Pictured: Typical Megaupload user
This one oughta get the torrent and illegal streaming crowd all fired up. The Munich School of Management and the Copenhagen Business School recently published a paper titled “Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload” that argues the shutdown of the streaming website Megaupload actually may have hurt some films’ box office revenues. I’ll give all of the diehard pirates out there a second to do some dancing and finger-wagging before I throw a little water on this.
Noting a slight but steady change in finances across the world before and after the Megaupload shutdown — taking into account inflation, Internet penetration and the site’s popularity as well — the researchers concluded that “the shutdown had a negative, yet in some cases insignificant effect, on [smaller films'] box office revenues.” Their case then goes on to explore file sharing’s role as “a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay.”
Okaaaaaay, buuuuuuuut…
