This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy.
They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:
- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the
legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]
- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)
- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"
- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music
- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries
Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)
And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...
[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...
EDIT: formatting
They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:
- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]
- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)
- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"
- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music
- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries
Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)
And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...
[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...
EDIT: formatting