Summary Government Transparency & Scientific Access Advocates
An Engadget article reporting on the European Commission's 18-month suppression of a government-funded piracy research study and its forced release through Julia Reda's freedom of information request. The piece strongly advocates for government transparency, public access to scientific research, and democratic accountability, framing information suppression as a threat to both free expression and collective knowledge-sharing.
It's worth noting that the EU-paid study was done in 2013, back when streaming and YouTube was on the rise. Billboard called streaming unignorable in 2013.
As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option.
It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it.
When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.
Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again.
That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.
Of course, they don't want to get in trouble with powerful American lobbyist groups. Same reason local authorities went after the Pirate Bay guys despite them not having broken any laws in Sweden.
The study mentioned in the article notes the only downside to piracy is for recently released blockbusters, where 10 pirated downloads leads to 4 fewer cinema visits. I wonder how much of that would be offset if streaming of blockbusters was available from day 1. No one would expect it to be included in Netflix subscriptions but available as an additional one-off purchase equivalent to say one month of subscription. The only losers here would be cinemas, but after decades of price gauging I think plenty would have little sympathy.
It'd be interesting to find out of film companies have studied this idea. Presumably there is some limit where blockbuster "viewing parties" with N or more people would make less money for the film than some fraction of those N people going to the cinema. They can't (yet) DRM living rooms.
From eastern europe: piracy cannot hurt sells when: 1. The title is not available in your country and 2. When the title is too expensive for the people to buy it. Piracy however helps sells. When i like some movie or music that i pirated, chances are big that i will buy it. When i don't know about it, the MPAA can keep it.
Marketing failure all the way.
I wouldn't worry about this too much. The Commissioners they swear an oath you know. An oath to be wholly independent, so we can rule out this having been them serving special interests or anything of the sort.
"Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" - Mario Savio, quoting UC President Clark Kerr
I was born and raised in an African country. My father had a salary of 500$ a month. I could never afford a 50$ book about resiliency engineering or about Java Concurrency when I was 17 years old, neither could my father.
The reason I love computer science and tech and excel at some parts of it, is simply because I could access any book, pirated. I have a huge will to learn, and piracy was quite literally the only means to learn. Once I worked and got on my feet, I started buying a lot of the books that marked my learning (because nostalgia and also great resources), and if and when I can, I always buys the books.
Let's not talk about movies. My town STILL has no cinema. Nearest one is 100Km away, and costs about 15$ for a ticket. So if it wasn't for piracy, I would've probably never watched Iron Man, and never dreamed of having my own Jarvis, and hence never taking up speech recognition and deep learning. Again, now that I can, I had periods where I watched 3 to 5 movies a week in the cinema, because I have the means to.
I believe people are more likely to buy books/movies when they can. But for those who can't, I believe it's almost always a net positive to society to give them access to those resources.
I was born in Poland in the end of the 80s and lived from the 90s in Germany. Back then the only way to watch Polish Media in Germany was either via Satellite TV or VHS.
Around the 00s I was into Polish Rap. Buying a CD in Germany from a polish Artist was something that you just couldn't do. So the only option I had was to download it.
Later when I wanted to buy the CD I couldn't because either the store did not had it or it was sold out.
If I wanted to watch polish tv shows or cartoons I either needed to later download them or my family needed to record them on VHS.
In this regard the Internet helped when it comes to Music.
But when it comes to tv shows and movies... Its a mess and you will end up with 10 subscriptions and hope that you find that show.
I also think that with movies and tv shows, piracy and will come back because of that reason alone.
I played pirated games when I was a kid (actually I didn't know it was pirated, I bought them off CD shops).
Growing up with more money to spend, I bought legit copies of those games (and more) from GOG just feeling nostalgic. Heck I don't even play them.
Now I don't play pirated games, simply because the potential problems (virus etc) outweighs the cost (I usually wait for Steam/GOG/Epic sale anyway).
Same thing for software.
For books.. during uni time I usually borrow books from uni library, and make a copy for personal use (so I can highlight the pages). I guess that's piracy.
What the article doesn't mention: Julia Reda, who "unearthed" the report, was an MEP for the Pirate Party at the time. She left the party in 2019 to protest against the nomination of a candidate who was under investigation for sexual harassment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda).
Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place.
Like FIFA games. I've never bought one even though Ive been playing for years. But I grew up with no money to buy them amd when I did have the money, the game was all about microtransactions. So its still a no.
I grew up poor in Eastern Europe. Very poor, in fact. Without piracy I probably wouldn’t ever have been able to learn English, find my passion and make it in life. And not just for monetary reasons but due to access as well. Ironically enough the Internet never mattered too much because we were able to get what we wanted hand to hand. The 56k modem was completely useless when your friend had a zip drive with the games you drooled over. But it taught me to appreciate things. Even today I love physical copies of things, it is like a little trophy to the thing I love.
