[Solar-general] Fwd: [CopySouth] Report: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

Mar Mar 8 00:17:33 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: carlos barreneche <carlos.barreneche en gmail.com>
Date: 2011/3/7
Subject: [CopySouth] Report: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies
To: copysouth en copysouth.org

Descargar/Download: http://piracy.ssrc.org/the-report/

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent,
large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging
economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico
and Bolivia.

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media
Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one
tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became
cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the
growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement
around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have
largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as
a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t
between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice,
rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy,
low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in
both environments, and that developing countries have a strong
interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with
enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.”

Major Findings:

-Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and
cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media
piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa,
the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten
times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are
correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.

-Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media
markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for
local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global
film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such
conditions are largely absent.

-Antipiracy education has failed. The authors find no significant
stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather,
piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing
portions of the population.

-Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry
lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize
these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to
apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile
mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with
severely overburdened legal systems.

-Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic
links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of
the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational
smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete
with free.

-Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement,
the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.

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Diego Saravia
Diego.Saravia en gmail.com
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