EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales (2017)
As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option.<p>It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you&#x27;d be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It&#x27;s much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it.<p>When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.