Swiss Gov't: Downloading for Personal Use Not Harmful to Industry
The Swiss government issued a statement today saying it will stand by its current copyright laws which state that "downloading of content for personal use" is acceptable and legal. The statement was released after results were made available from a Swiss government study into the impact of piracy on the entertainment industry.
The entertainment industry has been complaining in Switzerland and elsewhere that unauthorized downloads has harmed their business, and has been lobbying to get Swiss laws changed. Switzerland's response was to conduct this study to evaluate the true impact.
The study shows that the effect of unauthorized downloading on the industry’s bottom line is negligible, with one key finding being that downloaders spend as much if not more to acquire content legally as those who do not download. The study also found no change in consumer's disposable income spent on music and movies, despite the fact that roughly one third of Swiss people engage in some form of downloading. The government then concluded that there was no necessity to change the current laws, and it urged the entertainment industry to grow and adapt with the changes in technology and in consumer habits, rather than trying to suppress progress.
Switzerland’s findings are just the latest in a series of reports showing that the downloading of music and movies is far less harmful than the entertainment industry would have us believe. In July Douglas C. Merrill, formerly of Google and then EMI, one of the three main record labels, said in a keynote address that his research while at EMI showed that users of torrenting service LimeWire were among the best customers in the iTunes music store. Around the same time, Telepolis published a report stating that users of the recently raided kino.to website tended to pay more at the box office than the average moviegoer. Meanwhile, another study conducted by Northwestern University showed that users of peer-to-peer client software – i.e., BitTorrent users – bring in a substantial amount of money for the large ISPs.
