Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
G
It's a nice anecdote. Ain't data, though.
Gotta balance that against authors who believe that they lost sales through piracy . They don't get quoted on this website, since the prevailing meme here is that piracy is OK, but they are out there.
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So, you complain that the Gaiman quote wasn't data, and then say we need to look at other anecdotes? That aside, I get what you mean, anecdotes are interesting but you can only draw so much from them. What we need is hard data, maybe presented by a research firm that isn't attached to a media organization. Oh wait, that exists.
Canada's International Development Research Centre conducted years of of independent investigation in six emerging economies, and concluded in a 442 page report that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one. There's a summary
here, and a few quotes here (from the summary):
Quote:
While setting the record straight on piracy myths is valuable, the report's most important contribution comes from chronicling how piracy is primarily a function of market failure. In many developing countries, there are few meaningful legal distribution channels for media products. The report notes “the pirate market cannot be said to compete with legal sales or generate losses for industry. At the low end of the socioeconomic ladder where such distribution gaps are common, piracy often simply is the market.”
Even in those jurisdictions where there are legal distribution channels, pricing renders many products unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Foreign rights holders are often more concerned with preserving high prices in developed countries, rather than actively trying to engage the local population with reasonably-priced access. These strategies may maximize profits globally, but they also serve to facilitate pirate markets in many developed countries.
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