[INTERESTING ARTICLE; See Page 8] Discussion: Thoughts on Piracy

[Kreekakon]

I'm digging up this thread since I thought I'd show this article I found to all of you. It's VERY interesting.

http://piracy.americanassembly.org/where...come-from/

US P2P users have larger collections than non-P2P users (roughly 37% more). And predictably, most of the difference comes from higher levels of ‘downloading for free’ and ‘copying from friends/family.’

But some of it also comes from significantly higher legal purchases of digital music than their non-P2P using peers–around 30% higher among US P2P users. Our data is quite clear on this point and lines up with numerous other studies: The biggest music pirates are also the biggest spenders on recorded music.

Our German results appear to confirm this finding–in fact, extravagantly so. German P2P users buy nearly 3 times as much digital music as their non-P2P using peers. We qualify this because the German results are based on too small a sample to be statistically reliable: only 4% of respondents (39 people) reported using P2P networks. Yet the results are consistent with our wider findings. German P2P use is mostly the province of digital music aficionados who download in large quantities and who also buy in much larger quantities than their non-P2P peers.

Read the full article for more. To me this study makes it seem like that the idea that piracy will damage profits is completely false, and that people who pirate music end up buying much more music in the end than their completely legal counterpart consumers.

What do you guys think about this? This study may mainly focus on music, but would it also work for other forms of media piracy?