My biggest problem nowadays is not that I can’t afford the things I love but that there is hardly anything I actually want. But when I do I often get multiple copies, whether it is on different platforms or to share the joy with friends.
That being said the effects of piracy are both severe and negligible due to the quality. While it probably doesn’t affect big corporations at all, the small indie people sometimes suffer catastrophically from it.
I think software piracy hurts/benefits companies in complicated ways. When kids trade copies of Photoshop, Adobe benefits from this. This allows people to learn the tool and strenghtens Adobe’s status. On the other hand more affordable options suffer. Why pay even $20 for the second best, if you can get the best for free.
I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free.
Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(
This has been my argument for a while now: people pirate content because they wouldn’t be customers if they had to pay for it. In other words while RIAA/MPAA can argue that by torrenting the latest blockbuster you cost them $20 in rental fees or a movie ticket in reality you wouldn’t have bought those things, to a first approximation.
The thing is: people have a budget, whether they want it or not. So, when they spend $50 to buy a video game, that's $50 less for theaters. It is all connected, so I think that in the end, free piracy (like torrenting) doesn't change much on the global scale.
Distribution bullshit hurts sales more than piracy.
"You can only watch this two months after the US release", "This isn't available in your country", "You need an internet connection to watch this", "You can't watch this on Linux", "You need to pay for 170 channels to watch one", "This that one show you want to watch requires a £12.99 monthly subscription", "You will pay cinema prices but will have to supply the TV, seating and only get to play it back once", "You will pay new-DVD prices but won't be able to share it with a friend"
We pretend that the surge of Netflix, Prime, Disney online services means this is getting more open, more free, but it the same game via a different medium.
Piracy still offers a better service, less bullshit. If they stopped treating people like criminals, yes, they might lose some cash, but they'd also pull in the people they've lost to years of abuse.
I think there's something to be said about simply supplying a superior service. While I would watch more TV and movies before, now I simply watch YouTube or Odysee. And that's it. I don't really have a need for much more. I wonder if more people have the same experience. Of course, it could also be my age and my strange interests at play though.
There's several factors at play here. Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. This means they only buy the thing they actually liked. On the other hand, services such as Steam—which has made getting games both cheaper and easier—is probably capturing a lot of those guys who would previously do piracy, simply because it's a lot less hassle to just buy it on there. And also the price isn't horrible either, unless the game is brand new (though the matter of ownership is still an issue, though not very relevant to this discussion). Also, I know more than one person who resorted to piracy, simply because the thing wasn't available in their country yet, or because the site that sells the authorized thing either has a prohibitively expensive price, or because the service is just prohibitively bad, thus making it comparably more easy to simply pirate the thing.
As someone who grew up in the UK in the late 90s, with a taste for American media, especially scifi, and the Internet a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for TV shows to come to the screen months or even years behind the rest of the world.
I do remember one site that allowed me to do download SG1 episodes (about 128kbit, and this was probably cinepak or some form of mpeg1 compression) over a modem, and that was a lifeline.
When I got to Uni in Oct 2000, I could use BitchX/IRC on the lab irix machine to use a massive 10 MEGA bit connection to get voyager episodes. Compared with downloading on a 33.6kbit connection over a phone line that cost at least £2.40 (about $5-6 in today's money) that was an amazing experience.
Even recently they decided not to bother releasing Lower Decks internationally. Had to get a Bittorrent client to watch it. That's not the case with things like Discovery and Picard which were released pretty much simultaneously.
If a media company won't sell me what I want to watch, I'll go elsewhere. I paid $6 to my phone company to get a shocking quality copy of Voyager. For me, Piracy is not trying to avoid paying for it, it's about trying to get it.
They've mostly cottoned on to the fact it's a global market now at least.
How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? Remember when you were forced the buy the whole album for just one song?
The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements.
If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.
When I was growing up I remember paying like $5 to see a movie. Used to see movies often. But as I grew up I became too busy with school to go. After I moved to Australia is went to see Avatar. The tickets in Sydney on the imax screen were $48 each…
Now I just rent them from iTunes when they are avaliable.
In hindsight, it seems like the fight against piracy, was really an effort to make it harder to access certain types of information and have people funneled to certain sources.
The fact that it used to be easy to access all kinds of useful data, and now you can't isn't an accident, The Internet is still the same, the governance around it isn't.
People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated.
People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information.
The Internet was real freedom for a brief while, and it was fucking great!
