Comment by skrebbel
7 years ago
This title is wrong and makes the problem worse. If we want people to believe the European Commission is acting corrupt by selectively hiding reports, we have to start by not twisting the conclusions of said reports, eg in headlines or on social media.
The report said that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that piracy is harmful. The article gets this right but then still somehow manages to screw it up in the headline. I can't imagine that's an honest mistake, so it must be a lie.
Well, at least now we know that TNW can't be trusted any more than the EC.
There's a statistics problem here. Firstly, by Bayes's rule, absence of evidence is evidence of absence: if you didn't find any evidence of harm from piracy when you looked for it, that increases your posterior probability that there isn't any harm from piracy.
Secondly, this isn't just a case of insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is the most pro-piracy conclusion that could ever come from a study framed as "let's see if there are harmful effects from piracy" — and let's face it, that's the only framing of the study that's going to get funding. The only stronger result possible would be a larger study with the same conclusion.
The quoted blurb (I haven't checked if this checks out in the study proper) does seem to suggest that at least in some cases, the report found the positive result that it isn't harmful:
> On the contrary, in the case of video games, the study found the opposite link, indicating a positive influence of illegal game downloads on legal sales.
Sounds like a case of "correlation implying causation". If a game is famous ie downloaded a lot from legal sales then it does stand to reason that there will be a huge number of people trying to illegally download it too.
Surely this is an obvious thing to control for; if they didn't, it would conversely be extremely implausible that they would find any sort of "piracy is harmful" effect for any other category, which the article seems to say they did for "recent top films".
2 replies →
If that were the cause it wouldn't be unique to games.
There's little difference between piracy and the demo/shareware model that is common in gaming, the pirated version often lacks updates and online play leading a fan to buy the game.
Getting the feeling almost every news site does not accurately report on this for the sake of click bait.
I doubt "Report finds no conclusive results for pirated digital goods" would raise that much attention.
Yes and and IMO that's OK when it's about iPhone X's cost but not OK when breaking news about policy maker corruption.
I would agree but at this point also warn to not indicate policy maker corruption since - just as for digital goods piracy - there was no conclusive evidence presented for corruption in EU at this point. ;-)