EU Piracy Rates Tick Back Up In Study That Shows Income Inequality And Less Legal Options To Blame

If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I'll let you in on a secret: that's been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In fact, as we have discussed in the past, piracy trends are actually declining and have been for at least 9 years or so, and probably longer. There have been more than one reason for that trend, but it all mostly redounds back to making these copyright products available as widely as possible in as many formats as possible at a price that is reasonable. Streaming services, for instance, had the effect of tamping down piracy of movie, television, and music content. Great job, content industries!

Unfortunately, the most recent study coming out of the EU's EUIPO, based off of numbers gathered by MUSO, show that for the first time in a long time piracy is trending back up once more.

In previous studies, aclear downtrendwas visible, suggesting that piracy had seen its peak. While this may still be the case, the most recent data suggests that there was a notable increase in piracy levels over the past two years.

Overall, the latest study shows that piracy traffic started to grow again at the start of 2021, after years of decline.

The main finding is that the declining trend seen in the earlier studies seems to be reversing, with piracy increasing again, mainly due to increases in piracy of TV content and publications," the report reads.

From there, the report does a couple of things. First, it does a ton of slicing and dicing of the data, all of which is actually quite interesting. For instance, at the macro level at least, music piracy in the EU is barely a thing. But piracy of television shows specifically is what is growing the overall numbers. Software, music, and film also aren't on the rise in terms of piracy. It's literally just television and publications.

Those numbers all do come with a caveat. MUSO bases its rate numbers on website visits, meaning that the entire IPTV piracy market is left out of the trend lines. Still, based on what MUSO does measure, it gives you an indication of where the public's interest in pirating content is, and the answer in this case is largely television.

The report also goes into what is, and what is not, to blame for this new trend. For starters, it sure as hell wasn't COVID, as the content industries originally tried to claim. In fact, after an uptick in piracy right at the start of lockdowns, which is what the content industries based their claims on, piracy rates then almost immediately went back to trending downward and were down overall during 2020.

So then what does explain the uptick? The most obvious of answers, honestly.

In addition to providing dozens of descriptive graphs and charts, the researchers also analyzed the data to identify potential key drivers of piracy. This produced some interesting observations.

The econometric analysis, which is limited to the movie, TV, and music categories, shows that the number of available legal alternatives reduces piracy. This means that the availability of more legal streaming services correlates to lower piracy numbers.

The income level of a country has a significant impact on piracy rates. Low per capita income, a high degree of income inequality, and high youth unemployment are all associated with increased consumption of pirated content.

So, as streaming services and what's available on them get more stratified, piracy goes up as the legal options for content specifically like television goes down. In situations where people have less money to spend in general, piracy goes up as they cannot afford to get the content, often siloed in one streaming service or another, legally.

Again, obvious. About as obvious, actually, as the notion that none of those people in those two situations that are doing the pirating represent lost sales", really. People with no money can't buy the content, anyway, and the other group would be happy to pay for the content if it weren't so siloed in one streaming service or another and was reasonably priced.

In other words, to some extent at least, the uptick in piracy is the television industry's own making. But somehow I doubt they'll see it that way.