Tired of waiting for that US Box office hit to hit your local theatre? Why not..

In light of the previous post (see below) where I remarked on many of the readers of musicpiracyresearchblog being unable to access the articles cited previously, it's time to take a dive into movie piracy. Why? You can access a full article on movie piracy here.

Discussed elsewhere, the paper by Danaher and Waldfogel explains how they successfully employed a statistical analysis of primary data on Box office returns to demonstrate that the staggered release strategy employed by the movie industry (where Hollywood movies are typically released in USA first) encourages illegal downloading.

The paper explains three principal reasons why this approach is adopted, where elsewhere George Lucas has went on record to explain that simultaneously releasing films in cinemas and to buy on DVD/Blu-Ray would satisfy different audiences.

The focus of this blog is of course music piracy, where it is the industry which is thought to be affected the most - a likely bi-product of the much smaller file sizes of individual songs as compared to movies. Much can be learned from related research on movie piracy, however.

In this particular instance, it is also learned that movies in the action and sci-fi genre are over-represented in pirate form, where an assumption flowing on from here would be that such genres are enjoyed more by males. This would fit with research on piracy overall, which suggests young males to be the principal advocates of piracy.

Do you think it's time to abandon this staggered approach to releasing films?

Also, while we are on the subject of movie piracy, find below a TED Talk presentation (mentioned in the last post) about 'copyright math' which expresses the difficulties in measuring economic losses through piracy.

Twitter feed now live @musicpiracyblog with daily updates.

References

Article cited above is a working paper at time of blog post. Both authors have personal web pages, where it is encouraged you contact them ahead of any formal citations of their research.

Advice on accessing articles

Starting to receive emails now with many readers unable to access some of the journal articles cited on this blog. Please note, I am unable to forward specific articles to you. Articles can be bought individually.
I have decided in light of this flurry of emails to go into more detail on some future blog entries. Look out for 'In depth' in the titles for future entries where I will explain more comprehensively the methodologies and materials used in select studies.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/ is a great website which does a far better job at summarising scientific articles, where sadly, there isn't much on there in the way of music piracy research aside from this excellent article which demonstrates how the removal of DRM restrictions may reduce piracy. This sort of research would fall under the previously mentioned broad area that is 'deterrents' which will be considered in future blog posts.

Also, please see http://www.ted.com/ which presents excellent presentations by researchers and public figures (freely available to the public) including a recent addition where the concept of copyright math is proposed. It highlights the difficulties in measuring losses due to piracy. TED can also be found on Twitter @TEDTalks

I also direct you to the UK governments January 2012 POSTnote publication (short briefing notes by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology) by Chadrika Nath, which calls for open access to scientific information. It is a big discussion point just now, with an article in The Psychologist May 2012 magazine also calling for access to such information for journalists, to check and confirm findings before publishing.

If this is something you want to discuss, please email me or leave a comment. Twitter feed also now online @musicpiracyblog

For now, please see the 'Resources' page above with some general advice on searching for articles online, where you should be able to find out more by simply searching for articles on Google using good keywords.

Hope this information is useful and worthwhile.

 Twitter feed online @musicpiracyblog with daily updates.