The focus of the study is on lag times between U.S. release and foreign release. The study found that longer gaps between a movie’s release in America and its release in foreign countries led to increased piracy in those countries, and correspondingly lower box office sales. The study estimates that pre-release piracy impacted foreign box office sales by as much as 7%
In the U.S., however, box office sales were not impacted by piracy at all. The study concludes that the impact of piracy is driven primarily by the lack of legal availability of content in foreign markets.

The study was conducted by economists Brett Danaher and Joel Waldfogel. Danaher is an assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College. Waldfogel is a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. The paper is currently under peer review preparatory to publication in an academic journal. Here is the abstract:

Hollywood films are generally released first in the United States and then later abroad, with some variation in lags across films and countries. With the growth in movie piracy since the appearance of BitTorrent in 2003, films have become available through illegal piracy immediately after release in the US, while they are not available for legal viewing abroad until their foreign premieres in each country. We make use of this variation in international release lags to ask whether longer lags – which facilitate more local pre-release piracy – depress theatrical box office receipts, particularly after the widespread adoption of BitTorrent. We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily-pirated genres. Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy.

Some entertainment companies are already becoming aware of the losses caused by delaying international releases. The BBC network in recent years has begun airing some of their most popular shows (e.g., Doctor Who and The Graham Norton Show) on BBC America on the same day that they air in the UK.

DeepField Networks posted a study on their blog titled, “File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era.” They say that file sharing traffic collapsed on January 18, the day that MegaUpload was shut down and its founder arrested.

They say that MegaUpload downloads represented about 30 to 40 percent of all file sharing. In the span of an hour, global Internet traffic dropped by a huge 3 percent. The copyright industry saw it as a great day for them and a bad day for pirates everywhere.

To preface, the study found that piracy has not decreased. No big surprise there. Pirates just moved to other services. They always have and they always will.

The study is far more interesting than that, however, as it sought to map the infrastructure behind file sharing. They say that the general consensus is that file sharing is spread across the entirety of the Internet where everybody is involved in the business of piracy.

The fact of the matter is that file sharing is located in a centralized part of the Internet. There may be hundreds of file sharing sites, but they all pull from the same six Web sites that drive over 80 percent of all file-sharing traffic.

They found that on January 18, before MegaUpload was taken down, MegaVideo was pushing 34 percent of all file sharing traffic. Most of that traffic was locally hosted in the United States on the servers in Virginia.

For comparison, they looked at file-sharing traffic on January 19. File-sharing traffic did not decrease, it just moved elsewhere. Sites like Putlocker saw a massive jump in their file-sharing traffic.

They conclude that the MegaUpload take down did nothing to combat piracy. All it did was force massive amounts of data to now be transferred from Europe over “expensive transatlantic links.”

TorrentFreak broke the story that Ukranian feds have taken down popular sharing site Ex.ua. The site was reported to have millions of users. Several international companies like Microsoft, Graphisoft and Adobe filed complaints against the service which led to raid today after a six-month criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the authorities confirmed that 200 servers were taken, holding a mind-blowing 6 petabytes of data. For those just joining us, that’s 6,000 terabytes of data.

Sixteen employees were taken into custody for questioning. It’s unclear if any arrests have been made, but the authorities did confirm that the site was run by a Latvian citizen.

Ex.ua was similar to MegaUpload, which was taken down just two weeks ago, but TorrentFreak points out a few key differences. Ex.ua allowed users to search for content on their site in categories like ‘MP3’ and ‘Video,’ MegaUpload did not.

The RIAA labeled Ex.ua as a “pirate haven” in 2010 in a complaint filed with the U.S. Trade Representative. Their main beef was that the Web site allowed users to directly search for content.

The operators of the site face up to five years in prison if found guilty.

Reuters is reporting that just like with MegaUpload, the Internet has not taken the news of the take down softly.

Ukrainians bombarded government Web sites with DDoS attacks that took down the president’s Web site alongside the Web site for the Interior Ministry.

A government spokesperson confirmed that the Web sites had been attacked. They also confirmed that the call to attack government Web sites was being spread over social networks “in the name of supporting file-sharing Web sites that do not observe copyright laws.”

The attack does not appear to be an officially sanctioned Anonymous attack, but just bitter users of the Web site. The hashtag #OpExua returns little results as well.

Over two-thirds of likely U.S. voters (67%) responded that they viewed the downloading of content without paying for it as theft. Fifteen percent weren’t sure, and 18% said it was not. In that case, a law designed to curb online piracy should be a good thing, right? Not so, according to the survey. While most agree that piracy is theft, even more respondents – 71% – answered that they felt that internet censorship was a greater threat than piracy.

This survey suggests that voters agree with what SOPA’s opponents have been saying all along: piracy is bad, and something should be done about it, but neither SOPA nor PIPA is the something that should be done. A good anti-piracy solution is necessary, but censoring the internet is not the way to go about it.

