[ecrea] Media Piracy in Emerging Economies - The Consumers Dilemma

Just released!

http://piracy.ssrc.org/

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:  ne 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.

³The choice,² said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, ³isn¹t 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.²

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 can¹t 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 hasn¹t 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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