Electronic Frontiers Australia has attacked the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft over claims that electronic piracy is costing the economy more than $1.3 billion every year.
In a blog post, EFA says the assumption is based on correlating downloads with lost sales and that is unproven.
“The survey method cited is better than assuming 100% of downloads are lost sales but there is better analysis in other studies,” it said.
EFA said downloads have an advertising effect, revenue is not the right metric to use and that any flow-on effects for other industries are ‘”wholly speculative”.
“The Internet, computer games and mobile telecommunication applications take ‘eyeballs and dollars’ away from DVD and CD sales, but also sports arenas, sales of board games and printed works,” EFA says,
“Change is consumer-driven and it’s futile for the industry to try to hold fast to a business model and methods of content distribution which are dying with or without fierce law enforcement of copyrights.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
