Whenever I hear statements like that (that the musical/movie industry is growing thanks to piracy, etc), the only logical question for me is - why are they fighting it so hard then?

I mean, they are fighting the various P2P sites and users for years, spending large amounts of money on various legal fights and lobbyists. The wouldn't do this if it really didn't hurt their sales.

People can say "they are doing it because they are stupid". Well, maybe they are, but they also have far better statistics than we have. They know far better what is hurting their sales.

I am not really arguing for copyright industry here, but I am just saying - if it didn't hurt them, they wouldn't be fighting it so hard.

If they did nothing, their silence would be taken as assent. There would be a critical point of social acceptance past which the number of people actually paying for their product would rapidly drop to an unsustainable level. They work to keep it from reaching that point.

Because of the power inversion. Historically they get to decide what will make money and when. It is frightening to them that all of that power and control can be taken away by a couple of guys in Sweden with a few servers.

People talk about the "business model" of the film and music industries.

But they have a "moral model", which is to present copyright itself as a moral proposition. Everything about why it is hard for us to stop the never-ending creation of new laws and international treaties that attack freedoms of computer use and internet use is due to this moral model.

It follows that empirical studies proving the "harmlessness" of piracy are largely irrelevant.

It all depends on the purpose of copyright in the first place. In the US, at least, copyright law stems from one section of the Constitution:

  The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and
  useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
  exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The stated purpose is clear: to promote progress. It's not difficult to evaluate the current environment in terms of this initial purpose, and I imagine it would be tough to build a case that piracy is stunting artistic progress. (And thus difficult to justify laws that inhibit file-sharing.)

Somewhere along the way, people began to confuse the concept of promoting-artistic-progress with ensuring-people-can-make-millions-of-dollars. These are two unrelated things. The success of some company's (or some artist's) business model has nothing to do with the progress of the arts in general. So I agree with you: the amount of monetary "damage" caused by piracy is entirely irrelevant.

What really matters is the moral argument that piracy equates to theft, or that piracy hinders artistic progress. I don't think it does. But if anyone disagrees, I'd love to hear your argument here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577454

It doesn't really matter what the purpose of copyright was in the first place. History is interesting, but it doesn't determine our understanding in the present of what is moral and what is not moral.

Also, copyright is world-wide, so what it says in the US Constitution isn't all that interesting to anyone not in the US.

And when I say "irrelevant", I mean it is irrelevant to public debate. The copyright industry's side of the debate about copyright enforcement is mostly the following, based on what I called the "moral model":

* We created something * We own what we created * Someone is stealing it

This message can just be repeated over and over and over again. Someone's report that internet piracy might not reduce cinema takings completely fails to address the above moral claim.

So the report can be ignored, and the moral claim can be repeated again. And again.

  * We created something * We own what we created * Someone is stealing it

The content industry derives both the 2nd and 3rd part of that argument from the law. They do not own something just because they say so. Nor is copying the equivalent of stealing just because they say so. They are basing their moral arguments purely on the law, which defines ownership and theft.

So when they tell the public, "It's stealing!", that's nothing but marketing. When the chips are down and they're standing in court, they argue based on legal precedent. I don't think we can argue against them on any other grounds.

According to my experience, it's not so much a "moral model" but the conviction that the current model is necessary to ensure the creation of professional works. And "professional" means an equivalent amount of sparkle and glitter.

...like rational, scientifically backed arguments, will burst MPAA/RIAA's bubble. For anyone on the outside, the findings in this article are common sense. So is the fact that MPAA/RIAA's business model is severely broken. Yet, that doesn't matter when you have Washington on your payroll. Unfortunately.

Sad but true. If rational sense had any place in legislation, marijuana wouldn't be illegal, the DMCA would never have been passed, and the AA groups would never have tried to serve a dead grandmother and a network printer.

What is the logic behind waiting to release Hollywood movies outside of the US?

Aside from distribution, marketing and screen availability (national/city quotas for Hollywood movies) in some countries, until digital distribution started to roll out in North America, EU, Japan and other countries the biggest limiting factor was the physical film itself. As in the movie was actually distributed on physical film and local overseas distributors did not want to pay for extra copies to be printed, when waiting for a few months (and reducing their own costs of showing the movie), they could obtain the used prints from North America.

While a movie would premiere on 1,000-1,500 screens in the US/Canada on its opening weekend, until some of those screens stopped showing and internal US/Canada distribution was done with most of those physical copies of the movie, the movie could not be distributed overseas for a reduced cost, which incidentally increased the studio's profit.

Here's one example that illustrates one of many possible reasons.

I know someone who works at a European DVD/Blu-ray mastering house. Recently they released an anime Blu-ray. He told me that the publisher in Japan refused to let them release any discs until all of the Blu-rays were out in Japan (where they were released one at a time).

Why?

Because the Japanese Blu-rays were much more expensive than those in the West; Japanese fans could buy the overseas discs in their place if they came out at the same time. Since the Blu-rays contained the original audio track, said fans would have lost nothing by "bootlegging".

Getting distribution is hard because screens for english titles are more limited abroad. You need to prove out the title before foreign theaters will pick it up. Obviously this doesn't apply to blockbusters which now often have global release dates.

Interesting. Having lived overseas, that explains why it would take ages for a film to arrive (sometimes 1 year). Many films would never arrive...

Not a filmmaker, but I imagine the same reason why a lot of software comes out in English first, and localized versions later. It's a lot of work to localize, the work is often outsourced, and for design-heavy things the amount of internal changes even during late-stages of a project can be really high - too high to be worth involving the localizers at that point.

So you wait until everything is done and out the door before bringing in localization to actually do their thing.

US Movies are often released outside of the US to see how well they go, so that an appropriate marketing spend can be done. Various small countries, and small towns will go first. Like New Zealand.

If the movie does ok, then that is more evidence for the investors to ok the massive marketing spends. But if their trial marketing fails (and their 10 different versions of it), then the movie will be released changed or released in one of the spare slots; the slots that they need to fill in the movie theatres to keep their quadmopoly(if they don't take up the screens with some crappy movie then some independent might get a shot at a screening instead).

I believe the term for a "quadmopoly" is an oligopoly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

A more relevant question would be how piracy affects movie rentals and DVD/Blu-Ray sales. You can't go out to see a pirated movie, so box offices sales and pirated movies are apples and oranges.

tl;dr

Study tries to find out if piracy has a larger effect in foreign box office returns the longer the length of time between the domestic and foreign release. Answer: Yes.

Given the finding that piracy demonstrably affects foreign returns, and that the researchers found no correlation to domestic returns, I think the article headline and interpretation is inaccurate. Not finding evidence is not the same as finding there's no effect, particularly when you've just found evidence of a related effect.

I think part of the reason for the title is that the study suggests that piracy is a symptom, not a cause. They are saying if the studios were releasing worldwide at the same time, that piracy would be largely nullified (at least my read of it)

For the record, a large portion of big box office films leaded as camera recordings are recorded in foreign theaters. CAM or TELESYNC releases tend to originate in Russia, China, or other eastern european nations and have their English/Dutch dubbing added from an audio recording made stateside.