Why the scare quotes? She did unearth it, through an FOI request. It was buried. Tiny parts were cherry-picked by commissioners, to support a conclusion diametrically opposed to the researchers' conclusions.
Cinemas and Movie theatres are going the way of drive-in theatres. The only ones that will survive are those offering some feeling of nostalgia, and small independent ones with incredibly low overhead.
Outside of dating, why spend that much money if you can stream the entertainment you want on release?
I think the state of software and media piracy have been in somewhat of a sweet spot. It’s technically illegal and not just every random person can easily find what they want. But those who are motivated enough to find the content and skirt the laws are able to do it.
This way the industry is still able to monetize and those without the resources can still get access with some effort.
I pirated like crazy growing up poor but internet savvy, but now that I’m a well paid professional it isn’t necessary and isn’t even worth the effort when I can just rent/buy.
Reminds me of something similar. My local library loans out ebooks, which are loaned out, reserved, and returned just like physical books. An ebook someone wanted had all its "copies" checked out, and there was a long wait list. But the physical book was available, so they just went with that instead.
We have the means to sidestep these physical impediments, yet we just recreate them digitally. And in the case above, the physical actually turned out to be the solution to the digital impediment. It's just too funny. The greatest barriers in this world aren't technological - they're social, economic, and political; always have been.
Just another reminder that we're living in clown world.
> Yeah. To be fair. The people who pirate were likely never going to buy it in the first place.
That's a tad bit too simplified. There have by now been several studies/reports [0] [1] that found people pirating a certain media, are also spending most of their disposable income on said media.
Sure, there's also the "I don't want to waste my money on possible garbage" curiosity/test-drive piracy.
But a very large chunk are just people who enjoy the medium so much that they can't get enough of it. So they will spend all their monthly disposable income on it, and when that's gone, they will pirate because of the FOMO created by marketing hype around the newest release getting thrown at them.
It's very much a manifestation of the consumerism that gets glorified in most modern societies.
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
A few well regarded authors (Charlie Stross, Cory Doctrow and Peter Watts spring to mind, I'm sure there are others) have been commercially successful despite (or because of) releasing some of their work for free download. Might be worth looking into how they approached it?
When I was a teenager I pirated every single song and PC video game. And yet, I haven’t pirated one ever since I got my own bank account, Steam, and Spotify.
It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.
There are other websites that allow you to do a static upload, under a pseudonym. Just have a look on somewhere like reddit for a name of such a site. Another option would be getting in touch with a popular uploader on one of these sites or a torrent tracker and have them upload and seed. If they are a member of a private tracker they may get some sort of reward for seeding, as an incentive.
> Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?
The big torrent alternative in the German warez scene are direct downloads from filehosters. Which means there is no real "central place" where you can just put it for widespread exposure because it's a whole bunch of different portals/forums with individual uploads.
There's a couple of well known bigger forums, like Gulli, Boerse or Bloodsuckerz, and countless "blog style" ones often specialized on certain media, those can be found on the Raidrush Toplist.
So in practice you would need to sign up to a whole lot of places and post the links to your filehosted books there.
Well, it seems everybody is different. Personally I bought a lot of games I pirated when I was younger and I'm glad because I wouldn't have bought them in the first place If I hadn't the option of trying it beforehand
> She left the party in 2019 to protest against the nomination of a candidate who was under investigation for sexual harassment
She tried to fire him before the investigation was even done, investigations based on two complaints, one of which was already rejected at that point.
As much as I like hear work, I really do not understand what happened there and why she would do what she did there, like she did it.
Her expertise and what the PP stands for are as relevant as ever, and its getting more relevant each day. Why would she just throw all that away for herself, but alongside that try to sabotage a whole political movement?
From western Europe: I pay for Netflix and Amazon. Getting titles on them seems easy until you run into localization, while Netflix seems to support dozens of languages with its own titles I still run into too many videos that only offer a subtitle instead of having the English language dub to fall back to.
Can we please throw all copyright lawyers into an active volcano and try to set up a system that doesn't make it intentionally impossible to legally watch the English language version of a video hosted by Amazon while in a non English speaking country? Also throw the Amazon execs who signed those licensing agreements after them.
In Russia, piracy is still the default option for most people. It's literally easier to torrent something than to bother with Netflix or other streaming services. Like, you pay money and get a worse result, because there's DRM and other licensing-related restrictions — why in your right mind would you even consider that? Some people do use Netflix though because they tell themselves "law is law" or "the creators need to be paid" or something similar.
And all those news of people's "bought" content disappearing, or accounts getting banned without a way to appeal, aren't exactly doing any good to the "legal" entertainment services either.
