Online piracy statistics too reliant on music, report says
The impact of unauthorised file-sharing on the creative industries is unclear as too much attention is paid to its effect on music, a university research group has said.
The findings are featured in a report released by CREATe, a research group based the University of Glasgow that focuses on copyright and business models in the creative economy.
In the report, called Determinants and welfare implications of unlawful file-sharing: A scoping review, the organisation says the debate over illegal file-sharing has been “predominantly determined” by evidence from music files.
“There is very little on video games, books, or TV content,” it says, adding that the “determinants and welfare implications” of one medium may not apply equally to another.
“There is a danger in basing policy decisions upon evidence heavily biased toward a single medium,” the report said.
The report’s co-author Professor Daniel Zizzo, an economist at the University of East Anglia, told the Scotsman newspaper that the downloading of music has been “subjected to far more research” than movies and software, which themselves had been studied “far more than video games, books or TV”.
“This means there is a real risk of designing policy which meets the needs of a specific industry, possibly at the expense of other creative industries which are less well represented,” Zizzo added.
The report added: “There is also a need to explore, more systematically, a wider spectrum of markets ... policies and assessments purely considered in terms of music files, or even a combination of music files and movies, may not be fit for purpose when considering other markets.”
Although based at the University of Glasgow, CREATe is partnered with seven other universities: the University of East Anglia, the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths (in London), the University of Nottingham, the University of St Andrews and the University of Strathclyde.
CREATe, which also collaborates with the UK Intellectual Property Office for its research, studied more than 200 academic papers on the behaviours and attitudes of file-sharers as part of its research.
The report also identifies five possible reasons for users to pirate files—financial, experiential, technical, social and moral—and calls for more research into the impact of these reasons.
