A ghost wanders through Europe, a community openly proud of its vocation for protecting users privacy (GDPR) but that proves to be very little interested in counting the aforementioned users when we talk about piracy and the more or less legitimate concerns of the copyright industry. Europe is so aligned to majors’ business to actively hide relevant information on the issue after funding them, if the conclusions aren’t that pleasant to listen to for managers and the industry bosses.

A recent contribution to denouncing Europe’s hypocrisy on matters like piracy, file-sharing and “illegal” downloads came by Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament that discovered a research dating back to four years ago and funded by the European Commission itself with €360,000. The research was completed in May 2015 and then handed to the Commission, which decided to not release it despite the money invested. Taking into account four different types of content (music, audio-visual materials, books, video games), the study reveals that “in general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by on-line copyright infringements.”

Except for recently produced films, the study says, there are no concrete proofs of the fact that piracy harms the content business as conversely stated by the industry. A potentially explosive conclusion, coming from a research work officially sanctioned by Europe and that finally came to light only because of the determination by a member of the European Parliament that had to act via the law for freedom of information to get the report.

The official reasons behind the study censorship – because this is downright censorship – are unknown, though the activism shown by the EU in these months in foolishly and aprioristically defending copyright says a lot: the Commission approves proactive filtering on contents shared on-line despite the potentially negative consequences on users’ fundamental rights, while this year is scheduled the release of the first European “watchlist” with sites and services facilitating copyright infringement on the model of the American blacklist.

As recently revealed by Motion Picture Association Canada, European countries (including Italy) are particularly active in blocking pirate sites and torrent search engines, while the individual national authorities plan to create special task forces against copyright infringement (in Denmark) or to stop the dangerous Internet pirates with punishments that include up to six years of prison (Sweden, the Pirate Bay “homeland”). In France the HADOPI program (three strike law/Sarkozy doctrine) is still going on despite the very poor results against unrepentant pirates, a particular kind of Internet “criminals” that don’t seem that much afraid even when they are closely monitored and risk ending up off-line.

As usual, the final result of all this activism by the industry and the politicians on their payroll is an embarrassing success: piracy (P2P, streaming and direct download) is more popular than ever, and if the authorities (in Europe and elsewhere) try to use force with filters and censorship users reply by moving the old content sharing habits on new communicaton channels like Telegram.

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