So you thought piracy is bad for music, film and music? Think again.

SHOOT: Interestingly enough I raised this very point when I interviewed Gavin Hood. Obviously he was horrified to hear that Wolverine (which he directed) had been pirated (someone offered us a copy on the drive to the interview). I said to him that sometimes, online piracy actually creates a wave of hype and the consumer ends up watching the pirated version, then watching the movie several times, then on IMAX, then on DVD. I think this applies specifically to the big blockbusters. The iffy stuff can get bludgeoned before they see the light of day - and I'm going to stick my neck out here and say - maybe they should, to spare us the agony of seeing junk and paying for it.

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com According to a new study (PDF) by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (University of Kansas), file sharing and weaker copyright protections generally benefit societies more than they hurt them. Among other things, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf argue that file sharing has done nothing to deter the production of books, music, and films. The two economists argue that weaker copyright is desirable, as long as it doesn't "lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." The two researchers also argue that the fact that music was basically available for free increased a lot of consumer's willingness to buy MP3 players in the first place. According to another study, 65% of respondents said that they did no buy a CD because they had downloaded a free copy of a song, but at the same time 80% said that they bought a CD because they had sampled it.