Remember SOPA? Remember the urgency with which the bill's backers were trying to convince us that its intended target, online piracy, was a clear and present danger? Remember how those dastardly BitTorrenters were going to deprive us of a functioning, creative movie industry?

Well, an academic study now doing the rounds suggests that's nonsense. According to researchers at the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College who examined box office history, piracy has never affected Hollywood's U.S. revenues. After BitTorrent file-sharing software started appearing online in the early 2000s, it had no effect — none whatsoever — on domestic receipts.

"We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in U.S. box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent," the researchers concluded. "Consumers in the U.S. who would choose between the box office and piracy choose the box office." (Read the study here.)

When it comes to the international market, BitTorrent did have an impact. Researchers found a 7% drop in box office receipts in countries other than the U.S. after the introduction of BitTorrent.

But the researchers also found a correlation with the length of time between a movie's U.S. release and its international release. The longer a movie took to come out in other countries, the more likely people were to download it.

In other words, Hollywood's online marketing machine is so effective that it has global reach, and so insidious that some eager movie fans can't wait and lead themselves into temptation. And that is the sum total of the online piracy problem.

For example, as Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow notes, The Muppets was only just released in the UK this month — after a Thanksgiving release in the U.S. That means Muppet fans in the UK (of which there are millions) had to endure a summer full of YouTube trailers and a fall full of reviews of the critically acclaimed movie — and still couldn't see it legally for another three months.

If only 7% of them turned to file-sharing as a solution, that would suggest nearly all movie-goers are law-abiding citizens even in the most tempting of circumstances. And that if movie studios want that money back, they should reconsider their marketing strategies and release date windows, rather than lobbying for draconian Internet laws with unintended consequences.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, leminuit