A new study, conducted by reseachers from University of Minnesota and Wellesley College, showed that there was very little, almost no correlation between illegal file-sharing facilated by BitTorrent and United States box office revenues.
According to the study, atleast in U.S. box office sales there has been very less of an impact on movie sales than what was conveyed previously. Even though there is some evidence indicating a link between U.S. Box office and BitTorrent and decreased international box office sales due to delay between U.S openings and international openings.
The researchers wrote in their report, “We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy”. The relationship between digital piracy and DVD sales or legal movie downloads was not investigated by the research team.
