[ecrea] The Media Piracy Report - Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

*/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.

*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.


 For more, click here: http://piracy.ssrc.org/about-the-report/