Anonymous couldn’t care less and threw caution to the wind by announcing Anonyupload today. The site is billed as being, “100% Free – No Advertising – 100% Anonymous.”

They are asking for help from users, however, to help them buy server and disk space. They also want to ensure the quality of the service, safety of the users and rapid transfer. The main reason behind the new service is the “sharing of knowledge and culture free and accessible for all.”

They also send a special thanks to Kim DotCom, founder of MegaUpload. They say, “Thank you mister Dotcom for the service for several years. We hope you’ll release as soon as possible.”

For those worried about the safety of the site, they claim that their infrastructure is set outside of U.S. jurisdiction in Russia.

They hope to launch the service within three days.

I don’t think anybody expected this, but we should have seen it coming. Anonymous is becoming more than just an activist group. They are slowly emerging as a brand that is inseparable from the Internet and has become a part of it.

TorrentFreak is reporting that many popular file hosting services are drastically limiting the services they offer or are just shutting down.

Filesonic, one of the biggest file sharing sites on the net, removed its rewards program and revoked access to files from third parties. In short, you can only download files that you uploaded yourself.

Fileserve, another major player, ended its reward program as well. It has also banned all third party downloads.

Users of Fileserve are reporting to TorrentFreak that they are having their files deleted and accounts banned for violating the site’s terms of service.

Uploaded.to took a more direct approach and banned all U.S. ISPs from accessing their Web site. This could be a move to remove itself from U.S. jurisdiction as the government shut down MegaUpload for having a server based in the U.S.

VideoBB and VideoZer, popular video streaming sites, are reportedly shutting down their rewards program and deleting massive amounts of accounts and videos.

Other file hosting services ending their rewards programs and deleting accounts include FileJungle, UploadStation and FilePost.

The major reason for all of this is that one of the reasons behind MegaUpload’s indictment was their rewards program that fed them money over the sharing of copyrighted files. File hosting services, even if they only serve legitimate users with business or persona files, don’t want to be considered targets by the federal government.

Realistically most of us have better and more important (like earning a living) things to do than examine every law or bill that gets passed. We only pay attention to the items which have “special interest” to ourselves and our lives. So let us look at this from the perspective of SOPA and PIPA.

Who has the special interest? Fortunately, almost anyone who uses the internet. Of course it probably starts with big film production companies and record producers. They are losing a lot of money ever since people figured out how to share music and movies. These are not the only people but it’s a good strait forward example. Almost everything can be pirated (sold or exchanged without paying royalties to the inventor or artist) over the internet.

The other end of the special interest are the people who use the internet and enjoy the privacy and freedom of viewing content without the fear of invasion and persecution. Copyright infringement can occur just about anywhere on the web (or elsewhere for that matter). Every web page would be shut down and we would all be tied up in some sort of litigation! Stupid!

As a country we should strive to get a handle on this thing in a manner that doesn’t punish the masses and benefit the few, as we have often done in the past. There is no simple solution to the online piracy problem and anyone who thinks there is, is simply out of touch with reality or merely concerned with amassing wealth.

Of course, as you may be aware, NinjaVideo was actually taken down by the DoJ in 2010 for hosting “high-quality copies of copyright-protected movies and television programs.” The case took a turn for the worse today as a co-founder of NinjaVideo, Matthew David Howard Smith, was sentenced to 14 months in prison according to the Department of Justice.

At the sentencing, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga also ordered Smith to serve two years of supervised release following his prison term, to pay $172,387 and to forfeit to the United States five financial accounts and various computer equipment involved in the crimes.

Smith was one of the founders of NinjaVideo.net, which was in operation from February 2008 until its shutdown in June 2010. Smith admitted that he made agreements with online advertising entities to generate income for the Web site. He and the other staff of the Web site collected more than $500,000 during the Web site’s two-and-a-half years of operation. Smith kept $172,387 of the money for himself.

On September 9, 2011, Smith was indicted along with four of the other top administrators of NinjaVideo. Co-defendant Hana Amal Beshara was sentenced on January 6, 2012, to 22 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $210,000 for her role as a co-founder. Two additional co-defendants are awaiting sentencing. An arrest warrant remains outstanding for the fourth indicted co-defendant, Zoi Mertzanis of Greece.

The case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

While TorrentFreak could easily be accused of preaching to the choir with its protest, the inclusion of an option to contact users’ Senators and Representatives is perhaps the cleverest part. It provides a direct link for those who might not otherwise get involved in the political process to express their opposition to the legislation with nothing more than a few keystrokes and a couple clicks of their mouse.

Willie Kavanagh, head of EMI in Ireland, said yesterday that the government had ignored a request from EMI to produce the law it was preparing, and that he suspected that the measure would not “satisfy the music industry’s requirement for injunctive relief.”

EMI filed the suit with Ireland’s High Court. The suit is the second EMI has filed in recent years concerning music piracy in Ireland. In 2010 the High Court shot down an attempt by EMI to enforce a 3 strikes rule on internet service providers in the country.

[Source: Irish Times]