study: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies
Posted by ElJay Arem (IMC OnAir) on February 1, 2012
by Prof. Nico Carpentier(PhD)
Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.
Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.
Major Findings
- Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.
- Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such conditions are largely absent.
- Antipiracy education has failed. The authors find no significant stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather, piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing portions of the population.
- Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with severely overburdened legal systems.
- Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
- Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement, the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.
For more, click here.
(Source: 02/01/2012 - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels) - Communication Studies Department)
Related articles
- A Modest Proposal On Copyright Enforcement (thinkprogress.org)
- Piracy Is A Service Issue (thinkprogress.org)
- Why Anti-piracy Legislation Doesn’t Work (socyberty.com)
- Piracy is the Wrong Metaphor (laf.ee)
- Gabe Newell: Game “Piracy Isn’t About Price” (games.ign.com)
- Fighting e-piracy in Russia: Litres.ru and Valve Software (teleread.com)
- White House-backed antipiracy video is Reefer Madness for the digital age (arstechnica.com)
- EU digital tsar: millions wasted on anti-piracy plans (pcpro.co.uk)
- Piracy gives overseas manufacturers a $2.9B competitive advantage (venturebeat.com)
- Microsoft highlights financial harm of pirated software on Play Fair Day (winrumors.com)
Download the Full Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (426 pp.) from here
with Chapter 8: “India: Lawrence Liang and Ravi Sundaram (60 pp.)”.
(Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.)
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Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (English Version)
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Intro (6 pp) – Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (English Version)
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Chapter 1 (74 pp.): Rethinking Piracy – Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (by Joe Karaganis)
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Chapter 2 (24 pp.): Networked Governance - Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (by Joe Karaganis and Sean Flynn)
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Chapter 8 (60 pp.): INDIA – Media Piracy in Emerging Economies Report (by Lawrence Liang and Ravi Sundaram)
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