inability to acquire a product by any means but cash…they will just bow out and not purchase the product at all.

Zero sum game. No one wins, no one gains, no extra profits lost or recovered. What is incalculable is the trickle down benefits of common use for songs and images. The home brewed Youtube distribution of outdated rare material has been a miracle for reawakening interest in long lost music and video. Because the effects have been hard to tabulate…they are ignored, but I’ve personally rediscovered dozens of musicians and auteurs thanks to common use and mash up fans who pluck old cult-hit material and recycle it in new ways.

Viewed that way…honestly, the big players in the media field owe the rest of us a paycheck…because we’re doing work that their marketing people haven’t even imagined…and they’ve gained from it.