Apparently ‘Piracy’ isn’t always a problem.

Two recent reports suggest that ‘piracy’ is not the problem some parts of the legacy industries seem to want us to believe. The Institute for Prospective Technological StudiesDigital Economy Working Paper 2013/04 studies Digital Music Consumption on the Internet:Evidence from Clickstream Data found that overall, piracy has a positive effect on music sales.

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo has just announced that not only is the huge piracy [of Game of Thrones] a compliment, but the phenomenon hasn’t hurt DVD sales at all. A couple of months earlier the show’s director, David Petrarca, said that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. Petrarca explains that the show needs “cultural buzz” to thrive and survive, and this buzz is being generated in part by pirates.

Mmm.