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Dear RIAA: Pirates Buy More. Full Stop. Deal With It.

Three separate studies all come to the same conclusion: “Pirates” buy more.

The article of the same name at Techdirt starts with:

Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing — UK regulatory body Ofcom hascome out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).

Mike Masnick does an excellent job of summarizing the results from the three studies coming to the final conclusion:

All of this paints the same basic picture that plenty of us have been arguing for over a decade: treating “pirates” like criminals is a mistake. They’re often either the best customers or the potential best customers if they were better served by the industry, which often means offering things more conveniently and at a lower price. But the industry still resists this notion and wants to continue to demonize all infringement and any service that helps infringement. What a wasted effort.

You might also want to read Andrew Robinson’s take on the same subject: Pirates are People too.

22 replies on “Dear RIAA: Pirates Buy More. Full Stop. Deal With It.”

Amen! We buy a legally licensed library, but would love access to more music for editing. It especially sucks that they are inconsistent in their prosecution of pirates. Others in the industry ignore the need for sync licenses and just use whatever they want.

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