Myth 1 & 2 go together. Provide content at a reasonable price, in a reasonable time frame, and many or most consumers won’t bother with places like Pirate Bay. Make your content hard to access or unavailable, and all of that changes.

@Elgarak — I agree with you: The NBC and Hulu examples were in “Myth #1″ in my presentation. I think John — who had the understandably challenging job of taking notes while trying to follow a very compressed 15 minute presentation of my research — just misplaced those.

My argument for Myth #2 came from a paper a colleague and I recently posted reviewing the academic literature on piracy (available here http://ssrn.com/abstract=2132153). Our review found 4 papers which conclude “piracy doesn’t affect sales,” 2 of which were published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and one of which was published in what would commonly be called a “top” journal. (We also note several academic papers that critique the findings of these papers. Finally, I’ll also say that if you know of any papers we missed, I’d be happy to add them. We did our best to be comprehensive, but we don’t claim to be perfect.)

In contrast, to these 4 papers that find that piracy doesn’t hurt sales, we found 24 academic papers that find that piracy reduces sales, 15 of which were published in peer-reviewed journals, and 11 in “top” journals. From this we concluded that the best available evidence strongly suggests that piracy harms sales. This finding is consistent with what two prior reviews of the literature by other academics found, and frankly, I don’t think this should be a controversial result: It seems intuitive that if you can get something for free, sales for it would go down. Our main point is that this intuitive argument is entirely consistent with the best available data.

@CharlesC: You are right that Le Monde critiqued our HADOPI findings — but I think they fundamentally misunderstood the statistical methods we use in the paper. Our findings rely on a _relative_ increase in French sales versus other “control group” EU countries. Their critique relies on an absolute increase in iPhone sales, but one that is basically the same in both France and in the control group. We blogged about this on info justice.org (http://infojustice.org/archives/8891), and updated our paper to empirically test their critique (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1989240). In short the “Le Monde” critique doesn’t change our finding at all: HADOPI seems to have caused an increase in sales in France.

But again, I think we can all agree that this is an important issue and I welcome the discussion.

http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676

Better check your facts again.

“The bottom line is that piracy sites do affect the market for authorized content.”

Your example only really proves that authorized content affected the market for piracy. “I see what I eat” does not mean the same thing as “I eat what I see.”

DVDs are to Hulu as 8-track tapes are to CDs. Say it’s 1989 and the RIAA pulls all CDs and records. The subsequent choice to tape at home instead of buying an 8-track tape does not necessarily prove that home taping is killing the 8-track tape.

Maybe you simply don’t own an 8-track tape player. A lot of people I know have unplugged their DVD players.

The price of a movie is compensation for delivery, not content – that’s why the same movie costs different prices in the theatre, on DVD and on Amazon Prime. The content is essentially free added value to entering the cinema, buying the plastic or accessing the server. If you stop selling a stream, a DVD is not a replacement.

Assuming you really did read it it’s clear from drivel like this you certainly didn’t understand it. It’s nice that you’d so proudly dismiss something out of hand without consideration though, it makes it real clear that you’re close minded and not interested in any real discussion that challenges your assumptions.

Because the government can’t force you to pay for reading, watching or listening to something. That’s a violation of the First Amendment, not to mention the private property rights of the person showing it to you.

Do you really want police bursting in on a family watching a DVD and making head counts?

People can and always will legally “enjoy work” without paying. The only question here is whether file-sharing will be one of those ways.

You can also enjoy a yacht without paying for it … if someone shares it with you. Derp.

That’s the difference between using the Internet and buying a DVD. If you own a radio, you get the concept of “free” Internet content. Why are you pretending to be obtuse?

Your assumption that people who “don’t pay” for something broadcast into their home do so because they “choose” not to makes no sense.