"That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally"
The article also mentions that piracy did not have much effect in legal consumption of books, music, and games. People felt that prices were "fairer" in these media. Games piracy even led to people buying more games than what they would have bought without piracy.
People felt that piracy in movies and TV is justified because the price is too high.
But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executives talk about this. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case.
That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.
Always great when the headline is contradicted by the body of the article, especially in this social media age in which people mostly read headlines and move on. It is especially funny in this instance in which the article also says "The European Commission was quite happy to publish partial results that fitted with its agenda". That is exactly what Techdirt did here by only focusing on the part of the study that confirmed "exactly what Techdirt has been saying for years".
From the study