MPAA spends millions of dollars on anti-piracy research

Researchers around the world are studying how the distribution of pirated content affects the popularity and sales of films and music. This is interesting from a scientific point of view, but for some people, such studies also have commercial significance, TorrentFreak writes .

One of the interested organizations - the American Film Association (MPAA) - distributes millions of dollars in the form of grants for such research. Then the organization uses the results of research to argue its anti-piracy position. At the same time, the MPAA actively criticizes other studies, the findings of which do not coincide with the position of the MPAA.

One of the main recipients of MPAA grants is Carnegie Mellon University, where the Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics ( IDEA ) program has been operating for several years. Cooperation began in 2012 with a relatively small grant of $ 100,000, the following year, the MPAA allocated $ 912,000 for research, and then increased funding again.

The latest financial statements of the MPAA for 2014 indicated that IDEA received exactly one million dollars for research - a good piece of the annual MPAA budget of $ 73 million.
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In total, about $ 3.5 million was allocated for grants in the reporting year.



Of course, the MPAA does not require that the research results coincide with its position that the illegal distribution of music on the Internet has a harmful effect for authors, composers and performers of songs, creative people and film studios. No, the results are conducted independently.

For example, one of the latest IDEA studies has shown that blocking pirated sites is driving an increase in the popularity of Netflix and other legal video broadcasting services. The previous study was devoted to the influence of search engines on the level of piracy (they say that search engines are responsible and should better filter search results.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University emphasize that they work completely independently, and the customer does not in any way set specific tasks and does not indicate what results should be obtained. Scientific grants are not some kind of bribe, but the necessary funds for hiring scientists, graduate students, graduates and other researchers who work on projects. “In many projects it is necessary to process large amounts of data, which implies either the purchase of expensive data or resource-intensive data collection,” said IDEA co-director Rahul Telang.

But another thing is clear: an increase in funding every year means that the results are satisfying to the MPAA.

The Motion Picture Association of America supports other researchers besides IDEA, but in smaller amounts. Two years ago, the MPAA launched a program of grants , inviting all interested scientists to offer their topics for research. For each approved work allocate $ 20 thousand.

Thus, Hollywood and MPAA see research as a useful tool in their work, and are willing to pay for the desired result. However, this is exactly what commercial companies ordering scientific research on topics of interest do: Microsoft, and Google, and many others.