Oct 19, 2023 08:00:00

Survey results show that there is a strong correlation between the number of pirated copies viewed and movie box office revenue

The crackdown on pirated content that infringes copyrights is based on the idea that ``the existence of pirated copies has a negative impact on copyrighted content.'' 'There is no evidence to support that copyright infringement changes content sales,' a European Commission-led study

reported , and cases were found where movie box office revenues declined after large-scale piracy sites were shut down. This indicates that pirated copies may not have a negative impact on content sales. A new study by MUSO , a piracy research company, points out that movie piracy is strongly correlated with box office revenue.

MUSO study shows strong correlation between Box Office and Unlicensed Audience data
https://www.muso.com/magazine/correlation-between-box-office-and-unlicensed-audience-data

Movie Piracy is Strongly Linked to Box Office Revenue * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/movie-piracy-is-strongly-linked-to-box-office-revenue-231009/

MUSO provides daily updates on 98 movies released in theaters around 2021, including popular titles such as ` `The Lion King ,' ' ``Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings,'' and `` Spider-Man: No Way Home .'' We conducted a study to compare the number of copyright infringements (number of views of pirated versions) and official box office revenue. The number of views for pirated copies is measured from the release date of the movie until it is no longer shown in theaters or until the official streaming service starts while the movie is in theaters.

The results showed that official box office revenue and daily bootleg viewing numbers followed a similar pattern. The graph below shows the demand rank for each of the 98 analyzed movies by date and time since release, with red being legitimate movies and blue being pirated versions. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, which is an index of correlation coefficient in statistics, is said to have a strong correlation when the coefficient is between 0.7 and 1.0, but the correlation coefficient between box office revenue and the number of pirated copies viewed is 0.85. MUSO claims that there is a very strong relationship.

In response to the study's findings, MUSO said: ``There is a very strong and statistically significant positive correlation between box office revenue and pirate viewing numbers. Pirate consumption data is therefore a proxy for box office revenue data.'' and vice versa.”

However, although it has been shown that there is a strong ``correlation'' between box office revenue and the number of pirated copies viewed, a ``causal relationship'' has not been confirmed. MUSO's survey results simply showed that the pattern of ``immediately after a new product is released, demand increases, demand quickly declines, but picks up on the weekend'' is the same for both theatrical releases and pirated sites. There is a possibility that In addition, since the correlation test ranks and compares numbers, there is likely to be a large difference in the actual change in numbers between box office revenue and the number of pirated copies viewed.

In addition, MUSO concludes that ``combining box office revenue data and pirated demand data provides a complete picture of movie consumption,'' but TorrentFreak, a media that mainly deals with copyright news, says ``Data on 98 movies.'' Even if there is no correlation for some small titles, it may be buried under a mountain of data.Different correlation patterns may occur depending on conditions such as movie size and genre. We look forward to further investigation into whether or not this is the case.'