Illegal Downloads May not Be Destroying the Music Industry After All

A Spanish judge suggests that piracy may actually help sales instead of hurting them.

A judge in Spain has reaffirmed what a lot of people already suspected — that piracy doesn’t harm media sales nearly as much as the industries have previously stated.

The ruling — originally in Spanish — states:

[I]t is not possible to determine the damage and corresponding compensation due to loss of benefits to the rightsholder, for the simple reason that customers of pirated copies of music and movies, when making the purchase of pirated copies, externalize their decision not to be customers of music and movies as originals, so there is no profit that could have been gained. In other words, those customers either buy a pirated copy at a low price or they don’t buy an original at a price between 15 and 20 Euros.

In any case, reversing the legal argument, it is conceivable that a customer, after hearing or viewing the pirated copy, may decide to purchase the original, finding it to their taste, so that the sale of pirated copies, far from harming, benefits the market for original items. [Via Tech Dirt]

For many consumers out there, this is very true. Albums, books, games and movies are so expensive that some are unlikely to buy them new without knowing ahead of time that they’ll like them. And if there isn’t a reliable way to preview the item, the person will resort to piracy.

What the various industries have so far mostly failed to acknowledge is that the person who turns to free downloads is often not doing so as an alternative to purchasing — they were never going to buy the item to begin with. If they were unable to find the album or movie online, they would simply do without. It isn’t a lost sale because they pirated it, it was a sale that was never going to happen.

As the judge stated, however, with some pirates there is potential for increased sale, now or in the future. Hearing an album might inspire someone to go buy a physical copy or tickets to a concert, or seeing a few episodes of a TV show might send you to get it on DVD. If you get your hands on an illegal copy of a book, you may love it and decide to buy something else written by the same author. But without having consumed the media beforehand, this particular person wouldn’t have considered purchasing anything at all.

There will always be people who will download or steal as an alternative to purchasing. That’s not unique to the internet, it’s just easier because of it. People were recording movies off TV, making each other tape and CD copies, and buying from the black market long before computers came around.

The fact is, piracy and sales are complicated issues. Downloading hurts and helps different artists in different circumstances based on things like medium and popularity. Yes, sales dipped in correlation with an increase in internet usage, but companies ought to consider that there are many layers of reasons that can influence that, along with shifts in public ideology that might steer them away from making purchases.

This judge’s ruling upholds the idea that piracy laws can’t be black and white issues, there’s a lot of gray area, and that verdicts need to consider different things, like a person’s intent or the actions that followed. And maybe the industries need to work on non-litigious ways to handle their declining sales and better adapt to the internet age.

[Via Torrent Freak]