New Study On Effects Of Manga Piracy Show Piracy's Effects Are More Nuanced Than Good Or Bad

from the comicly-nuanced dept

In all of our years and years of discussions on piracy and copyright infringement, one sweeping issue with the public discourse on the topic is how bereft of nuance it is. It's as though the world has been confronted with a massively complicated topic, the internet and digital piracy and their effects on content makers, and decided to make the conversation binary. Piracy is fine. Piracy is horrible.

It should be immediately apparent how absurd that type of thinking is. Complicated issues require complicated analysis that often times has complicated outcomes. Serving as an example of this, a recent study out of Japan on the effects of piracy for the manga industry shows exactly these kind of mixed and complicated results.

Newly published research by Professor Tatsuo Tanaka of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University suggests that both sides have a point. The findings come from a natural experiment that uses a massive takedown campaign conducted by anti-piracy group CODA in 2015. This campaign reduced the availability of pirated comics on various download sites, which allowed Professor Tanaka to analyze how this affected sales of 3,360 comic book volumes. The results, recently published in the article titled “The Effects of Internet Book Piracy: Case of Comics,” show that the effect of piracy differs between ongoing and completed series. In other words, the effect of piracy is heterogeneous.

Interestingly, if a manga series is a completed finished product with no more issues being produced, antipiracy efforts show positive sales effects for that series. On the other hand, for ongoing series, antipiracy efforts actually reduce future sales of that series. And, if you think about this for five seconds, that makes all the sense in the world. Illicit copies of an ongoing work will attract new potential readers of the work as the cost barrier to trying out the new series is null. Once a reader is gained illicitly, some percentage of those readers will go on to begin paying for the product. This happens either because of the way people use piracy as a no-risk method for trying out a new product or because of a more easy or convenient method to buy the product instead of pirating it.

What it absolutely does not show, however, is that content makers should be uniformly against piracy in every situation, full stop.

“If the effect of piracy is heterogeneous, it is not the best solution to shut down the piracy sites uniformly but to delete harmful piracy files selectively if possible. In this case, deleting piracy files of ongoing comics only is the first best strategy for publishers regardless of whether the total effect is positive or negative, because the availability of piracy files of completed comics is beneficial to both publishers and consumers.”

Nuance. Selective enforcement. These are not the hallmarks of the entertainment industries, unfortunately, but it has been demonstrated that they would be useful tools to those industries if they were applied. Is piracy good? No. Is piracy bad? No. It's all much more complicated than that and it would be nice if our public discourse reflected that.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: copyright, impact, manga, piracy