Here’s a sneaky story about the things they don’t want you to know:
Back in 2013, the European Union wanted proof that online piracy hurts sales of movies, books, and computer games. So they had a big study done.
The 300-page study was complete in 2015. It was then used for a second academic paper by two European Commission members, which came out in 2016.
The conclusion of that second paper was that piracy hurts movie sales by about 4.4%. “Our findings have important implications for copyright policy,” said that second paper.
The thing is, nobody ever saw the original 2013 study. It was never published. Not nowhere. Not until 2017.
That’s when Julia Reda, the Pirate Party member of the EU Parliament, got her hands on the missing study. And she published the results on her blog.
“With the exception of recently released blockbusters,” the 2013 study said, “there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales.”
Hold on a second…
So was the EU hiding this study… so they could cherry pick results that fit their desired “important implications for copyright policy?”
It sure sounds like it. Sneaky governmentses, right?
But here’s the bigger truth in all this:
I found out about this yesterday. An article about it was published in an online tech news site. It then went viral on a news aggregator.
But this story has been public since 2017… and yet we’re talking about it now, in the middle of 2021. There’s something there.
As you probably know, if a bit of information is scarce, we tend to value it more. “Long-lost study from 2013” piques our curiosity. But maybe not all that much, and not for all that long.
However, if that bit of information was suppressed, we tend to value it much more. “Long-lost study from 2013 that the government worked hard to bury.” That’s something worth discussing even years later.
“Fine,” you might say. “But I kind of knew that already. It sounds like the lead of every health VSL ever.”
All right. But let’s see if you knew this:
Bob Cialdini’s Influence lists a bunch of evidence that censorship doesn’t just increase desire for censored info…
But censorship also increases belief in that information. Even if you don’t actually see the information.
For example, I haven’t read the original EU study about piracy. Come on, it’s 300 pages. Who’s got time?
But I believe the conclusions. Why else would the EU try to censor it? I bet a bunch of people on that news aggregator thought the same, and that’s why this story went viral.
My takeaway for you is this:
Desire and belief are really two sides of the same coin.
Whether you’re using specificity… or a new mechanism… or even secrets… if you juice up one side of the coin, the other side gets bigger too.
And I’ve got evidence to prove it. Evidence nobody has seen before. I hope to publish it one day soon… if they don’t get to me first. If you want to read that secret report when it comes out, here’s our underground communication channel.