I used to buy a few CDs a year, $20 for one good song?? Then Napster came along, and I found all sorts of good stuff, and I started buying a few CDs/week because I knew they had good songs on them, and were better quality audio that the stuff on Napster. I bought a few hundred CDs at full Best Buy Retail prices!, then the record companies started suing their customers, and I've never bought a new CD since.
I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.
Core theme: strong advocacy for freedom of information, government transparency, and public access to research. Article champions Julia Reda's successful FOIA campaign to force disclosure of suppressed government study, implicitly validating citizen right to demand transparent governance.
FW Ratio: 63%
Observable Facts
Article headline centers on government suppression of study.
Reports that Julia Reda (EU parliamentarian) used freedom of information request to force disclosure of hidden study.
Quotes EDRi: 'Commission was hiding the study on purpose and cherry-picked the results they wanted to publish.'
Describes how EU withheld inconvenient findings from public and academic discourse for 18 months.
Details that Reda submitted FOIA request in July 2017, Commission stalled twice, then released study.
Inferences
The article champions transparency and government accountability as essential to free expression.
Emphasis on successful FOIA outcome validates citizen right to demand public access to government-commissioned research.
The narrative frames suppression as a threat to democratic deliberation and public discourse on policy.
Content advocates for meaningful democratic participation through transparent institutional mechanisms. Shows elected official using formal FOIA process to challenge government secrecy and hold executive accountable.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Reports that elected official (Julia Reda, EU parliamentarian) used formal FOIA mechanism to challenge government withholding.
Shows citizens have legal recourse to demand accountability from government institutions.
Inferences
The article demonstrates meaningful democratic participation through transparent institutional processes.
Success of FOIA request suggests confidence that democratic systems can correct institutional failures.
Core theme: strong advocacy for public access to scientific research and cultural works. Article's entire focus is suppression and forced release of government-funded piracy study, validating right to share in scientific advancement.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article's entire focus is on suppression and forced release of EU-funded research on piracy.
Reports that political considerations (copyright enforcement agenda) may have motivated withholding of inconvenient findings.
Shows that study results were hidden from scientific community, restricting knowledge-sharing.
Inferences
The article champions public access to scientific research as fundamental right.
Emphasis on suppression suggests concern that gatekeeping research undermines collective knowledge-sharing.
Critique validates that people have right to complete scientific findings, not curated subsets.
Content advocates for government transparency and public access to information, grounding human rights in transparent institutions and democratic accountability.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article reports EU Commission suppressed a €360,000 study on piracy impacts for 18 months before releasing it under freedom of information pressure.
The study's inconvenient conclusions (piracy doesn't harm most sectors) contradicted the Commission's stated copyright enforcement agenda.
Inferences
The article frames government information suppression as problematic, advocating for transparency as foundational to human rights.
The narrative emphasizes the value of formal FOIA mechanisms as checks on executive overreach.
Content questions strict copyright enforcement, reporting study findings that piracy doesn't harm most creative sectors and may benefit video games. Implicitly advocates for balanced IP policy that prioritizes affordable access.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article reports study findings that piracy doesn't harm game sales and may benefit them.
Reports that unauthorized playing 'might actually make it more likely users will buy them.'
Emphasizes that streaming and paid downloads have replaced piracy as primary consumption method.
Inferences
The article questions the premise of strict copyright enforcement, implicitly supporting balanced IP policy.
Framing positions affordable legitimate access as more important than anti-piracy measures.
Content advocates for full public access to government-funded scientific research as essential to education and knowledge-sharing. Critiques selective disclosure as undermining scientific integrity.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article emphasizes that government-funded scientific study was withheld from public and academic view.
Reports that study results were selectively disclosed, with inconvenient findings excluded from official academic publications.
Inferences
The article advocates for full public access to government-funded research as essential to education.
Critique of selective publication suggests commitment to scientific integrity and complete transparency.
Content suggests transparent institutions are necessary for just social order. Shows how FOIA mechanism corrects institutional failures and enforces accountability.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article describes institutional failure (suppression) and how transparency mechanism (FOIA) corrected it.
Shows system of checks and balances functioning through citizen-initiated information requests.
Inferences
The article suggests transparent institutions are necessary foundation for just social order.
Success of FOIA demonstrates that formal mechanisms can enforce accountability.
Content supports access to affordable cultural content, emphasizing that legal streaming services provide reasonable alternative to piracy, contributing to adequate standard of living.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article notes that paid streaming and downloading made content 'more economical for consumers to purchase.'
Reports music sales boom tied to increased accessibility of legal options (2016 best year since 2009).
Inferences
The article supports the principle that reasonable access to cultural content contributes to adequate standard of living.
Framing of streaming as superior solution to piracy suggests endorsement of accessible, affordable alternatives.
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build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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